my dream spring quarter

Originally uploaded by cupcup

here are my books on tap for next quarter. i imagine this being the syllabus for my dream class about anthropologies of open source and development. anyone want to start a reading group with me?

the vietnamese government has recently decided to crack down on bloggers. following the release of a government circular laying out the new official stipulations for blogging. much like anywhere else, the rubber hits the road not so much in the articulation of law but more in its implementation. so this alone doesn’t necessarily surprise me. what’s interesting about this is the underlying metaphors that frame the justification of these legislative controls. speech in blogs has been cast as a damaging kind of communication that diseases a cultural body. these so-called offensive blog are described as “black blogs” and are somehow contrary to vietnamese customs and habits. i also read somewhere that south korea intends to move in a similar direction and the kind of language they used to justify these measures entailed some kind of perilous “infodemic.” does anyone know where this term “infodemic” comes from? who originated it? i’m just a bit confused about this disease metaphor and information. i suppose what’s most fasinating for me is that these disease are interna, that they originate from within rather than being brought from some external force. has anyone else seen this metaphor in other places?

dong ngo over at cnet has been blogging about technology in vietnam lately and recently blogged about dating and the new digilanguage of love: emoticons. now, my vietnamese is just so-so i will admit. and while i grew up speaking vietnamese, i was born in the states and am only now just learning how to read and write properly. so this blog post was a nice schooling session into a world that i’m barely tapping into.

he writes in his post:

“Though most Yahoo IM emoticons are designed to mean something that’s widely understood, there are some that are interpreted here entirely differently from what they are originally designed to mean.
For example, the “time out” smiley (formed by :-t characters) is used by some to actually mean “I am going to hammer you on the head”. The “talk to the hand” and “bring it on” smileys (formed by =; and >:/ , respectively) are sometimes used to mean “bye bye.” And the “not worthy” sign ^:)^ is used to mean “po’ tay”, which is a trendy not-in-the-dictionary Vietnamese way to say “You are too much, I give up.”"

for me it was interesting to see how emoticons become appropriated and assigned new meanings. is something in the visual display of the emoticon that gives it new meaning in the vietnamese context? something as seemingly minute as a simple emoticon has a new kind of life as it moves from english to the vietnamese. it makes me wonder what other kinds of reinterpretations of emoticons exist in other languages. or what is an emoticon in chinese? does it work in the same way?

Somehow during finals week, I managed to find some time to work on some fun stuff! Along with Mark Hansen, Sasank Reddy, Jerry Mascia, and Alberto Pepe, we came up with TwitFlick for the Webbys. It pulls real-time feeds from both Flickr and Twitter to create micro-narratives that represent the current digital pulse. Digital Kitchen worked on the visualization. Peep it!

i was looking at all the content in del.icio.us tagged “immigration” and this is what i found:

whoops. let me blow it up and show you the related tags…

what should i make of this?

rick roll’d on the sidewalk…

i don’t know if this counts if you can’t click on it…

from latimes

this is my new pencil case. i lurve it i lurve it i lurve it i lurve it. those of you who know me well enough know about my obsession with organization. this case ratchets this obsession up several notches.

here ’tis wrapped and bundled:

here it is unfurled in all it’s glory:

i’m in love.

for the past year i’ve been working on an ethnography of social classification project. this has been mainly a pilot study of what it is that people actually do when they are adding things into sites like del.icio.us, flickr, etc. there’s been some early research (thx gleemie!) so far that begins to really incorporate ideas of social connection and social relations in digital social classification, rather than simply assuming that it happens like magic. as i’ve been plowing through my data, i’ve starting thinking about the ways in which these systems represent acts of collecting, rather than classifying. after looking around it seems like the tags that people really use are pretty arbitrary. there’s been so much focus and analysis on the tags themselves, that the research so far has been pretty limited at getting at what it is that people are actually doing. collecting seems to be a good way to think about this…at least that’s what i’m thinking so far.

as i’ve been chewing on this idea, i’s got thinking. there’s something about collecting that gives us a sense of who we are. there’s something about amassing things over time and then looking back on them that allows us to understand our historical trajectory. there’s something about collecting that gives us some kind of home in time, that allows us to place ourselves in the stretch of years past. how can i begin to think about acts of collecting in relation to space and time? it seems that people collect and it can either operate as a window into some unknown other , like with curio cabinets. but in collection personal artefacts, there’s something about memorializing ourselves, and imbuing objects with this kind of role of memorialization. think photos. think yearbooks. think that rock you picked up on the coast during the summer trip to rosarito. perhaps memorialization isn’t the right word as it makes it seem too much stuffy and official, but there’s definitely something in the act of collecting that  is about ordering in time and constructing space, some kind of domestic space. some kind of personal space. but also some kind of shared space too.

so a lot of these little things that we toss into our digital filing cabinet, these so-called tagging systems, they’re like digital scraps. digital news clippings. digital ephemera of sorts. i think researchers have made a mistake so far by looking at the terms of organization, the tags.  i think the real story is about how people relate to their digital scraps. i think there is a really kind of under the radar, seemingly quiet-boring tension here that we haven’t really explored yet.

has anyone been able to find a good source for asian news in english that isn’t from an UK-US based organization? i find myself going to the NYT and the BBC primarily and then looking under their asian sections. this is usually part of my morning routine as i sit down and get started on my day, however i’m interested in finding sources from asia directly. any tips?

database aesthetics, victoria vesna (ed.)

he-said-she-said: talk as social organization among black children, marjorie goodwin

linguistic anthropology, alessandro duranti [this one is killer good!]

understanding practice: perspectives on activity and context, seth chaiklin and jean lave (eds.)