Advancing the Value of Ethnography

Tag: quantified self

Livable Relations with Metrics

Livable Relations with Metrics

It is easy to become pessimistic, if not dystopic, about tracking technologies. The current digital services landscape promotes scoring, selecting and sorting of people for the purposes of maximizing profit. Machine logics rely on profiling characteristics and predicting actions, and management by...

Data, Data, Everywhere, but Who Gets to Interpret It?

Data, Data, Everywhere, but Who Gets to Interpret It?

There has been a good deal of discussion of the relationship between the EPIC community and new practices of big data. Will the data scientists have the final word on what people value? Are we ethnographers effectively getting disrupted by cheaper and worse data? In a wider sense, what kind of a...

Quantified, behind the Scenes

Quantified, behind the Scenes

*Join Dawn Nafus on September 1 when she hosts Ethnography & Quantified Self at EPIC2016. A few years ago, a colleague had asked me about the adoptability of biosensors—a rapidly evolving category of sensors that detect an ever-expanding array of stuff about the body or the environment. Water...