ethnography

  • What I’m talking about in 2016

    Authority and authoritative sources, critical data studies, digital methods, the travel of facts online, bot politics and social media and politics. These are some of the things I’m talking about in 2016. (Just in case you thought the #sunselfies only indicated fun and aimless loafing).   15 January Fact factories: How Wikipedia’s logics determine what facts

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  • Big Data and Small: Collaborations between ethnographers and data scientists

    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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  • 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 the theme entitled ‘The Openness Edition’ where we investigated what openness means for the ethnographic community. I ended up editing some

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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 Jesus at number 1 to Stalin at number 20. Curious, I wondered how ‘influence’ and ‘Wikipedia reach’ was being decided. According

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  • Beyond reliability: An ethnographic study of Wikipedia sources

    First published on Ethnographymatters.net and Ushahidi.com  Almost a year ago, I was hired by Ushahidi to work as an ethnographic researcher on a project to understand how Wikipedians managed sources during breaking news events. Ushahidi cares a great deal about this kind of work because of a new project called SwiftRiver that seeks to collect and enable the collaborative

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  • What does it mean to be a participant observer in a place like Wikipedia?

    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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  • Update on the Wikipedia sources project

    This post first appeared on the Ushahidi blog. Last month I presented the first results of the WikiSweeper project, an ethnographic research project to understand how Wikipedia editors track, evaluate and verify sources on rapidly evolving pages of Wikipedia, the results of which will inform ongoing development of the SwiftRiver (then Sweeper) platform. Wikipedians are some

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