Digital Ethnography

Just to piggy-back off of my last post - I read this piece by Eve Tuck recently and I think it's really powerful. In her letter, Tuck calls on communities, researchers to reconsider the long-term impact of "damage-centered research" - research that seeks to document peoples' pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for their oppression." Speaking to Witness' approach, this quote was particularly salient: "It is a powerful idea to think of all of us as litigators, putting the world on trial, but does it actually work? Do the material and political wins come through? And, most importantly, are the wins worth the long- term costs of thinking of ourselves as damaged?"

Project Witness is a video-advocacy initiative (Founded by Peter Gabriel) that seeks to provide video tools/strategies to document human rights abuses. Forrest posted a link a few weeks back to their video toolkit. I recently read about their new Labs project (a collaboration with The Guardian) in another article - particularly their Smart Cam Project which is an app that helps gather data that will support any video documentation in a court of law (who shot it, surrounding context to prove "is this for real!"). Their Obscura Cam is a way to blur the faces of people who wish to remain anonymous. Just Vision - an organization that supports communities documenting non-violent resistance (of Palestinian, Israeli, and foreign activists) of the occupation Palestinian territories - critiques Witness' evidence-based model, arguing that documenting atrocity in such a way only reinscribes and simplifies complex conflicts into perpetrator-victim narratives. That these narratives mobilize shame (and denial) rather than hope. I'm wondering what people think? I'll post another link to a relevant article here too.

This is the last of the tools that I talked about last week. Scripto is a community transcripting tool--should anyone have need of one--and works with both large and small groups. There is also the option to keep the community private.

TiA comes from the UCSB linguistics department, and is two tools. "VoiceWalker" is a transcription tool that "walks" through the transcription, that is, it repeats a segment of the transcription a certain number of times before moving on to the next segment. This prevents the constant stopping and starting that one has to do. The second tool is "SoundWriter" and it is still in Beta test form. The idea is that when you click on a section of the transcription, you'll be able to hear the original audio, so you can hear someones intonation.

This is a very handy transcription tool if you find yourself typing the same words over and over again. It allows you to create sort cuts and abbreviations that your computer will then expand into the real word. It's a nice time saver and its free.

An organization that uses an internet platform to assist planning agencies and consultants in allowing citizens to participate in decision-making efforts.

Neighborland is a way for residents to collaborate with local organizations and take action on important issues. It's free for residents to share their ideas and insights with organizations.

A crowdsourced mapping tool that promotes business transparency by tracking "where things come from". This tool creates a visualization of supply chains across the globe.

Just click on the link and input your duckid and password.

Nice follow up to David's post on Dedoose's crash

Nice summary of both advantages and disadvantages of dedoose. Although I have mentioned some points (e.g. cross-platform) during my presentation, there are some other features that I have not covered - the visualisation function and the issue of no local copy.

The Center for Media Justice presents some great material, particularly as an entry point to undergrads on concepts of media justice and examining the ways oppression operates in a digital sphere, troubling open internet and "closing digital divides" Great stuff!