After I sent my email I then pondered on those two statements. It is very true that our discipline is misunderstood. I have often had to differentiate what I do from what an archeologist does. I have also had to explain that while yes our discipline previously studied far off groups of people in newly discovered areas of the world, that is not what the majority of us do today. That said, I do have to mention that when I specify that I am a “cyber anthropologist” (aka digital anthropologist, technical anthropologist etc) people do tend to perk up and lean in to learn more about what I do.

So here I thought would be the perfect place to really describe what it is I do as an anthropologist, why it’s important, and why I – though I am also a User Experience Designer and am working toward my PhD in Information Science – identify myself as an anthropologist above all else.

What do I, as an anthropologist, do?
So – I’ll preface this with this is what I do as an anthropologist and does not necessarily reflect what everyone else in the discipline does.

The simple answer is I study culture online and online culture.

Well, what does that mean?

Studying Culture Online: I study the way different people from different parts of the world use the Internet and how just having access to it can influence cultures and communities. Examples of this include China’s firewall, South Korea’s Starcraft fans, and how civil unrest across the world unfolds in social media.

Studying Online Culture: To keep it short, I study the way people interact online including their behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. Additionally, I analyze their artifacts for trends, memes, and emerging understanding of how the Internet affects people’s lives and how people’s lives affect the Internet. Lastly, I have specified my focus on gamers and developers. However, while those are currently my preferred groups to study, I do branch out into politics, brands, and education.

Why is what I do important?
By understanding those around us we can learn from them and apply the lessons they’ve already overcome to other groups and situations that can benefit from them.

For example:
By understanding how gamers organically develop communities of practice and use open source tools to assist in communicating over geographically dispersed areas in order to successfully support their self-created and self-organized groups both in and out of in-game encounters, we can help businesses learn how to improve their communication techniques for their geographically dispersed teams in our ever increasingly global society. (You can read more about this here.)

Another example from my own work includes:
Understanding the motivation for participation in open source development communities and using that understanding to help motivate others to participate in more volunteer opportunities within their own communities.

While I could go on and on, I think these two examples help illustrate my particular research focus and how it can actually be applied to several different contexts that go far above and beyond the original groups and situations studied to help our economies and communities be more successful.

Why I identify as an anthropologist above all else?
I like to help people.

Yep, it’s as simple as that. In fact, it is that one idea that affects my entire approach to life including my other career and educational choices. This is why I identify as an anthropologist above all of the other identities I have. It completely influences absolutely everything else I do.

As a user experience designer I strive to help the people using the applications I design, the developers developing these applications, and the companies for which these applications are implemented. Yes, what I do goes that far and affects all of those groups. Being an anthropologist helps provided me with this holistic perspective as well as an ability to understand all of these groups in order to find ways to help them in the best way possible. I could not do my job if I didn’t think it was helping others and I have in fact left other jobs because I did not feel that the work I was doing had a positive enough effect on those it touched.

As a PhD student in information science I strive to find ways to make information easier to access, understand, and share. In the end, it’s not about the information itself, but those who use it and how it and the ways it can be used can better the lives of those users. My specific focus within my course of study is human computer interaction. It is the human part of that, that makes all of the difference.

Final Thoughts
So there you go! This is really just a very small glimpse into what I do and why I do it. I am posting it here in hopes of making my discipline a little easier to understand. My intent was to also how the work I do, though it may seem somewhat inconsequential as it focuses on things like gaming, actually can be applied to groups and situations that can have a far reaching impact on our communities and economies.

I love what I do and I am thankful every day that I have an opportunity to do it.

It explains a bit about what my take on Cyber Anthro is, how I do it, why I do it, and how I got here.

Hope to see a few of you at SXSW this year!

I mean, that’s how the last month of the semester should start out right? Biting knees and all that jazz…

*Shout! Shout! Let it all out!* <— Typed this out while listening to Disturbed over Pandora just now. Live blogging baby!

So, back to the task at hand. Why yes, it is the last month of the last semester of my Masters. Though this is in fact the truth, I will not actually be graduating until this summer. Why? Well, my professor and I both agree that my practicum work is just so cool that it deserves a more in depth analysis in order to do it and all of my participants in it justice. This is why I’ve been talking with a few of you in the Fedora community back and forth for the last month or so and why I’m in IRC almost every day!

This is also why I need those interviews back! If you’d rather complete the interviews over IRC than email please ping me! I’ve already done a few others that way, so I don’t mind doing it that way if you’re more comfortable with it.

