On taking risks in digital humanities.

As we are thinking about digital presentation, take a look at the Fembot/Ada site. It's an international collective working on building a digital, feminist peer review process.

I'm finding the learning curve a bit high on this one. The radial graph maps connections between collections/collectors/institutions - but is there any way to expand the graph - for example, I click on AAUP for OSU, it gives me a simple graph with OSU as a node - could I click the OSU node to then see its connections? I'm also wondering how I can use this as a way to enrich my own research with historical materials. Any ideas?

I don't want to ask this site to be a different site (it could be that I am not the audience) - it just strikes me as odd that the entry for queer nation http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=queer-nation-cr.xml is so lonely! That project (and its ephemera) are so richly connected through personal relationships, I'd love to see that made visible.

Not to self-promote, but as long as we are considering non-traditional research presentation and visual methods for thinking through the world, I would like to put in for comics as one place to do that. Here are some links of (mostly) online projects that are doing awesome work in comics and research.

Fourth mention : book length treatments of various sorts - these are not strictly speaking academic, but they engage with similar conversations about meaning, memory, and representation.

Joe Sacco's work: http://www.amazon.com/Safe-Area-Gorazde-Eastern-1992-1995/dp/1560974702

Logicomix : http://www.amazon.com/Logicomix-Apostolos-Doxiadis/dp/0747597200

If we think about memoirs as auto-ethnography, there are many more to add..

Fifth mention: http://spinweaveandcut.blogspot.com/

Nick Sousanis' blog - he is writing his dissertation about comics in comic form!

I'm interested in this as an intervention in making ethnography happen. Rather than finding existing communities doing this sort of exchange (I'm thinking about mail art and zine communities especially), this group is creating a space for this to happen.

What seems to take it into the realm of big E ethnography for me is the NYU address on the call for participation. Anywhere else (is this just freecycling for an academic cv?), and I wouldn't think of it as "ethnography." Though I'm not super invested in the term ethnography, I'm very interested in the ways that art and cultural production overlaps with research. I'm heartened to see projects that resist exclusively scientific organization of knowledge. Affectively engaging research is exciting - but I'm not sure this is it. Interesting bibliography though - do any of the linked projects self-identify as ethnographies?

This has been in my to-be-read folder for ages. I've started it a few times, but never finished it. While his arguments about the cases confuse me, I found useful his exploration of the potential tensions between user-produced content and institutionally maintained platforms. Traditional ways of thinking about vernacular online discourse place it in relation to the institutional. Howard sets out two types of vernacular - subaltern and common. He then argues for a dialectic understanding of online discourse, where one is always going between institutional and individual (counter-institutional) expressions. The cases are the weak point for me. However, this may be explained by Howard's disciplinary orientation as a rhetorician. The article's center is the fight about "vernacular," not how specific people and communities express themselves online.

Also, unless I am reading ungenerously, Howard mistakes Dignity USA (a counter-institutional though long standing organization for gay Catholics and allies) with the Catholic Church proper. This distinction seems like a small point at first; his arguments about the blogger adding text could still be considered disruptive. However, it indicates to me that he is not familiar with the community. As someone interested in community-produced media, this wasn't a helpful article.

I admit to loving cybercultural studies and web 1.0 aesthetics. This site has them both! It's a collection of visualizations and maps of "the internet" in terms of physical locations (cables, wireless towers, etc.), the conceptual, historical, and artistic. I'm not doing justice to the amount of geographical information presented here. It's worth noting that the site was maintained by UK-based geographer Martin Dodge (http://cyberbadger.blogspot.com/). I invite you to explore the historical and conceptual pages especially. How could these types of maps be integrated into our research?

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.

I couldn't get the pdf from that link. The pdf is available through the table of contents for the current issue (volume 12) at http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current.

Explore this place! This is a searchable collection of links to tools to help researchers conceive a project, collect data, organize and analyze it (including sections on mapping and data visualization), write, and publish. It is organized into intuitive categories based on what you want to do. Within each category, you can order the results by cost, platform, etc. This would be a great place to find tools for the toolplay workshops.

Vectors is a beautiful journal of culture and technology. It pushes its contributors to present research in innovative ways. Not every piece is ethnographic, but it may inspire us to present our research in visually stunning ways. This would be great to consider in week 9.

This book looks great and really helpful. However, it's not being published until September 2012. Just something to keep on our radar.

Watson, N. "Why We Argue About Virtual Community: a Case Study of the Phish.net Fan Community." Communication Abstracts. 21.5 (1998). Print. This is a fabulous article - old, but solid on the fights about online vs. offline communities. I read it in a Digital Culture class in 2008. I cite it all the time, and would love to go back in light of our discussions in class. This might go well in week seven when we talk about online communities.

Thanks for catching that. I have a physical copy I could scan and make available to the group.

Here is a link to a pdf I made of my copy. https://docs.google.com/open?id=0ByPQDYtlq5NmUlhYLXlIRHlnVkE Let me know if you would like it shared in another format. Can't wait to discuss this one!

The Wayback Machine! This is a great tool for retrieving old copies of web sites or completely defunct/ missing websites. It has been helpful for me to delve into everyday digital content (calendars, announcements, etc.) that wasn't archived clearly. It also gave me access to abandoned sites years after the community had moved on.

This is a great site that keeps a record of videos removed from YouTube for copyright violations. You can't watch them, but there's something great about having a record that they were there at all. I'm fascinated by the "when" of online culture and the tendency for some material to disappear. This is one of the places I've found that lets me see what the internet used to be.

This is the digital arm of the diy zine archiving project I have been involved with for years. Check out the about section for explanations of collective structure, tools used to build the site, and connection to other diy archives.

AoIR's ethics guide from 2002.