Heather Ford
-
First published on ethnographymatters.net. Last month on Ethnography Matters, we started a monthly thematic focus where each of the EM contributing editors would elicit posts about a particular theme. I kicked us off with the theme entitled ‘The Openness Edition’ where we investigated what openness means for the ethnographic community. I ended up editing some…
-
I just posted the article about Ushahidi and its future challenges that was published in the Index on Censorship last month (‘Crowd Wisdom’ by Heather Ford in Index on Censorship December 2012, vol. 41, no. 4 33-39 doi: 10.1177/0306422012465800) . I wrote about Ushahidi’s emergence as a powerful tool used in countries around the world to document elections, disasters and…
-
First posted at EthnographyMatters.net Last month’s Wired magazine showed an infographic with a headline that read: ‘History’s most influential people, ranked by Wikipedia reach’ with a group of 20 men arranged in hierarchical order — from Jesus at number 1 to Stalin at number 20. Curious, I wondered how ‘influence’ and ‘Wikipedia reach’ was being decided. According…
-
There has been much reflecting and soul-searching about the future of WikiSym in the past year (and probably before that as well). Many felt that the conference was becoming dominated by Wikipedia research and that it needed to grow to encompass more research in the open source, open data and open content realm. I felt…
-
It was the end of the final day of our workshop on the outskirts of Cairo and we were all feeling that curious mixture of inspiration, energy and exhaustion that follows those meetings where a world of ideas and people and things are thrown together in a concentrated few days. Mark Graham asked each of…
-
Below is the research proposal that I wrote when I applied to the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) DPhil Programme in November last year. I’m guessing it’s going to evolve some (especially since I’m wanting to add some statistical work surrounding citations and translations between languages), but I’m really excited about it as it stands. The wonderful…
-
After four months of travel to visit friends in amazing places and visiting some wild places on my own, I have at last settled down in Oxford for my next adventure: three or four years doing my DPhil here at Oxford University. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to believe it! This was my itinerary…
-
First posted at Ethnographymatters On the first day of WikiSym last week, as we started preparing for the open space track and the crowd was being petitioned for new sessions over lunch, I suddenly thought that it might be a good idea for researchers who used ethnographic methods to get together to talk about the challenges we…
-
Stuart Geiger and I will be presenting our paper about Wikipedia literacy in Linz, Austria for WikiSym 2012 (link below). It’s in the short paper series in which we introduce the concept of of “trace literacy”, a multi-faceted theory of literacy that sheds light on what new knowledges and organizational forms are required to improve participation in Wikipedia’s…
Hblog 