Heather Ford
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This post introduces the new group blog I’m working on called Ethnography Matters On the first of June this year, I became an ethnographer – but probably only an ethnographer in the sense that I got my first job with that title. My ethnography shoes (a pair of bright green sneakers) are new for me…
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Stuart Geiger and I just presented some research at WikiSym on why Wikipedia articles are deleted through both the speedy deletion or “CSD” process, a unilateral process whereby administrators can deleted problematic articles without discussion, and the articles for deletions or “AfD” process whereby articles discuss whether articles should be deleted. You might imagine that…
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the disputes around Ushahidi’s role in humanitarian efforts and came round to thinking that we may be looking in the wrong place to discover the work that tools like Ushahidi’s Crowdmap are doing in the world. Whereas humanitarian organisations are asking (good) questions about whether Ushahidi’s tools help or…
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I’ve been spending the last few days thinking about my upcoming research into how Wikipedians currently use and understand sources and citations in different situations (directly after a major international news event like the Japan earthquake and in conflict situations such as the Middle East conflict) and what kinds of software tools could be helpful…
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In the wake of anxiety about the “trustworthiness” of Wikipedia articles and the different quality levels of articles, a number of tools have been developed to automatically determine how trustworthy content on Wikipedia is. The first is ‘content-based filtering’, the second is ‘collaborative filtering’. Content based filtering uses properties of the text itself to automatically…
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Sir John Daniel from the Commonwealth of Learning was interviewed by Creative Commons’ Timothy Vollmer recently about his ideas on open education. He is one of the wisest, most gracious members of this community, and I just loved some of the answers. Many of the COL member states are located in the global south. How…
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I wrote a short memo to the Ushahidi team about what exactly an ethnographer does and how ethnography as a discipline could be useful to Ushahidi (and Crowdmap in particular). I’m thinking of actually writing more about this and interviewing ethnographers working at technology companies to shed some light on this growing field. What is…
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Alex and I completed our masters projects report on Thursday night. I thought I’d post the research that I did looking at information flows at the I School and the role of architecture in shaping the kinds of interactions that were taking place. Interviewing students, staff and faculty and observing what was going down in…
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On the 3rd of January this year, Guardian contributor, James Richardson wrote an article about how Wikileaks would have committed the same ‘collateral murder’ it accused the US military of (in their edited video of an Iraq drone operation) if Zimbabwean Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangarai was convicted of treason. One of the cables (published 8…
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Eight years ago, I applied to the Digital Vision Fellowship Program at Stanford University with an interest in developing GIS (Geographic Information Systems) tools to map conditions that could lead to conflict in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Benetech generously sponsored the fellowship hoping that I could help them with Martus, a human rights…
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