Free Books! a list of free e-pubs in the Ethnos Project Resources Database

Happy New Year! Here, have some free books! This collection of 29 e-publications spans the years 2002-2014 and contains over 3,000 pages of top-notch scholarship, hard-earned field wisdom, best practices and more. Yes, the list is a bit eclectic (and some items are fraying around the digital edges), but it […]

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Status of the Ethnosphere: New Statistics about Language Loss Across the World

Statistics and Folklore Despite popular and persistent statistics, we really do use more than 10% of our brains. We don’t actually eat an average of seven spiders a year, and suicide rates simply do not jump during the holidays. When statistics become sound bites, they sometimes become folklore. One such […]

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Technology and Language Revitalization: A Conspectus

Increasingly the world’s indigenous people are recognizing the value of using digital environments in the battle against the extinction of their languages and cultures (Hermes & King 2013).  Likewise as indigenous languages become increasingly visible on the internet, perceptions of them as antiquated, irrelevant or anachronistic in the Information Age are […]

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A great debate: to show or not to show the Ngintaka songline exhibit – and who should decide?

Three articles that capture the current cultural debate around an Aborignal Australian songlines exhibit… Songlines project sparks indigenous culture war March 22, 2014, from a post written by Nicolaus Rothwell It seemed like a dream arts project for the remote western desert’s Aboriginal communities — a research and exhibition series […]

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Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods – a presentation by Dr. Shawn Wilson

Modified from post originally published on the Red River College Applied Research blog. Join Red River College and Dr. Shawn Wilson, a Manitoba-born Indigenous people research expert visiting from Australia, to learn about and explore the realm of Indigenous research. Wilson’s book, entitled “Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods” examines […]

Libraries, telecenters, & cybercafés play a critical role in extending the benefits of ICTs to people worldwide

A guest post by TASCHA‘s Melody Clark. Originally published here. Report: Connecting people for development: Why public access ICTs matter While you’re likely reading this on your personal computer, enjoying reliable and fast internet, millions of people around the world still lack private access to this increasingly necessary resource to […]

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Information Technologies & International Development journal special issue: Selected Papers from ICTD2012

Information Technologies & International Development is an interdisciplinary open-access journal that focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with the “other four billion” – the share of the world population whose countries are not yet widely connected to the Internet nor widely considered in the design of […]

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Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the year 2020

“The question persists and indeed grows whether the computer will make it easier or harder for human beings to know who they really are, to identify their real problems, to respond more fully to beauty, to place adequate value on life, and to make their world safer than it now […]

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A decade of ICT4D: two academic perspectives

Two recent papers provide insights into the trends and changing field of ICT4D. The first is a 2011 paper by Ricardo Gomez, Luis F. Baron, and Brittany Fiore-Silfvast: The Changing Field of ICTD: Content analysis of research published in selected journals and conferences, 2000-2010 In this study, we report the […]

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Special Issue of the Journal of Material Culture: Digital Subjects, Cultural Objects

The Journal of Material Culture is concerned with the relationship between artefacts and social relations irrespective of time and place and aims to systematically explore the linkage between the construction of social identities and the production and use of culture. Special Edition edited by Amiria Salmond and Billie Lythberg Introduction […]

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Connect a School, Connect a Community: Providing ICTs to Indigenous Peoples

This post was created to share a document called “Providing ICTs to Indigenous Peoples” which is part of a best practices toolkit created by the ITU’s Connect a School, Connect a Community initiative. But before I present the document, I’d like to step back and introduce it in context starting […]

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African Fractals, Virtual Bead Looms, and other Culturally Situated Design Tools

Culturally Situated Design Tools While solutions to the “digital divide” are often imagined as a one-way bridge, there are a variety of ways in which we can create a two-way bridge alternative. Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDTs) use information technology to “translate” from local knowledge and low-tech practice, to high-tech […]

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Our original aim was the same as usual: to bring them sustainable development

A two-parter… take a moment to enjoy this sharp and satirical snapshot of development (There You Go! written and illustrated by Oren Ginzburg and published by Survival International in 2006) and then another few minutes to learn about Survival International’s work on behalf of tribal peoples worldwide. To see the […]

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