"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 in film, and that voice is what Dr. Joanna Hearne has spent her academic career studying." /// also features a great collection of related links and resources

A YouTube video of an MBA class presentation on Netnography - from Hiro Sudo and Anferny Chen.

This paper aims to contribute to existing scholarship in the field of digital anthropology by exploring the physical and virtual experiences of gender amongst 30 Millennial-aged F/LOSS hackers, coders and hacktivists living in Europe.

"Original and world-changing design was long considered the product of solitary geniuses, masters and heroes, but recent research has argued that cultural innovation is often the result of everyday actions by ordinary people. This course critically and creatively examines the dynamic and collaborative networks that characterise professional and amateur design today, and prepares students to face the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead."

[Course aims, course content, course assignments (4 of them) follow, all worth reading]

To get started, students are required to complete the following task (adapted from The Exercise Book) for the first tutorial:

1) Go for a walk with a notebook and pay close attention to what’s going on around you.

2) Compose one written page with three sections. Start the first section with “I see…”, the second section with “I remember…” and the third section with “I imagine…”."

Ethnography platform

Ethnography Platform

Questions to gather context and collect details
Questions to probe on what’s unsaid
Questions that create contrasts in order uncover frameworks and mental models

"there is a very deeply-rooted assumption that humans have some innate, unique qualities that distinguish us from not only mere matter but other animals as well. … once we show that life is not a necessary criterion for this thing called culture, then the fun really begins — and you can see why lots of people would oppose this. … I keep returning to this quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus on music: “Of course, as Messiaen says, music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains … The question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what is already musical in nature. Moreover, what Messiaen discovered in music is the same thing ethnologists discovered in animals: human beings are hardly at an advantage, except in the means of overcoding, of making punctual systems.” Music is but one of many domains that is typically seen as inherently social and therefore uniquely human, and the anthropocentric perspective tends to reduce everything to how it functions in the human experiential frame. And on a side note, this is why I’m so excited by Ian Bogost’s upcoming book “Alien Phenomenology: Or What It’s Like To Be A Thing” … Robots can be said to have their own culture precisely because they don’t need to copy our sociologisms in order to be social, although what they do in their own social realm may not easily map on to things we do in our social realm. This is probably what fascinates me most"