Group items tagged

Analysis of 2.6 million tweets shows Twitter is adept at correcting misinformation - particularly if the claim is that a tiger is on the loose in Primrose Hill This Guardian piece is an interesting way to think of scraping Twitter to show how mis-information moves across time in periods of crisis. I was living in London during this time period, and it was really amazing how influential social media was in shaping people's perceptions of the riots.

Twitter maybe correcting misinformation when it comes to riot rumors but its doing nothing to stop storytelling. https://twitter.com/1014retold Buzzfeed compared it to a re-life Game of Thrones http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/this-live-tweeted-medieval-irish-war-is-the-real-game-of-thr

The example of a web forum turning their "newbie" section into essentially an "unconverted" section very interesting example of how communities separate "us" and "them." I don't know how broadly we can apply that example, though. Vegans are an easy target as a community that identifies largely in opposition to an "other," since most definitions of veganism lay out what vegans *don't* do, eg use animal products. I'd be interested to see if other communities with, for lack of better phrasing, more "positive" or additive identifications, similarly segregate "others" on their sites. Then of course the question becomes, what do the "others" get out of being segregated on a community's site? Do they have their own subcommunity?

I do believe that it was religious scholar Robert Ellwood that said that a group most identifies in what they are not. So I do think that they create their own subcommunity, because they are identifying with the fact that they are the "other" and that they are not the "us." To give a real life example (but not a digital one, sorry) Dianic Paganism was created in response to second-wave feminism, they did not allow men into their circles. In response, you see this rise of men-only circles.

I've been reading this book and it has a bunch of stuff related to conducting ethnography in virtual spaces. The editor proposes the idea of cyber-social-scientific knowledge to get at the internet as both a cultural artefact and cultural context. Chapters 6 and 10 seem particularly relevant to discussions of digital ethnography.

Interesting piece on the significance of different social apps.

The Interest Group for Digital Practices in History and Ethnography will address the data concerns of history as a research domain and those of the ethnographic disciplines (including cultural anthropology, folklore studies, ethnomusicology, interpretive sociology, and science and technology studies). This group proposes to build a medium sized tent (smaller than the whole of the digital humanities or of the social sciences, larger than a particular discipline) to explore strategies and frameworks for the collaborative care and use of research data of diverse types.

For those interesting in online communities, gaming or otherwise, you may find this article and the related book interesting.

This is an interesting case study on how ethnographic methods are being used by arts and cultural groups to help make their case to funders. "There is growing pressure to provide concrete evidence of impact to funders and institutional and civic leaders. And yet, numbers and metrics rarely capture the complex individual transformation and collective social change at the heart of many impactful community-based arts and humanities-based endeavors. Stories and qualitative data more readily meet the challenge but are often viewed as "soft" evidence. How can we reap the valuable content- and context-rich learning that qualitative approaches to assessment afford, while enhancing the credibility of qualitative evidence toward more effective case making?"