Tag Archives: reading list

July 31, 2012 | 5 Comments

The Ethnographer’s Reading List: Nicolas Nova takes us back to objects, public spaces, and lines….yes lines [guest contributor]


Credit: Matt Cottam

A few months ago we interviewed Nicolas Nova in A Retrospective of Talks by Ethnographers at Lift Conference. Now we finally  have Nicolas grace  us with a peek into his brain with his summer reading list.  A bit more about Nicolas from his bio: 

Nicolas Nova is a consultant and researcher at the Near Future Laboratory. He undertakes field studies to inform and evaluate the creation of innovative products and services. His work is about exploring and understanding people’s needs, motivations and contexts to map new design opportunities and help designers and engineers. Nicolas applies this in the domains of video games, mobile and location-based media as well as networked objects/robots. He also teaches user research in interaction design at HEAD-Geneva and ENSCI-Les Ateliers in Paris. He holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL, Switzerland). He is also editorial consultant for the Lift Conference. In his free time, he collects video game controllers and peculiar interfaces dug up in flea markets here and there.

If you would like to contribute to the “Ethnographer’s Reading List,” send us an email! – Tricia

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This summer I’m spending the months of July and August in California for a visiting researcher’s residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, working on a project about rituals and gestures of the digital everyday. Because of that topic, the books I’ve bought for the summer are quite influenced by this project. They’re not about methodologies, but more about case studies concerning design, material culture, ethnography and architecture. Each of them seems to be feeding our investigation here:


Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century (Alison J. Clarke Ed.)

An interesting anthology describing various case studies about how different designers benefit from observing people when making new things. What caught my attention here is the wide breadth of examples presented and the description of what happens beyond data collection. As a matter of fact, several books (and presentations) I’ve read recently address the data part but are less verbose about how to turn this into “something”. And I have to admit that I’m interested in that “something”, be it a commercial product, a design fiction or a good discussion with friends. Some essays are of course more relevant to me than others but it was overall a good compilation that also covers examples beyond commercial products sold next year.

Read More… The Ethnographer’s Reading List: Nicolas Nova takes us back to objects, public spaces, and lines….yes lines [guest contributor]

July 31, 2012 | 2 Comments

The Ethnographer’s Reading List: Christina Dennaoui brings us some science, emotion, & pain [guest contributor]


We have another first time contributor on Ethnography Matters! Christina Dennaoui was a graduate student of anthropology, media, and religion at the University of Chicago. After graduate school she started a new chapter as a digital planner and strategist for a digital marketing agency in Chicago. I met Christina through her amazing tumblr blog, Modern and Im/Material Things. Christina isn’t an ethnographer, but she’s a crazy smart social theorist working in industry, so we immediately bonded. Here’s some more about Christina from her bio: 

Off the clock, she is an artist, and producer of electronic music. She also volunteers on the Associate Board of Chicago’s largest LGBTQ resource center. She is currently working on a project, which she jokingly calls “post-colonial dubstep.” The project combines elements of critical theory with dance music. This project began with a transatlantic collaboration with Parisian musicians to “remix” Zizek’s Occupy Wall Street speech and is now expanding to include other contemporary philosophers. She’s not much for the Twitters but she tumbls and is fond of email.

If you would like to contribute to the “Ethnographer’s Reading List,” send us an email! – Tricia

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In my ideal world, I would use the summer season as an opportunity to catch up on recently released works of fiction or non-fiction. This summer, however, has been the start of a somewhat ambitious project: actually reading all of the books on my bookshelf in their entirety. Crazy, right?  My goal is to take my time with each book, actually “sitting with” the author’s arguments rather than voraciously consuming theory like I did in graduate school. My graduate studies focused on religion, anthropology, and communication theory, which means that I have shelves full of work that relate to my professional work in digital strategy and planning. Although there is no grand theme uniting all of the books on my list, there are a few sub-themes worth calling out: archiving and identity, personal branding, quantifying individual interests, and the meaning of “strategy.”

The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology

Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay
(A PDF of the book)

Though short in length, Latour and Lepinay’s introduction of Gabriel Tarde’s  Psychologie Economique is dense but remarkably clear. Situating Tarde’s work in a larger context of economic and political theory, Latour and Lepinay tease out some the aspects of Tarde’s work that provide useful conceptual frameworks for articulating the more esoteric aspects of economics as a field of study. One area that is of particular relevance to my work is Tarde’s interest in the qualitative measures of economies, such as conversations, tastes, ideas, etc. For Tarde, one of the shortcomings of his contemporaries was that their economic methods often focused on the study of wealth and production to exclusion of other available data. It wasn’t that one approach was better than the other but that a narrow focus creates methodological problems because it often results in the construction of the very structure it aims to study. It’s a simple enough argument, yes, but one that was lost in the wake of Marx’s work.

Read More… The Ethnographer’s Reading List: Christina Dennaoui brings us some science, emotion, & pain [guest contributor]

July 2, 2012 | 5 Comments

The Ethnographer’s Reading List: Carla Borsoi’s Summer Reading [guest contributor]


Carla Borsoi is a new contributor to Ethnography Matters. This month, she’s sharing her summer reading list in the Ethnographer’s Reading List series. One of my favorite books about the history of the internet is on her list, Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.  I’ve always been interested in Carla’s work because her work with industry has always been tied to producing insights with qualitative research.  After spending five years at Ask.com, she is currently the VP of Consumer Insights at AOL where she gets to drive product and marketing strategy for mail and mobile products by drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, digging into web analytics, measuring marketing effectiveness, and monitoring social media. We’ll have to interview Carla in depth in soon about how she uses qualitative research at AOL. You can find more about Carla on her website or if you have questions for Carla, send her a tweet!  

If you would like to contribute to the “Ethnographer’s Reading List,” send us an email! – Tricia

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I love summer. I love reading. I maintain an ongoing reading list on GoodReads, which means that there is never a lack of content to consume. Next year, my eldest will be attending high school. We got her summer reading list and I was surprised to see some books that have been languishing on my to-read list. Then, as Ethnography Matters has put together other people’s summer reading lists, it was inspiration to smash these all together and create a list of must-reads by August.

While books directly related to research and methodology can be interesting, what’s more compelling is what comes after the data collection. How do you tell a story with data? How do you suck people in and get them to internalize what has been learned? What can we predict for the future? To that end, this list is comprised of books that cover this topic in various guises.

1. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

This is actually a re-read, but is hands down the best book on using storytelling that I’ve read. It’s nice to revisit and take the lessons back in, reinforcing them.


2. The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

This is about taking a bunch of studies related to happiness, filtering it through a personal lens and then weaving a story around it. I’m also interested in understanding how people manage their time and achieve goals.

3. You are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

More of a manifesto. How does one weave together history with a vision of the future? Many folks have told me that they disagreed with some of ideas put forth in this book, but at the least we know Mr. Lanier can be provocative.

4. American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture Edited by Kenneth Haltman & Jules David Prown

This book is a compilation of essays covering America’s connection to products and what that has to say about American culture. I can’t wait to read about chapters about corsets, lava lamps and the telephone.

5. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

A history and a book which looks to the past to get ideas of the future. How can one weave together a cohesive explanation of how a culture arose based on various influences?

I just finished one of these, and will be looking forward to digging into the rest of these over the coming weeks.  At the end of the summer, I’ll report back and let you know what you think the value of each of these and how I might apply these to my work.