Digital Anthropology

Digital Anthropology
Author: Heather A. Horst
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2013-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857852930

Anthropology has two main tasks: to understand what it is to be human and to examine how humanity is manifested differently in the diversity of culture. These tasks have gained new impetus from the extraordinary rise of the digital. This book brings together several key anthropologists working with digital culture to demonstrate just how productive an anthropological approach to the digital has already become. Through a range of case studies from Facebook to Second Life to Google Earth, Digital Anthropology explores how human and digital can be defined in relation to one another, from avatars and disability; cultural differences in how we use social networking sites or practise religion; the practical consequences of the digital for politics, museums, design, space and development to new online world and gaming communities. The book also explores the moral universe of the digital, from new anxieties to open-source ideals. Digital Anthropology reveals how only the intense scrutiny of ethnography can overturn assumptions about the impact of digital culture and reveal its profound consequences for everyday life. Combining the clarity of a textbook with an engaging style which conveys a passion for these new frontiers of enquiry, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, media studies, communication studies, cultural studies and sociology.

The Anthropology of Digital Practices

The Anthropology of Digital Practices
Author: John Postill
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2024-03-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1003851339

The Anthropology of Digital Practices connects for the first time three distinct research areas – digital ethnography, causal ethnography, and media practice theory – to explore how we might track the effects of new media practices in a digital world. It invites media and communication students and scholars to overcome the field’s old aversion to ‘media effects’ and explores the messy, complex, open-ended effects of new media practices in a digital age. Based on long-term ethnographic research and drawing from recent advances in the study of causality and ethnography, this book tells the ‘formation story’ of the anti-woke movement through a series of critical media events. It argues that digital media practices (e.g. podcasting, YouTubing, tweeting, commenting, broadcasting) will have ‘formative’ effects on an emerging social world at different points in time. One important task of the digital ethnographer is precisely to distinguish between the formative and non-formative effects of specific media practices. This book makes three contributions to our understanding of media practices in the digital era, namely a theoretical, methodological, and empirical contribution. Theoretically, it furthers the ‘practice turn’ in media and communication studies by engaging with the latest thinking on causality and ethnography. Methodologically, it serves as a compelling, up-to-date guide to doing digital ethnography, with special reference to the study of digitally mediated practices. Empirically, it is the first book-length study of the anti-woke movement, a major actor in the ‘culture wars’ currently being fought across the Western world. With its accessible language and rich case studies, The Anthropology of Digital Practices will make an ideal supplementary textbook for a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in research methods, digital ethnography/anthropology, and digital activism.

Digital Ethnography

Digital Ethnography
Author: Sarah Pink
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2015-10-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1473943140

This sharp, innovative book champions the rising significance of ethnographic research on the use of digital resources around the world. It contextualises digital and pre-digital ethnographic research and demonstrates how the methodological, practical and theoretical dimensions are increasingly intertwined. Digital ethnography is central to our understanding of the social world; it can shape methodology and methods, and provides the technological tools needed to research society. The authoritative team of authors clearly set out how to research localities, objects and events as well as providing insights into exploring individuals’ or communities’ lived experiences, practices and relationships. The book: Defines a series of central concepts in this new branch of social and cultural research Challenges existing conceptual and analytical categories Showcases new and innovative methods Theorises the digital world in new ways Encourages us to rethink pre-digital practices, media and environments This is the ideal introduction for anyone intending to conduct ethnographic research in today’s digital society.

Anthropology

Anthropology
Author: Tim Ingold
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781509519804

Humanity is at a crossroads. We face mounting inequality, escalating political violence, warring fundamentalisms and an environmental crisis of planetary proportions. How can we fashion a world that has room for everyone, for generations to come? What are the possibilities, in such a world, of collective human life? These are urgent questions, and no discipline is better placed to address them than anthropology. It does so by bringing to bear the wisdom and experience of people everywhere, whatever their backgrounds and walks of life. In this passionately argued book, Tim Ingold relates how a field of study once committed to ideals of progress collapsed amidst the ruins of war and colonialism, only to be reborn as a discipline of hope, destined to take centre stage in debating the most pressing intellectual, ethical and political issues of our time. He shows why anthropology matters to us all. Introducing Polity’s Why It Matters series: In these short and lively books, world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students.

Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age

Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age
Author: Haidy Geismar
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2018-05-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1787352838

Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.

Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice

Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice
Author: Ethan Watrall
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2022-06-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081307228X

Exploring the use of digital methods in heritage studies and archaeological research The two volumes of Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice bring together archaeologists and heritage professionals from private, public, and academic sectors to discuss practical applications of digital and computational approaches to the field. Contributors thoughtfully explore the diverse and exciting ways in which digital methods are being deployed in archaeological interpretation and analysis, museum collections and archives, and community engagement, as well as the unique challenges that these approaches bring. In this volume, essays address methods for preparing and analyzing archaeological data, focusing on preregistration of research design and 3D digital topography. Next, contributors use specific case studies to discuss data structuring, with an emphasis on creating and maintaining large data sets and working with legacy data. Finally, the volume offers insights into ethics and professionalism, including topics such as access to data, transparency and openness, scientific reproducibility, open-access heritage resources, Indigenous sovereignty, structural racial inequalities, and machine learning. Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice highlights the importance of community, generosity, and openness in the use of digital tools and technologies. Providing a purposeful counterweight to the idea that digital archaeology requires expensive infrastructure, proprietary software, complicated processes, and opaque workflows, these volumes privilege perspectives that embrace straightforward and transparent approaches as models for the future. Contributors: Lynne Goldstein | Ethan Watrall | Brian Ballsun-Stanton | Rachel Opitz | Sebastian Heath | Jolene Smith | Philip I Buckland | Adela Sobotkova | Petra Hermankova | Theresa Huntsman | Heather Richards-Rissetto | Ben Marwick | Li-Ying Wang | Carrie Heitman | Neha Gupta | Ramona Nicholas | Susan Blair | Jeremy Huggett

Digital Materialities

Digital Materialities
Author: Sarah Pink
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2016-02-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 147259259X

As the distinction between the digital and the material world becomes increasingly blurred, the ways in which we think about design are also shifting and evolving. How can the human, digital and material be brought together to intervene in the world? What constitutes our digital-material environments? How can we engage with digital technologies to make sustainable, healthy and meaningful decisions, both now and in the future? Digital Materialities presents twelve chapters by scholars and practitioners working at the intersection between design and digital research in the UK, Spain, Australia and the USA. By incorporating in-depth understandings of the digital-material world from both the social sciences and design, the book considers how this combined knowledge might advance our capacity to design for the future. Divided into three parts, the focus of the book moves from the theoretical to the practical: how different digital materialities are imagined and emerge, through software emulation, urban sensors and smart homes; how new digital designs are sparked through collaborations between social scientists and designers; and finally, how digital design emerges from the insider work of everyday designers. A fascinating, ground-breaking book for students and scholars of digital anthropology, media and communication, and anyone interested in the future of digital design.

Digital Cultures, Lived Stories and Virtual Reality

Digital Cultures, Lived Stories and Virtual Reality
Author: Thomas Maschio
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000484475

This book focuses on the meaning and experience of digital practice, emerging from work in the world of business and drawing on recent anthropological thinking on digital culture. Tom Maschio suggests that the digital is a space of a new "story culture" and considers the lived experience of new technologies. The chapters cover: storytelling in journalism and business with the new technology of virtual reality, the emerging meanings of social media and community building in the digital space, the uses and meanings of visual imagery online, and the cultural meanings of smartphone technology use and the "mobile life." The book incorporates ideas from humanistic anthropology and phenomenology in order to bring business problems into alignment with human concerns and desires, and to show the application of anthropological ideas to real-world issues. As well as anthropologists, the book will be valuable to business students and professionals interested in the digital realm.

Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement

Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement
Author: Sarah Pink
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2015-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1782388478

Contemporary anthropology is done in a world where social and digital media are playing an increasingly significant role, where anthropological and arts practices are often intertwined in museum and public intervention contexts, and where anthropologists are encouraged to engage with mass media. Because anthropologists are often expected and inspired to ensure their work engages with public issues, these opportunities to disseminate work in new ways and to new publics simultaneously create challenges as anthropologists move their practice into unfamiliar collaborative domains and expose their research to new forms of scrutiny. In this volume, contributors question whether a fresh public anthropology is emerging through these new practices.

Deep Stories

Deep Stories
Author: Mariela Nuñez-Janes
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2017-03-20
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3110539357

Have you ever wondered what makes storytelling and digital media a powerful combination? This edited volume examines the opportunities to think, do, and/or create jointly afforded by digital storytelling. The editors of this volume contend that digital storytelling and digital media can create spaces of empowerment and transformation by facilitating multiple kinds of border crossings and convergences involving groups of peoples, places, knowledge, methodologies, and teaching pedagogies. The book is unique in its inclusion of anthropologists and education practitioners and its emphasis on multiple subfields in anthropology. The contributors discuss digital storytelling in the context of educational programs, teaching anthropology, and ethnographic research involving a variety of populations and subjects that will appeal to researchers and practitioners engaged with qualitative methods and pedagogies that rely on media technology.