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Contents contributed and discussions participated by John Fenn

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John Fenn

Rhizome | Mapping the Social - 1 views

rhizome.org/...mapping-social

week9

shared by John Fenn on 21 May 12 - No Cached
  • Livehood uses the data of over 18 million foursquare check-ins to map both geographic distance of frequented venues as well as plotting its ‘social distance’, or ‘the degree of overlap in the people that check-in to them’
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      an approach to visual analysis that accounts for physical movement & social relationships...a possibility of 'digital ethnography'? any predecessors re: tools or analog approaches?
John Fenn

Sensory Ethnography Lab :: Harvard University - 4 views

sel.fas.harvard.edu

tools media research week8

shared by John Fenn on 21 May 12 - No Cached
  • John Fenn on 21 May 12
     
    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.
John Fenn

Zeega - 3 views

zeega.org

digital tools media presentation html5

shared by John Fenn on 21 May 12 - No Cached
  • John Fenn on 21 May 12
     
    Zeega is a non-profit inventing new forms of interactive storytelling. Our HTML5 platform makes it easy to combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio, data feeds and maps via APIs from across the web.
John Fenn

Sensate Journal - 2 views

sensatejournal.com

journal media experimental practice week8

shared by John Fenn on 20 May 12 - No Cached
  • John Fenn on 20 May 12
     
    Sensate is an online, media-based journal for the creation, presentation, and critique of innovative projects in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Our aim is to build on the current groundswell of pioneering activities in the digital humanities, scholarly publishing, and innovative media practice to provide a forum for scholarly and artistic experiments not conducive to the printed page.
John Fenn

Digital Storytelling - We jam econo - 3 views

ds106.us

shared by John Fenn on 08 May 12 - No Cached
John Fenn

Methods for Shaping Society | DMLcentral - 1 views

dmlcentral.net/...methods-shaping-society

methods digital read this week9

shared by John Fenn on 08 May 12 - No Cached
  • Research methods are routinely understood as objective techniques for getting to know the world. Yet they may be more influential and socially significant than this, particularly as more digital methods are being developed and deployed. So what, too, do digital methods do?
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      post focused on 'digital media and learning' field, but how might these questions apply to "ethnography"?
  • However, underpinning the technicality of methods is the assumption that they are able to capture and represent the world just as it is. Methods are understood rather like a photographic device that can capture, freeze-frame and reproduce a facsimile of reality. As researchers, we can say we've done a good job if our methods have been up to the job of capturing a picture of an objective reality as it really is—or at least pretty accurately so.
  • But much the same can be said of anthropological ethnographers returning from fieldwork. Their fieldnotes, photographs, dictaphone recordings, transcripts and video data are much like the neuroscientist's CAT and PET scans. They represent a reality—a human brain, a culture, whatever—that has been recorded and made presentable enough for interpretation. But are research methods really so objective? Or do they do other things?
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • It is that our research methods may in some important ways fabricate the very things we want to observe.
  • Methods are not neutral or innocent tools but necessarily construct, shape, configure, frame and make up the social worlds they study—methods help create society.
  • in 18th and 19th century map-making and census-taking, as well as popular contemporary methods such as sample surveys and focus groups, and the emergence of new digital methods in the 21st century.
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      implication/application for this line of inquiry re: digital ethnography (across the many manifestations we've encountered thus far...)? Also, how do methods of "analysis" figure in to this conversation?
  • Such details demonstrate the importance of recognizing the social life of methods. These are not neutral tools but politically charged instruments.
  • Methods are also social, however, because they in turn help to shape that social world—or, as it's put in the social life of methods program, methodologically speaking “what you see is what you get.”
  • Important questions are raised for research in digital media and learning by these insights. Newer forms of digital methods are now being developed and deployed that will enable researchers to make data on learning in new kinds of ways.
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      To the point of questions/applicability around 'digital ethnography'...
  • open source social analytics are all beginning to change the ways in which learning can be tracked, recorded, visualized, patterned, documented and presented
  • Is this a big deal? If methods allow us to know more, then doesn't that mean we can intervene more effectively to improve learning? Isn't making new social worlds an admirable aim? Maybe so
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      the ethical dilema...and not necessarily a 'new' one when it comes to ethnographic work; but what changes with the "digital"?
  • Perhaps the key point to be made about many such digital methods is that they generate transactional data without the awareness or intervention of research subjects—we are being aggregated as research data based on our transactions online without even thinking about it.
  • Digital media and learning research traces learning processes as they occur in new digital and networked spaces where they are inseparable from transactional data.
  • Yet one risk, as we have seen, is that the rise of digital methods has begun to emphasize transactional data over human participation in research
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      Is this where "ethnographic" attention or impulse can fit?
John Fenn

