1. ACLS proposal. We talked about the draft for the proposal to ACLS, particularly the plan for workshops and presentations. It sounded like everyone was on board, and that we would divide up the conferences by interest, project relevance, and funding. I will look for additional sources since the money allowed for ACLS will not cover travel to all the planned conferences.
As planned, the initial conferences will be important places for networking/finding ideas & support for you as you work through composing your projects. DMAC & Computers and Writing are both well known as places to make connections and find good people to work with. Also, I was in touch with Cindy Selfe, and she indicated that we could be on the (optional part of) DMAC's program to give a workshop on doing digital ethnography. So that is great news. We will get started on proposals to Computers and Writing *(deadline Oct 31) & the rest as soon as this ACLS proposal is completed.
2. Updates from Sergio. Sergio pointed out that we need to be collecting all our data using Open Source software. You indicated that a workshop with Sergio would be useful - and I have been in touch - and will get back to you on whether we can do a workshop this coming Friday, at the Academic Technology lab (in the Library).
Sergio is setting up a YouTube channel for us to post/share data, and a Facebook page, where we can link to/comment on the screencasts/videos/transcripts etc we are planning to use for data. This will be the place where to congregate the data for me to choose from for the methods chapter that will be one of our sample chapters for the book collection.
Sergio also suggested that we include analytics in our design so we can assess/track how our text is used. I have an email out to CCDP to make sure this will work within their series. I think this is a great idea, and am hoping it is something they will support. I will let you know as soon as we hear back.
3. Readings to provide theoretical background on writing ethnographies. We are still working on reading Grenfell et al, and we decided that reading some ethnographies (particularly ethnographies that study digital communities) if we are going to "extend the conversation" within ethnographic writing. Below is a list of some of the texts I would identify as most relevant to our projects (in addition to the Ito et al, which we have read and discussed, and the essays from the Handbook of New Literacies, and the random essays I sent that addressed your individual projects). I have copies of all of these books and will be willing to loan them.
Boellstorff, Tom. (2008). Coming of Age in Second Life: An
Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hakken, David. (1999). Cyborgs@Cyberspace: An Ethnographer Looks to
the Future. New York: Routledge.
Hine, Christine. (2000). Virtual Ethnography. Thousand Oaks:
Sage.
Kendall, Lori. (2002). >Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub:
Masculinities and Relationships Online.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schapp, Frank. (2002). The Words that Took Us There: Ethnography in
a Virtual Reality. Amsterdam: Askant.
Taylor, T.L. (2006). Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Let me know what you are interested in and I will have it available at my office.
4. Discussion of projects. For the last quarter of the meeting we spent some time talking through where you were in terms of data collection and etc (with some groaning about moving to all open source aps) and I am not going to sum up everything we talked through - except to say that it sounds like everyone is putting in some time here, and this is definitely moving along. Sergio set up the YouTube Channel and the SocialMedia site for easier commenting (I am going to concede that the blogs have not exactly been excellent at fostering informal sharing) and hopefully that will make working on our data a little more seamless.
So - great meeting - and I will be in touch about Sept. 13.
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