The CHI Fieldschool is a unique experience that employs the model of an archaeological fieldschool (in which students come together for a period of 5 or 6 weeks to work on an archaeological site in order to learn how to do archaeology). Instead of working on an archaeological site, however, students in the CHI Fieldschool will come together to collaboratively work on several cultural heritage informatics projects. In the process they will learn a great deal about what it takes to build applications and digital user experiences that serve the domain of cultural heritage - skills such as programming, media design, project management, user centered design, digital storytelling, etc.

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...

Must have had promise when I linked to this back in March, but now I get a "404" when accessing...backing into the domain a bit yields a rather dramatic "untrusted connection" message from Firefox! Beware!