Group items tagged

I really like this piece! I'm not super familiar with DML as a field, but the author's attention to the world-making capabilities (and not even capabilities - it's built in or "politically preloaded") of research methods. The post provides a clear defense against those who would argue that research is just objectively recording the world. At the same time, it doesn't slip into a poststructuralist wormhole about meaning. There's an attention to politics here that 's fruitful [Ah! but politics in general.. What are this author's projects' politics? What departmental/ disciplinary political fights shape the ground on which DML research takes place?]

By revealing the social networks present within the urban environment, Invisible Cities describes a new kind of city-a city of the mind. It displays geocoded activity from online services such as Twitter and Flickr, both in real-time and in aggregate. Real-time activity is represented as individual nodes that appear whenever a message or image is posted. Aggregate activity is reflected in the underlying terrain: over time, the landscape warps as data is accrued, creating hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data.

Might be interesting to download the software and see what comes of this multimodal effort...takes geocoded activity from social media and "maps" it to an "immersive three dimensional space." While not ethnographic in any proper/traditional sense, this tool foregrounds questions about community, public-ness, social practice, and digitally-enabled culture...

VersuS is a series of works about the possibility to listen in real-time to the emotions, expressions and information generated by users on social network and using ubiquitous technologies, and to publish them onto the cities which they are related to. A scenario emerges according to which it becomes possible to realize information landscapes which are ubiquitously accessible and which change our experience or urban spaces. These projects also suggest the possibility to use these methodologies and technologies to promote novel forms of participatory practices in urban spaces, for decision-making, policy-making and urban planning and design.

Interesting how this intersects with Meta-Nerd's idea of "scenes." The video is interesting - it plays without sound, and provides very little context (sns platforms, time scales, etc). For me, this made the video less a visualization of data than a weird, undulating monster (or earthquake? Why am I using negative metaphors?). Without the context, it veers away from a piece that will make an argument about the role of social media "in today's society." I appreciate that, even as I want to critique the video for not providing the promised "participatory practices in urban spaces, for decision-making, policy-making and urban planning and design."

This is quite fascinating! The notion of mapping conversations on social networks with /place/ opens many pathways to exploration and innovation. I wonder if the 3D visualization software will be released to the open source community.

[Synopsis] This book is a critical and ethnographic study of camgirls: women who broadcast themselves over the web for the general public while trying to cultivate a measure of celebrity in the process. The book's over-arching question is, "What does it mean for feminists to speak about the personal as political in a networked society that encourages women to 'represent' through confession, celebrity, and sexual display, but punishes too much visibility with conservative censure and backlash?" The narrative follows that of the camgirl phenomenon, beginning with the earliest experiments in personal homecamming and ending with the newest forms of identity and community being articulated through social networking sites like Live Journal, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. It is grounded in interviews, performance analysis of events transpiring between camgirls and their viewers, and the author's own experiences as an ersatz camgirl while conducting the research.

This study (and its author) is mentioned in this week's reading 'Digital Ethnography : An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research' by Dhiraj Murthy. Dissertation Remarks and Synopsis (from Theresa Senft's website) http://www.terrisenft.net/diss/synopsis.php#remarks

An article by Rosie Flewitt Provides insights that the well established traditions of ethnography can bring to the more recent analytic tools of multimodality in the investigation of early literacy practices.

Looks to be an article useful for Week 5, possibly Week 7; a recent look at how to use ethnographic "traditions" in a multimodal context. Topic concerns "literacies" for three and four year olds in the "digital age".

Here's the abstract: In this article I reflect on the insights that the well established traditions of ethnography can bring to the more recent analytic tools of multimodality in the investigation of early literacy practices. First, I consider the intersection between ethnography and multimodality, their compatibility and the tensions and ambivalences that arise from their potentially conflicting epistemological framings. Drawing on ESRC-funded case studies of three and four-year-old children's experiences of literacy with printed and digital media,1 I then illustrate how an ethnographic toolkit that incorporates a social semiotic approach to multimodality can produce richly situated insights into the complexities of early literacy development in a digital age, and can inform socially and culturally sensitive theories of literacy as social practice (Street, 1984, 2008).

This article provides some code snippets that can be used to query user data on Facebook via Facebook Query Language. It also describes how to use the Graph URL Scheme if you'd prefer to explore using URLs in your browser and not with code. Very useful for conducting online and virtual ethnographic research that entails Facebook users and communities.

An interesting look at Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn considering where these each will be 5 years from now and 10 years from now.

For those having trouble finding  Domínguez, Daniel, Anne Beaulieu, Adolfo Estalella, Edgar Gómez, Bernt Schnettler, and Rosie Read. 2007. "Virtual Ethnography (Editorial, special issue)." Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 8 (3): 

There are some more simple network analysis, which I think are more user friendly (just one click :) ): Mentionmapp (http://mentionmapp.com/) and Vizify (https://www.vizify.com/yahoo#transition) can be used to analyze people's twitter network, and InMap (http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/) can be used to analyze people's professional network.

