Determining Requirements within an Indigenous Knowledge System of African Rural Communities

Eliciting and analyzing requirements within knowledge systems, which fundamentally differ so far from technology supported systems represent particular challenges. African rural communities’ life is deeply rooted in an African Indigenous knowledge system manifested in their practices such as Traditional Medicine. We describe our endeavors to elicit requirements to design a system to support the accumulation and sharing […]

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Ethnography Beyond Text and Print: How the digital can transform ethnographic expressions

Excerpt I’m not advocating for abolishing academic book publishing. Others have and have discussed the economic and ideological structure that supports academic publishing and valorizes the monograph.) Instead, I want to make room for a serious consideration of ethnographic expressions that are not strictly based in text, either in the […]

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The Evolving Braid: an Ethnography of Technology Change in Uganda

Thanks to Melissa for allowing me to share her recently published dissertation! Abstract If there’s one thing one can expect from information technology deployments in developing countries–it’s the unexpected. From 2007-2010, I combined my skills as a software developer with ethnographic methods to observe the use of information technology in […]

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HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

The world didn’t end on May 21st. Don’t be sad. There’s a cool new journal to check out… From their website: HAU, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, is an international peer-reviewed, open-access online journal which aims to situate ethnography as the prime heuristic of anthropology, and return it to the forefront […]

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ViTu: a system to help the Mexican people to preserve and celebrate their culture

This paper (excerpted below) by Mónica Isabel González Arribas, Emilio Sánchez Sánchez, and Edgar de los Santos Ramírez was presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011) in Vancouver, BC. Abstract ViTu is the entire development of a system focused on appreciating and highlighting […]

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Repatriation, Digital Media, and Culture in the Virtual Museum

A presentation by Kate Hennessy. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS). Many Canadian First Nations and Aboriginal organizations are using digital media to revitalize their languages and assert control over the representation of their cultures. […]

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Mobile Technology, Gender and Development

Mobile Technology, Gender and Development is a University of Jyväskylä based research project focusing on the use and cultural meanings of mobile technology in Africa, India and Bangladesh. From the first post on their blog: We are a group of five anthropologists doing research on mobile technology, gender and development. […]

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ICTs and the Backstretch: an Ethnography

ICTs and the Backstretch: an Ethnography of the Backstretch Employees of the Saratoga Race Track and their use of the Backstretch Global Communications Center As Ellen McHale points out in An Ethnography of the Saratoga Racetrack, “the backstretch of the thoroughbred racetrack at Saratoga Springs, New York, is an ‘intentional’ […]

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