Gabriella Coleman’s
research on the enigmatic Anonymous network has provided unique insights and dispeled myths about the group. In a guest contribution this month, Coleman writes about tensions in her work and what it means to be implicated in “the dance between Anonymous and journalism.”
Our other guest contributor, Cisco’s Mike Gotta, writes about rethinking enterprise social networking (ESN) design processes and the value of qualitative research for building ESN systems.
Heather Ford addresses the value of qualitative research in another context in her reflections on a WikiSym conference dominated by quantitative analyses of English language Wikipedia.
And Jenna Burrell discusses the challenges of keeping up with fieldwork from afar in her post on read-along ethnography, in which she examines the possibilities and limitations of understanding a distant fieldsite through a collaborator’s notes and images.
- Bill Moggridge, inventor of the laptop and founder of IDEO, died in September. In case you missed it, check out this NYT tribute, and this Atlantic piece on the role of gender and class in the adoption of the laptop.
- A new digital anthropology interest group is forming within the American Anthropological Association.
NEXT MONTH
- Music ethnographer, Wendy Hsu will guest contribute a series of articles on digital and computational methods in doing ethnography and field research
- Erik Bigras from The Asthma Files, an experimental ethnographic project, will tell us about how they work with the medical community to collect ethnographic knowledge about asthma.
- Nicolas Nova will share a series of posts about his new book, CURIOUS RITUALS: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday.
Would you like to be our next guest contributor? Ethnography Matters is your space. you can feature a project/paper/book/syllabus, provide a fieldwork update, or share your thoughts. Here are some more ideas for how you can participate. We’d love to hear from you. Email us at ethnographymatters[at]gmail!