I'm taking this week's idea of "domains" a bit literally. Here's a quick blog post from Amit Agarwal (tech columnist for Wall Street Journal India). It links to several visualizations of internet activity. Some are physical: electricity; some are political (i.e. explicitly - all these maps are political!): censorship by country; some are social: use of SNS by country, the first edition of the xckd map of internet communities.* He offers these maps without much commentary. I'm interested in how these visual representations could help us think about the "where" of digital ethnography. My offline/physical context may be a coffee shop in Eugene, OR, am I also placed on these maps? What kinds of maps help you think about the "where" of the internet? * The second edition is worth looking at to think about the way time and technological development shapes our understanding of space.

Here's a link to the second version of the xckd map of internet communities. https://xkcd.com/802/ While not a "real" map, I often use it in presentations to explain the idea that online communities are particular and exist in relation to each other. I often pair it with the concept of "fractalized communities" found in Patrica Lange's work in youtube video bloggers. Both get at the specificity of online research; there isn't one internet that I can study - I can only tell you about my time in this particular community.

From the website: The Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) is a key component of the Museum of Anthropology's Renewal Project, "A Partnership of Peoples." In addition to the RRN, the Renewal Project comprises several complementary and innovative components, including a new Research Centre, Major Temporary Exhibition Gallery, and Community Suite. Together, they support collaborative, socially responsible, and interdisciplinary research across local, national, and international borders. The RRN is an online tool to facilitate reciprocal and collaborative research about cultural heritage from the Northwest Coast of British Columbia. The RRN enables communities, cultural institutions and researchers to work together. Members can build their own projects, collaborate on shared projects, upload files, hold discussions, research museum projects, and create social networks. For both communities and museums, the RRN is groundbreaking in facilitating communication and fostering lasting relationships between originating communities and institutions around the world.

There is not much access to the site without an account, so I requested one. I am interested in looking at how this site functions (where there seem to be numerous projects being created with the materials) in contrast with the Danish Folklore Nexus I posted earlier. Both resources might offer insight in to how new projects are being created with already collected materials.

I finally got an account set up and was able to look around the webpage. The images are worth looking at in the very least, although it looks like you have to join sections to see what is going on with projects. You can also see "user submitted" information in a specific heading to see what information users have contributed to the objects.

This article is really dense, bringing in a framework of participatory democratic society into on-line platforms. It is interesting concept but I have not been able to discern what the pilot project "Mobile Phones, Risk and Health" is about. Nonetheless, it poses good questions about who analyzes and constructs the data, the participants or the social scientist?

I haven't been able to find a free online copy of this yet. It looks very helpful. Has anyone else been able to secure one? The title reminds me of Patrica Lange's piece on YouTube and "publicly private" and "privately pubic" online spaces. Her application of the idea of "fractalized communities" has been very useful to my research on out-of-the-way online communities. Check that one out at http://uolibraries.worldcat.org/title/publicly-private-and-privately-public-social-networking-on-youtube/oclc/726935972&referer=brief_results

I have not been able to find one either, although I was able to find proof chapters of another two articles in the book.

The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard is a unique collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Visual & Environmental Studies (VES). Harnessing perspectives drawn from the human sciences, the arts, and the humanities, the aim of SEL is to support innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, with original nonfiction media practices that explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human existence. As such, it encourages attention to the many dimensions of social experience and subjectivity that may only with difficulty be rendered with words alone. SEL provides an academic and institutional context for the development of work which is itself constitutively visual or acoustic - that is conducted through audiovisual media rather than purely verbal sign systems - and which may thus complement the human sciences' and humanities' traditionally exclusive reliance on the written word. The instruction offered through SEL is thus distinct from other graduate visual anthropology programs in the United States in that it is practice-based, and promotes experimentation with culturally-inflected, nonfiction image-making.

Harvard seems to have a lot going on for it... In context for what we /do/ with digital ethnography materials, I wish that more of the projects that are featured were actually available for, at the very least, preview (at odds with the program's description of conduction through audiovisual media...). I wish I knew more about Zeega (and the apparent connection based on large logo presence on the projects page), even if it is only in alpha... http://zeega.org/about.php

The projects at SEL provide a rich landscape for sensory/experiential exploration. This type of work really opens the mind to new perspectives and detail that is often exploited or skewed through popular media - like maintstream cinema or video games. Being a huge fan of the film "Where Eagles Dare" and the old SkyTram at Disneyland, I really enjoyed the Greunrekorder - Swiss Mountain Transport Systems sound recordings. I wonder if anyone has conducted similar research on the Portland Aerial Tram. Many of the trailers were exquisite, too. "Sweetgrass" looks to be an amazing documentary.

This article is written from the computer science perspective on how social sciences are used to analyze Human-computer-interactions (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Tthis article is talking about how ethnomethodology can help computer scientist to design systems allowing people to interact in groups through technology and computer networking. The article is concern on people's behaviors that takes them to interact with the technology and how they do it, some of these points can be stretched and transfer to understanding the behaviors of individuals that interact in digital communities. It continues talking about the influence of the participant in the design of the technology, which brings to my mind the discussion about how the data gathering and "aggregation of information" shape the actions, the behaviors and the data available, which at the same time can dictate how the technology is been developed