February 2012
35 posts
“To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a...”
– Clifford Geertz (via noellejt)
Anonymous asked: Can you PLEASE put a "read more" cut on your most recent post? I had to hit "page down" SEVENTEEN times to get past it! That's just crazy!
5 tags
NY Times - How Companies Learn Your Secrets.
Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”
Pole has a master’s degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the intersection of data...
Who Will Tell Native Stories, and Who Will Hear... →
effyeahfolklore:
“Native Americans have long struggled for accurate representation in media, particularly in film. Whether the uncredited performances of the “documentary” Nanook of the North or the familiar racism of traditional Westerns, Indigenous cultures have rarely been given much truthful, let alone positive, attention. However, Native people have been slowly cultivating their own voice...
d.think: Trends: The Evolving Education-Work Path,... →
ashaegupta:
Let’s get straight to it: I think we’ll see a fundamental decline in the institutional power of colleges and large corporations over the near future due to three major trends:
1. An increase in high quality, affordable practical training available outside of traditional colleges 2. A rise of …
Canvas8: Countdown to LIFT12 →
canvas8:
BOM BOM BOM. It’s going to be a good one.
Particularly excited about seeing UCL anthropologist Stefana Broadbent discuss the evolving relationships with tech in the home, and University of California researcher/sociologist Tricia Wang on the geography of trust in social networks. Have…
Marketing to Culture: Why you’d want the... →
marketingtoculture:
Cyberpunk who?
The term ‘cyberpunk’ was born quite a while ago and came to be primarily used to describe computer geeks who were (and still are) typically characterized by a distrust in government, a libertarian attitude and a belief that the internet and information must remain open and free…
“[S]ome moral views are better than others, despite the sincerity of the...”
– From a 2004 philosophy textbook, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?, by Russ Shafer-Landau
A quote to make just about every anthropologist I know go crazy…
(via literary-ethnography)
Identity, Prestige, and Hypocrisy: Why Students...
totallyatypical:
I am not sure, under initial evaluation of my ideas, if my consideration of ‘Facebook’ as a culture was well-placed intrigue or a mild obsession with what I consider an online microcosm for social interaction. Kirin Narayan, in her article: “How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” (1993) put her finger on the problem that I found when deciding to study the ‘society’ of...
Norman: Does Culture Matter for Product Design? →
peterdalsgaard:
“…culture might be far less important than we might have expected”
Once upon a time, when I visited other countries, I would head to the department stores so I could experience the wide cultural variations in such things as cookware, cutlery and tools for crafts and gardening. Today, I seldom do this anymore because all the stores look the same. Rice cookers and woks may...
Thoughts on Thinking: Ethnographic Field Methods... →
mfa-jasonwilkins:
Ethnographic Field Methods and Their Relationship to Design in Participatory Design: Principals and Practices
Jeanette Blomberg | Xerox PARC
Jean Giacomi, Andrea Mosher, Pat Swenton-Wall | Xerox Corporation
In this chapter of Participatory Design (PD): Principals and Practices, Jeanette…
BEAT NATION :: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture →
edgyrazor:
Beat Nation reflects a generation of artists who juxtapose urban youth culture with Aboriginal identity in entirely innovative and unexpected ways. Using hip hop and other forms of popular culture, artists create surprising new cultural hybrids—in painting, sculpture, installation, performance and video—that reflect the changing demographics of Aboriginal people today. In Vancouver,...
Separatist: Selectivity & objectivity of digital... →
richshaw:
A challenge often heard in relation to ethnography, especially newer netnographic & social media based approaches, is that the selectivity, production and curation of media makes it a invalid observational record. This position views the content used by ethnographers as ‘objective data’ which…
Ethnography for User Experience →
uxiscool:
A careful look at the relationship between ethnography and design.
This is the first essay in a multi-part series by John Payne, Principal of Moment’s Experience Design practice, reflecting on his workshop, Ethnography for User Experience, and their field research with Occupy Wall Street.
Folklorist Rob Willis has been travelling around... →
When people from all over the world started coming to Australia to live, they built farms and worked on cattle stations in the remote reaches of the country.
They cut sugarcane and set up shops, and at night when they were often lonely and spooked by the quiet they brought out their musical instruments and danced and sang and told each other stories from their homeland.
Rob Willis has been...
“I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to...”
– Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007 (via literary-ethnography)
“ethnography serves at once to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar”
– John Comaroff & Jean Comaroff (via lucjanlocke)
January 2012
48 posts
5 tags
d.think: MoveTogether: Lessons Learned from... →
ashaegupta:
This is the story of MoveTogether, a class project I did at Stanford to encourage carpooling in the Bay area. If you don’t care about carpooling or the environment, don’t command+shift+] too quickly. More importantly, MoveTogether is a testament to ethnography and the power of the ol’ pivot.
…
lucjanlocke:
Michael Taussig - ‘Occupy...
Anonymous asked: this is awesome?! We love you.
The Martyst: Gypsy Tag →
the-martyst:
Hey everyone!
“Gypsy” is an ethnic slur. It is not a lifestyle. It is not a fashion. It is not a philosophy.
If you are a creative and free-spirited enough person to tie scarves all over your body and hang out in a corn field, you probably have enough inventive neurons to rub together and come…
Piece on open marriage... →
I spent a recent weekend up in Maine with my girlfriend and our three kids. We went on long canoe trips, made mountains of buttery waffles, and read Rainbow Fairy books aloud till the words blurred together on the page. When the kids had gone to bed and the house was quiet, we crawled into bed and had sex so hot I thought the sheets might catch fire.
When I got home, I told my husband all...
