[Stc_cny] Fwd: Nov. 8 presentation on research

[Russ Kahn]

All STC members and friends are invited to come out to a presentation  
on campus at SUNY Institute of Technology Wed., Nov. 8, at 4 p.m. in  
Donovan G175.  If you are interested in doing qualitative research  
analyzing online activities this should be a valuable opportunity to  
learn about some state-of-the-art techniques.

Free - No need to RSVP

Presentation: Virtual Ethnographers Toolkit

Information Design and Technology (IDT) and Anthropology Professor  
Kathryn Stam and IDT student Heather Perretta will present the  
"Virtual Ethnographers Toolkit," based on a talk they gave this  
summer at the Virtual Ethnography Workshop at the International  
Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The authors have compiled a set of software tools that can be used  
for archiving, sharing and analyzing data, and presenting results.  
The Virtual Ethnographer's Toolkit consists of open source programs  
that facilitate researchers to collect, annotate, and manage  
information from the field.  Each program in the toolkit is an open  
source application that the researcher can obtain for low or no costs  
and requires minimal technical or programming knowledge to use while  
offering the flexibility of being modified if needed.

With these tools, the virtual ethnographer is able to create a  
personal archive of web pages making web objects that are observed  
durable for future analysis.  Creating an archive of materials allows  
the researcher to organize the data in several ways.  Each page as it  
is archived is saved with a date and time stamp.  Each archived page  
can be organized in various file systems based on the needs of the  
researcher and this file system acts as the first level of metadata  
associated with each page.  Archived pages can then be analyzed,  
tagged, and annotated.  While web archiving can be expensive and more  
technically difficult, open source solutions such as Scrapbook, a  
Firefox extension, offer a free, easy to use, alternative for  
creating personal archives that can be stored and shared.