Digital Ethnography

This is absolutely great, although it makes me feel old! Their reactions to older technology is so funny and their impressions of the changes over time is very interesting!

There are some more simple network analysis, which I think are more user friendly (just one click :) ): Mentionmapp (http://mentionmapp.com/) and Vizify (https://www.vizify.com/yahoo#transition) can be used to analyze people's twitter network, and InMap (http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/) can be used to analyze people's professional network.

(39 Images of occupying Favelas in Rio de Janeiro that don't appear on TV) Here are some great pics of the police occupying the favelas or communities as most Cariocas (People from Rio) would preferred to call them out of respect. This is what they call 'pacification' where drug trafficking is eliminated and police enforcement is ever present. 

Here's another recent article on this from the Washington Post: RIO DE JANEIRO - Squatters occupying a complex of abandoned buildings in Rio de Janeiro clashed with police Friday after a court ruling that allowed the premises to be cleared. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/fighting-breaks-out-in-rio-de-janeiro-as-police-move-to-clear-5000-squatters-from-buildings/2014/04/11/047ade4e-c180-11e3-b574-f8748871856a_story.html.

Intermediate-level R resource as an adaptation of Dante's Inferno.

This was a really fascinating piece. I have given some thought as to how the digital world can/will transform the workplace but this is the first scholarly piece on the subject. I am curious to see how these changes will affect face-face (i.e., office) interaction and communication practices in the future.

Marko Pelijhan is an incredible digital artist, a lot of his work comments on surveillance. This project is a cool collaboration with North and Arctic Peoples and climate scientists - and brings up some important questions for me around open authoring and traditional ecological knowledge, how might platforms like this incorporate the necessary feedback loops or knowledge-ownership protocols of a particular person/group. How do you protect the sacred in the digital sphere? "The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) is a non-profit, international group of individuals and organizations, founded by Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman, whose goal is to promote the creation of open authoring, communications and dissemination infrastructures for the circumpolar region. Its aim is to work with, learn from, and empower the North and Arctic Peoples through open source technologies and applied education and training. By creating access to these technologies while promoting the creation of shared communications and data networks without costly overheads, continued and sustainable development of autonomous culture, traditional knowledge, science, technology and education opportunities for peoples in the North and Arctic regions is enabled."

I think this article is really spot on in providing an important model for empirically studying and representing the spread of ideas (or controversies) between media and how participatory and professional media influence one another. The fact that this article is written as much for academics as for activists is also exciting (and scary) to me, as a means of thinking about agenda-setting and influence. How might access to these tools help activist campaigns, and how might they swing back to challenge them? How can you really measure effect? "Even when we are able to access the data we need for analysis, interpretation is complicated by the specificity of individualized media experiences, where we've each curated our own individualized lists of sources on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. This can leave us with very different understandings of the day's news. Is it possible to speak meaningfully about a media agenda when agendas are set by individuals following a combination of friends and professional sources they've chosen to meet personal preferences and needs?"

Sam Ladner writes on (and practices) ethnography in non-academic settings...eg. "private sector ethnography." While there is not much "digital" in her post here (a transcript of a plenary talk) with regards to overt subject matter, much of what she says intersects with how this course approaches the intersection of "digital" and "ethnography".

I found this short slide show useful and informative because, as a newcomer to the concept of digital ethnography, it helped to contextualize and outline how ethnographic methods can be applied to online sources. It's pretty basic, but it's a good refresher/good place to start.

Just testing diigo, but thought this service provided by WalMart(!) was interesting.

Nothing better than Walmart trying to control the media world :)