Digital Ethnography

This is an interesting case study on how ethnographic methods are being used by arts and cultural groups to help make their case to funders. "There is growing pressure to provide concrete evidence of impact to funders and institutional and civic leaders. And yet, numbers and metrics rarely capture the complex individual transformation and collective social change at the heart of many impactful community-based arts and humanities-based endeavors. Stories and qualitative data more readily meet the challenge but are often viewed as "soft" evidence. How can we reap the valuable content- and context-rich learning that qualitative approaches to assessment afford, while enhancing the credibility of qualitative evidence toward more effective case making?"

Project Witness is a video-advocacy initiative (Founded by Peter Gabriel) that seeks to provide video tools/strategies to document human rights abuses. Forrest posted a link a few weeks back to their video toolkit. I recently read about their new Labs project (a collaboration with The Guardian) in another article - particularly their Smart Cam Project which is an app that helps gather data that will support any video documentation in a court of law (who shot it, surrounding context to prove "is this for real!"). Their Obscura Cam is a way to blur the faces of people who wish to remain anonymous. Just Vision - an organization that supports communities documenting non-violent resistance (of Palestinian, Israeli, and foreign activists) of the occupation Palestinian territories - critiques Witness' evidence-based model, arguing that documenting atrocity in such a way only reinscribes and simplifies complex conflicts into perpetrator-victim narratives. That these narratives mobilize shame (and denial) rather than hope. I'm wondering what people think? I'll post another link to a relevant article here too.

Just to piggy-back off of my last post - I read this piece by Eve Tuck recently and I think it's really powerful. In her letter, Tuck calls on communities, researchers to reconsider the long-term impact of "damage-centered research" - research that seeks to document peoples' pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for their oppression." Speaking to Witness' approach, this quote was particularly salient: "It is a powerful idea to think of all of us as litigators, putting the world on trial, but does it actually work? Do the material and political wins come through? And, most importantly, are the wins worth the long- term costs of thinking of ourselves as damaged?"

There are 112 apps on this extensive list of qualitative research apps for mobile devices. They range from interview assistance, to specific research methods, to building basic communication bridges across multiple parties. This list is interesting and should be investigated by anyone looking to research their subjects via mobile access/pathways.

This is a short article looking at the mobile dating app Tinder, and how an ethnographer might approach researching its population. Fairly interesting to people who have used the app in the past or currently, as well as brings up the interesting aspect that mobile and digital ethnography act as very unique fields despite their strong similarities.

This is a pretty interesting article about the guidelines as to what digital citizenship truly means, and how it exists. There are nine aspects I feel directly affect the ethnography aspect we investigate every week of the digital world, and might possibly add to our perspective as to how the general population views joining the digital community.

This is an art installation from 1980 of a large video chat between people in LA and New York. It deals with time and space. It is really interesting to see peoples reactions to this new form of communication.

Just another transcription tool to look at!

So I couldn't find this on our site so far, but I recently downloaded this app on my ipad. This program essentially allows you to mark up PDFs, articles, etc. by highlighting, taking notes, and so forth. It runs around $9.99, so I was a little hesitant at first, but this app is really valuable! I've always struggled to read articles paperless, and this app really helped by productivity levels skyrocket. You can also export your notes, so you can basically write your papers/etc. as you read. 

"Products for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering barriers to sharing stories."

Nice follow up to David's post on Dedoose's crash

Nice summary of both advantages and disadvantages of dedoose. Although I have mentioned some points (e.g. cross-platform) during my presentation, there are some other features that I have not covered - the visualisation function and the issue of no local copy.

A crowdsourced mapping tool that promotes business transparency by tracking "where things come from". This tool creates a visualization of supply chains across the globe.