Digital Ethnography

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.

On taking risks in digital humanities.

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.

[Synopsis] This book is a critical and ethnographic study of camgirls: women who broadcast themselves over the web for the general public while trying to cultivate a measure of celebrity in the process. The book's over-arching question is, "What does it mean for feminists to speak about the personal as political in a networked society that encourages women to 'represent' through confession, celebrity, and sexual display, but punishes too much visibility with conservative censure and backlash?" The narrative follows that of the camgirl phenomenon, beginning with the earliest experiments in personal homecamming and ending with the newest forms of identity and community being articulated through social networking sites like Live Journal, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. It is grounded in interviews, performance analysis of events transpiring between camgirls and their viewers, and the author's own experiences as an ersatz camgirl while conducting the research.

This study (and its author) is mentioned in this week's reading 'Digital Ethnography : An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research' by Dhiraj Murthy. Dissertation Remarks and Synopsis (from Theresa Senft's website) http://www.terrisenft.net/diss/synopsis.php#remarks

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.

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?

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.

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?

VersuS is a series of works about the possibility to listen in real-time to the emotions, expressions and information generated by users on social network and using ubiquitous technologies, and to publish them onto the cities which they are related to. A scenario emerges according to which it becomes possible to realize information landscapes which are ubiquitously accessible and which change our experience or urban spaces. These projects also suggest the possibility to use these methodologies and technologies to promote novel forms of participatory practices in urban spaces, for decision-making, policy-making and urban planning and design.

Interesting how this intersects with Meta-Nerd's idea of "scenes." The video is interesting - it plays without sound, and provides very little context (sns platforms, time scales, etc). For me, this made the video less a visualization of data than a weird, undulating monster (or earthquake? Why am I using negative metaphors?). Without the context, it veers away from a piece that will make an argument about the role of social media "in today's society." I appreciate that, even as I want to critique the video for not providing the promised "participatory practices in urban spaces, for decision-making, policy-making and urban planning and design."

This is quite fascinating! The notion of mapping conversations on social networks with /place/ opens many pathways to exploration and innovation. I wonder if the 3D visualization software will be released to the open source community.

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.).

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/)