Digital Ethnography

For those who may want to gather some quick demographics about an area in the U.S., BAO a free App from ESRI is very useful. Below are some of the features the App offers. Use on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. Get up-to-date facts, using the latest Esri Data, about prospective customers (e.g., age, income, education, home ownership, lifestyle, and spending habits). Compare one address against another or against the county, state or US. Analyze an area within one-mile of your location. Instantly determine if a location fits your needs with Smart Map. Share your facts with others via e-mail.

Definitely a must view. It is an amazing piece of work."Last month, the photographer Pieter Hugo went to southern Rwanda, two decades after nearly a million people were killed during the country's genocide, and captured a series of unlikely, almost unthinkable tableaus."

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

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

An interesting look at Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn considering where these each will be 5 years from now and 10 years from now.

"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 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".

the concept of "deep maps" invokes multimedia, and stems from thinking anchored in 18th onto late 20th centuries...what shifts does 'digital' provide in this concept? what is the 21st century discussion like?

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