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Digital Projects

digital-projects

The Centre for Digital Anthropology hosts a number of experimental digital projects:

  • Material World Blog, an experiment in digital publishing, was founded by Haidy Geismar and Daniel Miller in 2006 and is an online hub for global research into material, visual and digital culture. We are one of the top ranked anthropology blogs (on top ranked) and have had more than 500,000 visitors. Our indexed Occasional Paper Series aims to experiment with different digital formats for the presentation of research.
  • The ERC Anthropology of Social Networking project has a group blog exploring the comparative and global dimensions of social networking. They have also developed a MOOC, and have published their results in a ground-breaking book series with UCL Press. They are also working on alternative outputs including infograms, animation, and video. For more, please see their website.
  • As a project partner in the AHRC funded Future of the Book Initiative and with the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, Haidy Geismar and Heather Horst are working on a new digital environment for the ethical circulation of anthropology.
  • Students in the MSc in Digital Anthropology work with a number of different platforms to experiment with ways of presenting their work. Workshops in Gephi, Infograms, and using different forms of software they experiment with the presentation of short ethnographic projects. Click here to access an example of one of the practical projects, a study of a student house by Laura Parraga Gonzalez. Another example, by Luke Evison, can be found, here.
  • Other students experimented with different platforms to curate UCL collections, set up an oral history project for the ethnography collections and explore the organization of knowledge in digital spaces. 
  • In 2014, an experiment was run in partnership with the MA in Graphic Design and Communication at Central St Martins and with Community Associations in the London Borough of Camden. Students worked with community associations to brainstorm the significance of social media in these communities and to think to the limits of generic platforms such as twitter and instagram.
  • MSc student Freddy MacKee had his dissertation published as an article entitled "Social Media in Gay London: Tinder as an Alternative to Hook-Up Apps" in Social Media + Society.

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