Digital Ethnography

On taking risks in digital humanities.

The CHI Fieldschool is a unique experience that employs the model of an archaeological fieldschool (in which students come together for a period of 5 or 6 weeks to work on an archaeological site in order to learn how to do archaeology). Instead of working on an archaeological site, however, students in the CHI Fieldschool will come together to collaboratively work on several cultural heritage informatics projects. In the process they will learn a great deal about what it takes to build applications and digital user experiences that serve the domain of cultural heritage - skills such as programming, media design, project management, user centered design, digital storytelling, etc.

This article provides some code snippets that can be used to query user data on Facebook via Facebook Query Language. It also describes how to use the Graph URL Scheme if you'd prefer to explore using URLs in your browser and not with code. Very useful for conducting online and virtual ethnographic research that entails Facebook users and communities.

These projects are worth looking at, even if the documentation of the project is not always as extensive as we might want. (http://hennessy.iat.sfu.ca/making-culture-lab/collaborations/)

see here for slide show: http://www.slideshare.net/chris_khalil/the-new-digital-ethnographers-toolkit-capturing-a-participants-lifestream

From the website: "The Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) is a section of the American Anthropological Association. We promote the study of visual representation and media. Both research methods and teaching strategies fall within the scope of the society. SVA members are involved in all aspects of production, dissemination, and analysis of visual forms. Works in film, video, photography, and computer-based multimedia explore signification, perception, and communication-in-context, as well as a multitude of other anthropological and ethnographic themes.The Society encourages the use of media, including still photography, film, video and non-camera generated images, in the recording of ethnographic, archaeological and other anthropological genres. Members examine how aspects of culture can be pictorially/visually interpreted and expressed, and how images can be understood as artifacts of culture.

From website: "This portal is a gateway to the cultural materials of Plateau peoples that are held in Washington State University's Libraries, Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC), the Museum of Anthropology and by national donors. The collections represented here have been chosen and curated by tribal consultants working in cooperation with University and Museum staff." The About section has a good description of the curation process. In summary, the digital collection allows annotation and content submission by registered tribal members and organizations; also allows visitors and guests to leave text, audio, and video comments on content. The Tribal Links section for each category connects the historical content to contemporary cultures. Content controls allow participants to flag content as sensitive; presumably there is non-public content that is somehow managed. Here is a record that has some annotation by tribal organization: http://plateauportal.wsulibs.wsu.edu/html/ppp/display.php?tid=2&cid=4&fid=147&pgst=0 Metadata seems to include geospatial metadata that allows mapping of buildings, etc. From what I understand, the software used to support this collection is based on an Australian project with similar approach. Unfortunately, not much on the site about the software tools. I will try to locate and add the Australian project and related documentation. Is this digital ethnography? It seems to approach it; but limited markup by tribal members and organizations gives limited view of offline implications of online data.

This article is of interest (http://mappingonlinepublics.net/2012/04/27/twitter-and-disaster-resilience-lessons-from-qldfloods-and-eqnz/) I would be interested in taking the map of twitter usage or during as disaster and the doing ethnographic follow up after the factor the see how this resource was used. This might build a better picture of how to use social media during disasters/similar problems.

How very interesting. Could be a really valuable read. I'm very curious how their method/methodology changes from other content analysis work in online spaces. If they take into account the unique context of blog comments (trolls, etc.).

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 really like this piece! I'm not super familiar with DML as a field, but the author's attention to the world-making capabilities (and not even capabilities - it's built in or "politically preloaded") of research methods. The post provides a clear defense against those who would argue that research is just objectively recording the world. At the same time, it doesn't slip into a poststructuralist wormhole about meaning. There's an attention to politics here that 's fruitful [Ah! but politics in general.. What are this author's projects' politics? What departmental/ disciplinary political fights shape the ground on which DML research takes place?]

This article is really dense, bringing in a framework of participatory democratic society into on-line platforms. It is interesting concept but I have not been able to discern what the pilot project "Mobile Phones, Risk and Health" is about. Nonetheless, it poses good questions about who analyzes and constructs the data, the participants or the social scientist?

An article to revisit the concepts of boundaries of communities

Watkins studies young people's social and digital media behaviors. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, in the departments of Radio-Television-Film, Sociology, and the Center for African and African American Studies. C.

I learned about this program while reading "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:Media Education for the 21st Century" by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is an interesting program were users of video games interact and remix the games to create their own movies and story lines. This brings more platforms for individuals to create self-representations in a digital form, bringing forward the possibilities of reinterpretation of cultural objects and creative participation of digital communities

This is the article by Henry Jenkins talking about the trends in young generations and their participation in the digital world creation. This article seem relevant because it explores how and why these digital communities are forming, which would give us a better sense of how to study them.

This is the parent organization for Map Knitter. They have open data archive, the site serves as a repository for mapping data.