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Doing ethnography is central May 21, 2007

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Ethnography, Research.
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I have been meaning to write something about the PlaceMe workshop I attended in Stockholm about data collection and transcribing multimodal and mediated interactions. The workshop was lead by Professor Lorenza Mondada who has been working with video data for more than 20 years. One of her key points during the lectures was that doing ethnography is essential in relation to video recordings. One must always do fieldwork for a period of time before doing the actual video recording. This will not only establish trust with the participants, but also make your data better since it will help you identity the central and relevant activities within the field.

This message is very much in line with another workshop I attended last Monday on interdisciplinary discourse studies at Center for Discourse Studies with Professor Srikant Sarangi as key note speaker. During his talk Sarangi pointed to the fact that combining ethnography and discourse studies is central in order to understand professionals’ practice. One must not underestimate the value of a long term informal ethnography in order to understand the “native knowledge” that exists in a particular setting.

I think that these points about ethnography are central to almost all humanistic research – especially, when you are trying to really understand social practice. Therefore these points are also relevant to my PhD project on understanding youngsters and online social networking and ethnography is definitely something that I (still) will be working with – both online and offline 🙂

PlaceMe May 8, 2007

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Networks, Research.
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At the moment I’m preparing for tomorrow when I will go to Stockholm for a workshop within the network “PlaceMe“. PlaceMe is a Nordic research network on Place, Mediated discourse and Embodied interaction.

placeme-logo2.gif

The workshop is on the first steps of data collection and how to transcribe and analyse multimodal and mediated interactions. I’m looking forward to the workshop and to seeing other PhD students data.

The digital generation gap: A classic example May 3, 2007

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Generation gap, MySpace, Social networking sites.
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Is there really a huge generation gap between youngsters and their parents when it comes to new media? I’m not sure. However, many parents seem to have a hard time understanding their children’s use of new social media and especially social networking sites.

On Carolyn Shelby’s blog I just read a classic example of this. A parent who is in no way up-to-date with MySpace where his step-daughter has created a profile. The father is worried because an old pervert is trying to pick up his daughter:

“It’s some guy named Tom, and his profile says he’s 31.”

Read the post and find out who the old pervert is here 🙂

Networked Identities May 1, 2007

Posted by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Academic, Identity, Networks, Research.
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My colleague, Thomas Ryberg, and I have a paper on networked identities in networked environments coming up in JCAL – Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. Earlier someone was asking for an English-language version of one of my papers on Arto and I remembered that I have this one which also draws on some of my Arto research and uses the social networking site as a case. However, I must give credit to Thomas who had the idea for and is the main author of this paper.

The paper is called “Networked Identities – Understanding Movements Between Strong and Weak Ties in Networked Environments”. I am not sure when it will be out, but for now you can read the draft version here ».