Updates
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Review of ‘code/space: software and everyday life’
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…
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How Wikipedia’s Dr Jekyll became Mr Hyde: Vandalism, sock puppetry and the curious case of Wikipedia’s decline
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…
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Isolated vs overlapping narratives: the story of an AFD
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…
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February 2013: The Openness Edition
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…
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Crowd Wisdom
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)…
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Why Wikipedia is no ‘proxy for culture’ (Part 1 of 3)
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…
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WikiSym Redefined
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…
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Language, identity and Wikipedia: Some perspectives from the Cairo “Wikipedia in the Arab World” workshop
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…
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The politics of truth: Who wins on Wikipedia? A study of what Wikipedia deletes and who it bans
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…
Hblog 