Digital Ethnography

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.

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.

Digest of larger post of big study by International Telecommunication Union about mobile broadband use...

This is report does provide a sense of how mobile broadband is spreading globally. However, I wonder if this is necessarily a "good" thing. Sure, we could argue that eventually the spread of these technologies will happen, but is the source censored or monitored in any way? Is it available to "all" without loss of content or as a democratic platform for those in marginal communities?

danah boyd is a scholar whose work examines technology, society, and policy. She has produced a lot of great research on the ways in which young people engage in new media. I've recently become aware that she offers a free download of her new book "It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens" on her personal website. I encourage all of you to give it a read if you have time. 

So I was wrong, as I often am, there is an updated site and the next Vasetz Reunion is June27-29. Sorry, this story has fascinated me since I was a reporter out there.

So this is an interesting extension to the Electronic Evergreen. This website was create in the late 90s to commemorate the company town of Valsetz, OR that was leveled in 1984. The graphics alone are a time capsule. The interesting thing is that even thought the last face to face reunion was in 2006 (as far as I can tell) the most recent blog post was December of 2013. Also, there are very recent posts in the forum section. The website is so poorly designed that it's hard to navigate, but there is a lot of fascinating information here and it is a prime example of a real life community being displaced into cyber space.

There was a documentary made about it as well. It's trailer can be viewed here: http://youtu.be/Y1jO5bmmBkM

For those of us looking for free cloud transcription service! Here's a great review from a KUOW Reporter.... "Register at http://www.voicebase.com, upload your audio, do something else for 10 minutes to an hour or two (the wait varies apparently), and it will do a rough but surprisingly not-bad transcription for you. What I've done is then paste that "machine transcript" into a Word doc (or you can download it) and correct major errors in it as I listen to my original audio. Much faster (and a lot less typing) than trying to log tape from scratch. Voicebase.com lets you do 50 hours of audio transcribing free. I did it for a half-hour interview I'd taped in the studio; I don't know how Voicebase will perform on phone tape, audio with ambient noise behind it, speakers with accents, interviews with more than one person, etc. But for my purposes, it was pretty freaking awesome."

Interesting poster from an EdD Candidate looking at "hypermedia ethnography" in a 2009 conference. Abstract appears alongside the Flickr image...

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?"

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

A project that is placing transmedia tools in the hands of New York youth in an effort to empower.