Additionally, this is why I have not been blogging as much lately. I’ve been consumed with Atlas.ti – then of course my Windows partition (it only runs on Windows) on my Mac (only machine I have that will run a large enough installation of Windows to install Atlas.ti) crashing and eating my installation / HU with it, which required me to redo EVERYTHING all over again.

Now I’m just waiting on the last 2 interviews to come back. This way I can code them and add them to my extended analysis, which is going to be used to verify whether or not I’ve covered everything in the survey questions I’ve come up with. If so, well then I should be releasing a survey to everyone soon! If not, well then I’ll be filling in the gaps and then submitting another change request to the IRB so I can have permission to send the survey out.

It’s also why my brain is kinda mushy at the moment. Other things contributing to the mush are my grant writing class, my job where I am the ONLY user interface / user experience designer, and getting setup to start my PhD in the fall (which is a LOT of work!).

So really, this is just a plea to those I’ve already badgered a few times to get back to me with your completed interviews as soon as you can!

What’s fun about this stage is finding all of the themes that are appearing in the data from the interviews. Fedora, you’re an interesting lot of people!

Yes, I really do love what I do!

Since I was already on the 4th floor, and it’s quite a trek to get there, I headed over to the Blogger’s Lounge where I met @sarahmworthy. Who when I asked if the free chairs at the table were taken, asked if I was cool enough to join them! Mentioning I was a cyber anthropologist was my ticket in.

Being that I’ll likely get a bit of new traffic to the old blog here due to networking at SXSW, I figured I’d post a link to the podcast I did for last year’s SXSW – an introduction to cyber anthropology.

New visitors will also find that I currently have a lot of posts directed to the Fedora community. You can learn more about my Master’s practicum with Fedora / Red Hat via my short FAQ. Elevator speech: An explorative study on how to maintain, sustain, and grow the Fedora Project open source development community.

Other research new visitors might find interesting includes ethnography of a guild in World of Warcraft (circa 2006), as well as product research for Motorola (ask me for these papers and I’ll be happy to send them to you), and a subject matter expert for Microsoft on how people use the Internet.

I should finish my masters in applied anthropology at UNT this summer and will be starting my PhD in the fall at UNT in Philosophy of Information Science [Human Computer Interaction], for which I’ve been awarded a fellowship for my studies based on my academic performance that covers my full tuition for the next 4 years!

My day job is that of a User Experience Designer for The Planet. Just as a forewarning, nothing I say here has anything to do with the company I work for and they should not be held responsible for the content of this blog as it is solely mine.

On that note – off to the trade show, you can find us in booths 303 and 305!

The long and short of surveys is the quantitative statistical analysis that can be performed on them. The purpose of my survey is to help triangulate the data obtained during the qualitative (interview/participant observation) portion of my research against a broader sample that is more representative of the overall community. However, in order to do this properly I need to know how big the current overall community is.

This is where I need your help. I need you, Fedora Project contributors, to help me find ways to get at least an approximate count of currently active and contributing participants that can be verified by some means.  This could be getting the number for how many people own packages in Rawhide or even how many people have edited the wiki in the past 6 months. Being that not everyone owns packages or edits the Wiki, we need ways to count the other contributors as well. Also, there is likely some overlap between several countable contributing groups so we need to keep issues like that under consideration. I understand that it will be difficult to come up with an exact number, so a close approximation will suffice as long as we have ways to support how we got the numbers and they are verifiable.

Not only will we need to ways to get the numbers, but also the people who are able to access that data and get it to me. So, if you come up with an idea but have no knowledge of how to actually get the data in question, feel free to brainstorm on this post with other people! I imagine that by working together we can quickly and easily come up with ways to figure this out. I’ll be hanging out in IRC as always, so feel free to ping me there or email me if you have ideas, questions, or numbers you wish to donate to the cause.

Once we have a number, then I can come up with a quota and will be able to release the survey!

I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much for helping me out with this process.

*If you still want to participate in the interview process and have the ability to return your signature to me electronically (print/scan, fax, xournal, signing with a mouse) then please contact me diana [@] cyber-anthro.com.

Then you get into the project and start your research, and only then do you start to realize and understand what you’ve got yourself into and just how many things you didn’t anticipate. So far with this project, being a cyber anthropological based research study (all of the research is being conducted online), my problems have all centered around technology.

My first limitation was understanding the process to get my blog on the Fedora Planet blogroll. With help and some ‘hacking the system’ I got on and while at FUDcon I figured out why it didn’t work in the first place (I wasn’t a part of enough groups!).

Now I am realizing my second limitation, that of requiring a signed piece of paper from all interview participants before each interview can commence. Pen and paper is perhaps one of the oldest forms of communication and technology known to man and yet it is the one thing standing between me an several potential interviews.

