Digital Ethnography

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.

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!

The example of a web forum turning their "newbie" section into essentially an "unconverted" section very interesting example of how communities separate "us" and "them." I don't know how broadly we can apply that example, though. Vegans are an easy target as a community that identifies largely in opposition to an "other," since most definitions of veganism lay out what vegans *don't* do, eg use animal products. I'd be interested to see if other communities with, for lack of better phrasing, more "positive" or additive identifications, similarly segregate "others" on their sites. Then of course the question becomes, what do the "others" get out of being segregated on a community's site? Do they have their own subcommunity?

I do believe that it was religious scholar Robert Ellwood that said that a group most identifies in what they are not. So I do think that they create their own subcommunity, because they are identifying with the fact that they are the "other" and that they are not the "us." To give a real life example (but not a digital one, sorry) Dianic Paganism was created in response to second-wave feminism, they did not allow men into their circles. In response, you see this rise of men-only circles.

I don't know how much this might apply to any of our research, but I thought that this new leap in technology could be interesting in the future. How are we going to interact with others once things like this start being used more? Kind of reminds me of Wall-E, but still, really cool. I would definitely buy something like this. Get your cardio and gaming in all at once! 

This is the best voice recognition software out there. You can train it to recognize your voice and it is incredibly accurate. I have written papers using it. The student version is around $100. The challenge with it is it is only going to be really accurate with your voice so you would have to listen and restate what you are hearing for the program to really recognize it well.

It works fine for accents. You practice reading a set script to tune the program to your voice.

I guess what I'm questioning is its ability to adapt to tonal changes, speech rate, etc. I know I don't pronounce things with consistency.

Interesting piece on the significance of different social apps.

I've been reading this book and it has a bunch of stuff related to conducting ethnography in virtual spaces. The editor proposes the idea of cyber-social-scientific knowledge to get at the internet as both a cultural artefact and cultural context. Chapters 6 and 10 seem particularly relevant to discussions of digital ethnography.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project provides a great deal of nationally representative data on Internet and new media usage in the United States. It may be a valuable site for those seeking survey data to analyze and incorporate into their research

I too have found this website to be very helpful. Here are a few more links from Pew providing evidence of the growing use of the internet and for the fading of the "digital divide." http://www.pewresearch.org/millennials/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2009/09/01/the-internet-and-civic-engagement/

"The computer science research community is going full speed ahead developing exciting new algorithms, but it seems a bit disconnected from what it takes to get their work used."

I thought this article is interesting, basically you need to understand more than just computer science to develop a program that is usable to a particular group.

I was looking back at this (really interesting) multimedia writing work by Anne Wysocki and noticed how many of the pieces required special players and ample download time/space - Flash Player, Shockwave Player, 1.5 MB of download space - which got me thinking about platform/storage restrictions and digital accessibility. In many instances, a researcher may need not only specific digital skills/knowledge, but also specific platforms, players, software, memory space, etc. to conduct her work. And as players, platforms, software, etc. are upgraded, older digital texts may become less accessible. On that note, I have been taking screen shots of all of the scenes in the Facebook game I'm currently studying. Why? One reason is so I can put these screen shots into a presentation, but the more pressing reason is that another game I'm really interested in looking at (Food Force, a social media game from 2005 - so ancient, right?) is no longer accessible. In its place is a Facebook page with a big bandaged thumb and a "Sorry! This page has been removed." message. An ethnography conducted in a digital space, it seems, requires just as much "recording" as one in an offline space.

The life and preservation of the digital world is a huge question, and one that I don't think enough people are considering. I see more and more of my friends taking all their photos with smartphones and loading them to Instagram or Facebook, or worse never moving them beyond their phones. I wonder what photos will have survived in 20 years when their children are looking to make wedding or anniversary slide shows, or simply becoming interested in their own pasts. There are no hard copies of these images, and while hard copies are vulnerable, so are digital copies for a number of reasons.

great points in this discussion, especially around issues of "access"...which range from having the "right" tech to get into a site to ADA regulations/requirements. Also, preservation is a complicated facet of access and one worth discussing seriously in this course as we think about digital data.

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

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