Ethnographic Studies

Report on Youth and New Media Pokes at Educational Institutions — Peer into the networked world of teenagers and young adults and you’ll see intense, creative communities of young people who want to learn. That’s the conclusion of Living and Learning with New Media, a report on a three-year study called the Digital Youth Project at the University of California at Berkeley. It was financed by the MacArthur Foundation. The report, released yesterday, focuses on teen life with a few examples from young adults in their 20s. It combines results from interviews, observations and ethnographic studies by 28 researchers exploring interactions with personal technology like video cameras and cell phones as... [Tags: california at berkeley, creative communities, educational institutions, ethnographic studies, facebook]

Jan Chipchase on Researching in the Field — Last week we had the privilege of attending Tiger.Blam, an eye-opening discussion put on by frog design and IxDA featuring Nokia field researcher Jan Chipchase. Though not trained as an anthropologist, Chipchase makes a living by learning first-hand about how people interact, work, and - just generally - live with and without technology. He openly shares his experiences via his blog, where he posts some of the research he does to inform Nokia design as well as his own musings on the future of connectivity (we’ve featured several of his insights here before). Chipchase talked extensively about the methodology he... [Tags: anthropologist, boundaries, colleagues, conducting research, connectivity]

Microsoft hires social-net scholar Danah Boyd — Danah Boyd, a researcher best known for her ethnographic studies of social networks, has been tapped to be part of Microsoft's new research facility in Boston, Microsoft Research New England. "Going to (Microsoft Research) will allow me to continue the research I do and it will give me a ...... [Tags: boston, danah boyd, ethnographic studies, microsoft, microsoft research]

How successful bloggers become bureaucratized too — I’ve recently been reading ‘Making Online News‘ a book of ethnographic studies of online news production. Tucked towards the back of the book is a chapter called The Routines of Blogging by Wilson Lowrey and John Latta. It is one of the few studies I’ve read to look not at journalists, but at the work practices of bloggers - specifically, political bloggers. And their findings support what I’ve increasingly suspected: “the more relevant bloggers become in terms of audience and influence, the more their production routines resemble those of professional journalists.” A few years ago this would have been held... [Tags: aspiration, audience, blogger, blogging, central argument]