ethnography
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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
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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
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This post first appeared on Ethnography Matters on May 1. The vision of an ethnographer physically going to a place, establishing themselves in the activities of that place, talking to people and developing deeper understandings seems so much simpler than the same activities in multifaceted spaces like Wikipedia. Researching how Wikipedians manage and verify information
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Cross-posted from Ethnography Matters xkcd’s Updated Map of Online Communities I arrived in Nairobi last night after an absence of about five years. As I left the plane through the walkway, I took a deep breath and inhaled the familiar southern African smell that I always miss so much living in America. I walked through
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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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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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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
Hblog 