Please note: students without prior background in anthropology may be advised to sit in on the first- and second-year Social Anthropology seminar.
Term 1 (Autumn)
In term 1 students enrolled in the Digital Anthropology MSc will take ANTHGC01 (Critical Issues), a graduate seminar in anthropological fundamentals shared with those in the Material & Visual Culture programme (typically convened 1.00-4.00 on Mondays). The 2010/11 seminar topics included:
- Introduction
- Bourdieu (1984) Distinction
- Strassler (2010) Refracted Visions
- Boellstorf (2010) Coming of Age in Second Life
- Practitioners Profile: Gell/Ingold
- Practitioners Profile: Appadurai/Taussig
- Reading Week
- Practitioners Profile: Ito/Suchman
- Marxism, Benjamin & Foucault
- Structuralism and Poststructuralism
- Phenomenology
In addition students will take the Digital Anthropology practicals session (one of two separate two-hour sessions, often held in the Digital & Visual Culture Lab, see below). These sessions will include roughly the following:
- No session - registration week
- Introduction to the Lab
- Hypermediated Fieldnotes
- Visual Data and Analysis in Digital Anthropology
- Video Data Collection Exercise (outside the Lab)
- Video Editing and Analysis
- Reading Week
- Domestic ICT Research/Interview Transcription & Analysis (S. Broadbent)
- Digital Ethnography
- Virtual Ethnography
- Virtual Ethnography Data Collection Exercise
Finally, during the first term there will also be weekly Material, Visual, and Digital Culture public seminars with invited speakers on Mondays at 4.30-6.00 (usually followed thereafter with drinks/socializing in the department and possibly dinner in town).
Term 2 (Spring)
Students in the Digital Anthropology MSc switch to a separate core seminar, ANTHGM01, specifically focused on digital culture (convened 10.00-1.00 on Mondays in 2010/11). No practicals are held in Term 2, but the public seminars do continue through the Spring.
Sessions in the term 2 Digital Anthropology core seminar for 2010/11 included:
- Anthropology, Technology, and Design
- The Digitisation of Spaces and Artefacts
- Social Robotics
- Mediated Intimacy
- New Communication Media - Internet and Mobile Phones
- Reading Week
- Social Networking
- Polymedia and Relationships
- Digital Culture and Property
- Indigenous Media and Community Informatics
Term 3 (Summer)
Formal classes are not convened during term 3, but the research seminars typically continue and shortly after the first week of the term, the exam is administered. Following the exam, students typically complete their research and writing proposals and any preparations for fieldwork.
Anthropology in the Professional World (Practitioner's Talks)
Adapted from the "White Heat Meet" concept of our inaugural year's students, in the spring of 2011 a speaker series was initiated—Anthropology in the Professional World—principally for students in the Digital Anthropology and Material & Visual Culture masters programmes. The spring 2011 schedule of speakers includes:
Systems for augmented retailing (Lynne Murray, Brand Director from Holition)
A study of urban mobility (Akseli Anttila, Nokia)
Developing mobile social products - realities of insight application within a user centered development environment at Vodafone (Ben Fehnert: Eclipse Experience)
The P3i cross disciplinary Design:STEM studio and the 'Active' materials for Living platform (SENSE-BIOSYS-AMBIENT-KNIT) which constitute how we intend to explore and probe future ways of living enabled and enhanced by new classes of materials and associated technologies (Professor Raymond Oliver, Northumbria University School of Design at Islington)
Ethnography, Innovation and Product Development for an Ageing World ( Simon Roberts, Ideas Bazaar, formerly Research and Design lead for Intel's DigitalHealth Group in Europe)
User experience: from device and user interface challenges, to contexts, ecosystems and sustainability (Mark Vanderbeeken Experientia, author of the well known blog on User Experience: Putting People First)
Experience Research in practice (Dr. David Dinka, Head Of Experience Research Svenska Spel, previously at Skype)
Examples of Readings
Baym, N Personal Connections in the Digital Age. (Polity 2010)
Bijsterveld, K. and J. van Dijck Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (Amsterdam U. Press, 2009)
Boellstorff. T. Coming of Age in Second life (Princeton 2008)
Bolter, J. D., and R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT 1999)
Buchli, V. A Material Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg 2002
Bull, M. Sound Moves: Ipod culture and urban experience
Cameron, F. & Kenderdine, S., Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse (MIT 2007)
Clarke, A. Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century (Springer-Verlag, 2011).
Coyne, R. Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real (MIT 1999)
Curry, M, Digital Places: living with geographical information technologies
DeNicola, L. “The Bundling of Geospatial Information with Everyday Experience” in Monahan, T. (ed.) Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life (Routledge 2006)
Gershon, I. The Breakup 2.0 (Cornell 2010)
Hine, C. Virtual Ethnography (Sage 2000)
Horst, H. and Miller, D. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Berg 2006)
Ito. M et. al. Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. (MIT Press: forthcoming
Kalay, Y.E. et al, New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2008)
Kelty, C. Two Bits: the cultural significance of free software. (Duke 2008)
Macdonald, S. & Basu, P., Exhibition Experiments (Blackwell 2007)
Miller, D. and Slater, D. The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (Berg 2001)
Miller, D. Tales From Facebook. Cambridge: (Polity 2011)
Nardi, B. My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft (Michigan 2010)
Parry, R., Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change (Routledge, 2007)
Tilley, C., Keane,W. Kuchler,S. Rowlands, M. Spyer, P. Handbook of Material Culture.(Sage 2006)
The Digital & Visual Culture Lab
The Digital & Visual Culture Laboratory is a dedicated space within the Anthropology Department for practical instruction, project development, and experimentation in research methodology and digital media production. The Lab is a resource shared with other courses of instruction (e.g. documentary film making), though students enrolled in the Digital Anthropology programme are given access via a dedicated DA account on each machine.
The Digital Lab is currently built around eight Apple Macintoshes (three Mac Pros and and five iMacs), all in stock configuration and connected via ethernet to the UCL network and the Internet (wireless Internet access is also available throughout most of the Department). All workstations are (as of late 2009) running MacOS X Leopard (10.5.8), and are outfitted with the Final Cut Studio package from Apple, which includes:
- Final Cut Pro 7 (video editing)
- Sountrack Pro 3 (audio editing)
- Motion 4 (3D animation)
- Color 1.5 (color grading)
- Compressor 3.5 (audiovisual encoding)
- DVD Studio Pro 4 (DVD authoring)
Additionally, access is provided to a wide variety of other software via UCL's WTS (Windows Terminal Service), including:
- Atlas.ti and NUD-IST (qualitative analysis of textual and multimedia data)
- ArcGIS (a GIS or geographical information system)
- Dreamweaver 8 (web page/web site development environment)
- Google Sketchup Pro (a computer-aided design or CAD package)
- Nvivo (qualitative analysis of textual and multimedia data)
- SPSS (statistical analysis)
We also employ a set of portable digital video fieldkits developed in-house for the rapid, flexible acquisition of qualitative video data in support of the practicals and student projects. Watch the following video for more detail on these kits.
UCL anthropology staff and students can consult the DVC Lab wiki for further details on the resources of the Lab (you will need your UCL network username and password). Others should contact either Chris Hagisavva or Lane DeNicola.