links for 31 May 2006
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“Well, what is ethnography anyway? It sounds like such a cool word. When pitching the method to my clients, I describe ethnography as a fancy term for shadowing….”
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“The companies that serve us need to be mindful, to meet us where we are.”
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still looking for a tool to replace visio… here’s a web-based app that looks kind of cool… via http://digital-web.com/news/2006/05/online_diagramming_with_gliffy/
I have a slight issue with Todd Warfel’s post about ethnography. He writes as if ethnography and anthropology were the same thing, and they’re not. If you break the word ethnography down into its constituent parts … ethno (culture) graphy (writing) — writing about culture is a subtly different task to studying culture. And the methods of studying culture have moved on. Warfel’s definition: “I describe ethnography as a fancy term for shadowing” has exactly the negative connotations of the power relation of traditional anthropology (subject:observer/ object:observed) — that postmodern ethnography seeks to address.