This was not a hindrance I anticipated when designing my research study, and it is perhaps not something with which people who are not researching under a university have to deal. However, it is something I now realize is important and am bringing attention to in case there are others embarking on similar research studies with similar IRB limitations that require them to have signed consent forms so they can account for this process in their research design.

Were I to design a similar project in the future under the same IRB limitations, I would ask my IRB to approve an electronic encrypted signature on my consent forms.

Here’s to hoping someone out there can learn from my mistakes!

That all being said, if you have a means for returning a signed document to me electronically and you would like to be interviewed for the Fedora research project, but have yet to contact me please do so soon! All interviews will be wrapped up (as best they can) by Friday!

I need at least 10 more willing participants by the end of next week. The most convenient way of participating for all involved so far has been through email. So if you have a little time and wouldn’t mind answering a few questions about your participation in Fedora via email, please let me know!

If you need alternative means of signing the informed consent documents, please note that you can sign it via a tablet as well as via fax (just email me for the fax number), rather than being restricted to having scan your forms in and send them to me.

I’ll be constructing a survey based on the interview results by the middle of February. So, I would like to get started on the construction of it as soon as possible. If you know of any, and especially if you have used any please let me know.

I look forward to your suggestions!

This is the same for possessions, and ideas. All your friends may possess an item or hold to an idea, but the item or idea is only validated when it is also possessed or held to by someone external from your circle.

In contrast are the non-conformist who only hold to feelings, possessions, and ideas when others do not. What they fail to realize though is that external non-validation caries as much weight for them as external validation does for everyone else. Unfortunately, as is usually the case, many non-conformist ideals are eventually conformed to through such external validation. This is not necessarily because these people want to conform to these non-conformist ideals, but that they have to due to the simple fact that these ideals exist. This is turn causes the non-conformist to seek out new ideals even though they are in fact dooming their non-conformity to conformity by this very act.

The ad works for the possessors more than for those that do not yet possess the product as it is an external validation of their purchase. It does the same for those who purposely do NOT possess the product (not those who do not possess it ‘yet’ but those who never want to possess it) as it externally validates their reasons to not possess it. Think of the ‘Mac’ ads for example.

The trick to all of this is that it is entirely turned upside down in the online world. If you can think of it, there is a site for it (rule 34) – thus everything is externally validated in one way or another however it is all done so anonymously now requiring us consider whether that is a true external validation or just an internal one as we sought it out ourselves by the act of being online where it exists for everyone instead of it being voluntarily given to us in the real world where it may or may not exist for us.

Everyone is simultaneous beautiful and ugly as the continuity of the world is displayed before us electronically. And, even though we are alone behind our computer we seek out companionship online in one form or another. The to/with continuum determines whether or not you’ve found an audience or a cohort and in some cases the same people travel up and down this line without a second thought of whether they are being pandered to or communicated with.

Often times we find we are our own audience as we reveal things about ourselves that even we did not know thus becoming our own external validators, something that could not be done in context of the real world. Adding to this is the public external validation of an internal validator online that, because it is public, makes it external where it were private it would be internal. So then we take the word of someone close to us as truer were it spoken in an online environment where other external validators can validate it than we would the same utterance in an internal and personal context even tough it is the same person saying it.

What the online world has done is cause us all require an audience now, if only to validate ourselves in ways we cannot be validated offline. This is why we share things online we would never share in public or even in some cases in private.

I may pick this up again later…

In the meantime – read what oversharing means for a blogger who was paid to blog.

ETA:

“To the young today, however, the dream experience is its own reality, a separate reality: it doesn’t need to be validated by translation into the historical world of sensory experience. It validates itself.

Similarly, they regard media as self-contained environments, having little correspondence with other realities or environments. TV is its own reality, radio its reality, film still another reality.

[...]

The young in particular regard media environments as designs, patterns – what William Blake called “sculptures” – states that have no separate physical existence. We pass temporarily into one or another & when in any one, it seems overpoweringly real & all other states shadowy. We imagine, of course, that any state we are in is physically real. This makes it splendidly attractive. It doesn’t occur to us that only our spirits can enter these realms, and that events experienced there can never be tested against observed reality.

I think this is one reason the young find nothing incongruous about conflicting reports in the press, radio, TV, etc. ” – Edmund Carpenter 1972

So nice when you read something that falls inline with your current thought (hah! external validation!).

Interesting though how the Internet provides a place where this self-contained environment can be observed by an outsider as it is a participatory form of media rather than a passive one such as radio, tv, or film.