.. citymurmur.org .. - 1 views

www.citymurmur.org

week8

shared by John Fenn on 01 May 12 - No Cached
John Fenn

Researching the Internet (working paper from EASA) - 3 views

www.media-anthropology.net/...et.-Introductory-comments.html

ethnography digital methods read this spaces week7

shared by John Fenn on 25 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • John Fenn on 25 Apr 12
     
    Found this via Brant's link to the EASA...on their "Documents" page, under "Working Papers". Link should start downloading the PDF.
Rosalynn Rothstein

Beatboxing, Mashups, and Cyborg Identity - 2 views

week7 cyborgs
started by Rosalynn Rothstein on 04 Apr 12 no follow-up yet
  • John Fenn
    #2 John Fenn on 16 Apr 12
     
    Does not look like we can get a PDF of this easily, as JSTOR only has issues of Western Folklore up to 2007. Tok has written elsewhere about "digital" stuff, though, so we might be able to find something else of his.
Kelly Heckman

Periscopic Play: re-positioning "the field" in MMO studies - 9 views

methods research MMO games ethnography read this week7 week8 article PDF
started by Kelly Heckman on 13 Apr 12 no follow-up yet
  • John Fenn
    #2 John Fenn on 16 Apr 12
     
    http://bit.ly/HXDuQ7

    A shortened link to the PDF...and here is the link to the journal homepage: http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/

    You comment, Kelly, that the ethnographer of games "needs to be a pre-existing gamer" in many ways echoes debates about emic/etic perspectives and discussions about the "position" of an ethnographer that have been ongoing since the onset of anthropological fieldwork (well, maybe not that long...). Certainly something worth considering as we endeavor to produce ethnographic knowledge about communities, cultures, practices, etc in "the digital age", wherein "objective reality" (if it ever exists) is thrown into such an oblique spin as a "given" concept.
John Fenn

Mediated Cultures: let's discuss - 5 views

research digital culture
started by John Fenn on 10 Apr 12 no follow-up yet
John Fenn

Rhizome | The Art of Fieldwork - 4 views

rhizome.org/...artist-ethnographer

ethnography art mimetic inquiry post read this week8 interpretation methods

shared by John Fenn on 10 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • The role of “artist in residence” on a scientific expedition is a malleable one, without clearly defined parameters, thus Ga decided that her project would be to become the ship’s archivist, attempting to capture the various facets of life aboard the Tara
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 10 Apr 12
       
      An ethnographic flavor emerges here...esp. the "facets of life" element.
  • Ga is one of a number of younger contemporary artists whose work is tied to a kind of artistic fieldwork, investigating aspects of their lives and interests by merging the apparent objectivity of documentary forms and anthropological research with a plainly subjective, flexible approach, drawing on multiple methodologies and discourses.
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 10 Apr 12
       
      use of "apparent" and "plainly" modifiers here stand out to me as rhetorical valuation of practices (anthropology vs. art)
  • her work as “performative investigations,”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • ry, and animation, the project equally reflects Jordenö’s concern with the implications of her anthropological approach and her own shifting relationship to the subjects of her inquiry:
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 10 Apr 12
       
      something ethnographers in the anthropological tradition have been doing for some time...though mainly in print.
  • For a younger generation of artists, for whom the use of technology is natural and the Internet an inextricable part of information gathering, the ability to adopt these various strategies and roles is greatly enhanced by the accessibility of information: in an Internet age, the barriers to research begin to collapse.
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 10 Apr 12
       
      what happens with this sentence if we swap in "ethnographers" for "artists"?
Rosalynn Rothstein

The Art of Fieldwork via Rhizome - 4 views

fieldwork art archivist performance
started by Rosalynn Rothstein on 04 Apr 12 no follow-up yet
  • John Fenn
    #2 John Fenn on 10 Apr 12
     
    ran across this project/post earlier in the year, and really appreciate the multimodal approach to documentation & interpretation. As I look over it again, I'm thinking we should talk about the relationship between "fieldwork" and "ethnography," using this project as a starting point.
Rosalynn Rothstein

The Object Ethnography Project - 27 views

week9
started by Rosalynn Rothstein on 04 Apr 12 no follow-up yet
  • John Fenn
    #2 John Fenn on 10 Apr 12
     
    an intriguing project, esp. since it appears to be one of many such efforts floating around the web focused on the "materiality" of life & the everyday. I'm curious as to what constitutes "ethnography" here, as it is more about "exchange-ography" in many ways...
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