Heather Ford
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My article about Wikipedia infoboxes and cleanup tags and their role in the development of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution article has just been published in the journal, ‘Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism‘ (a pre-print is available on Academia.edu). The article forms part of a special issue of the journal edited by C W Anderson and…
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Reblogged from ‘Connectivity, Inclusivity and Inequality‘ Continuing with our series of blog posts exposing the workings behind a multidisciplinary big data project, we talk this week about the process of moving between small data and big data analyses. Last week, we did a group deep dive into our data. Extending the metaphor: Shilad caught the fish and dumped them…
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I gave this talk at Wikimania in London yesterday. In the first years of Wikipedia’s existence, many of us said that, as an example of citizen journalism and journalism by the people, Wikipedia would be able to avoid the gatekeeping problems faced by traditional media. The theory was that because we didn’t have the burden…
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This article first appeared in Big Data and Society journal published by Sage and is licensed by the author under a Creative Commons Attribution license. [PDF] Abstract In the past three years, Heather Ford—an ethnographer and now a PhD student—has worked on ad hoc collaborative projects around Wikipedia sources with two data scientists from Minnesota, Dave…
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Reblogged from ‘Connectivity, Inclusivity and Inequality‘ In this series of blog posts, we are documenting the process by which a group of computer and social scientists are working together on a project to understand the geography of Wikipedia citations. Our aim is not only to better understand how far Wikipedia has come to representing ‘the sum of all human knowledge’ but…
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Reblogged from ‘Connectivity, Inclusivity and Inequality‘ In this series of blog posts, Heather Ford documents the process by which a group of computer and social scientists are working together in a project to understand the geography of Wikipedia citations. Their aim is not only to better understand how far Wikipedia has come to representing ‘the sum…
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Reblogged from ‘Connectivity, Inclusivity and Inequality‘ OII research fellow, Mark Graham and DPhil student, Heather Ford (both part of the CII group) are working with a group of computer scientists including Brent Hecht, Dave Musicant and Shilad Sen to understand how far Wikipedia has come to representing ‘the sum of all human knowledge’. As part of the project, they will be making explicit the methods that…
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This review was published in Environment and Planning B last year. I really loved the book and think that it’s a powerful reminder of the importance of context in thinking about how code does work in the world. Code/space: Software and Everyday Life By Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge; MIT Press, Cambridge, London, 2011, 290…
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This is a (very) short paper that I will be presenting at Internet Research in Denver this week. I want to write something longer about the story because I feel like it represents in many ways what I see as emblematic of so many of us who lived through our own Internet bubble: when everything…
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First published on ethnographymatters.net in March, 2013 Editor’s Note: This month’s Stories to Action edition starts off with Heather Ford’s @hfordsa’s story on her experience of watching a story unfold on Wikipedia and in person. While working as an ethnographer at Ushahidi, Heather was in Nairobi, Kenya when she heard news of Kenya’s army invading Somolia. She found out that…
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