Tag: analytics

Looking Ahead to 2014: Living Analytically

I am proud to say that The CASTAC Blog has become a truly impressive archive of scholarly and practical information for research, applied practice, and teaching. Last year the Blog saw a rich set of posts on research, pedagogy, and practice that may yield inspiration for student papers, future trends in scholarly articles, and cross-pollination of ideas for new research projects. Indeed, I encourage my anthropology of technology students to peruse the site for inspiration about current topics of interest in the STS community. Of course, it is impossible to cover the contents of an entire year of material in a single report, but I would like to continue the yearly tradition of calling out a few themes that emerged across several posts. These themes include: nuanced ideas about performance; debates about intensive engagement with personal analytics; discussions about taken-for-granted, everyday infrastructures; and re-imaginings of the future of past waste. Interestingly, these themes are not isolated but have their own intersecting echoes and intellectual provocations. (read more...)

Ethnographic Analytics for Anthropological Studies: Adding Value to Ethnography Through IT-based Methods

Ethnographic analytics? What’s that? In short, ethnographic analytics takes advantage of today’s technology to benefit anthropological studies, and is a great example of how science and technology can come together to help us understand and explain much about society and our human condition overall. I suggest that, using the computing power of software tools and techniques, it is possible to construct a set of useful indicators or analytics to complement the five human senses for ethnographic investigation. Where did the idea of ethnographic analytics originate? How have ethnographic analytics been used and with what results? How can you incorporate them in your work? These are all questions I will address in the following short example of a recent study application in which ethnography and IT-based analytics complemented one another to produce insights about organizational innovation. In this blog, I will focus on one indicator that I have found very useful: (read more...)