Open Source Ethnographic Project
by Gabriele Etta
Hi everyone,
Today we start a new series of blog posting about a new project which just started here in Data For Democracy team about ethnography.
Cultural changes are something we have to deal with every day. The desire of each individual to aim for happiness moves himself to make choices in their life which, as part of communities, often leads to restructure the way they live, think and act. In the recent times, the stringent politics adopted from even more countries and the activism performed in response to that enlighten the necessity to better understand what is behind these changes in order to better inform people who are unfamiliar with so they will not fall in the not so common way of thinking based essentially on being diffident or hate whatever is unknown.
We in Data For Democracy are aware of all of these problems and for this reason we are launching a new project called Open Source Ethnography Project. The goal of this project is to give people who are not familiar
with ethnography in general or who had not a proper training a deeper knowledge about this topic.
How do we accomplish these goals? By working on two different sides contemporaneously, understanding what information people trust or consider fake news and by making ethnographic analysis. About the first point, the goal is to better understand what is behind fake news sharing in order to ask better questions about this phenomenon. This is accomplished by building
a database of questions, responses and observations to be used for future interviews. For what concerns the second instead, a parallel study will be performed in order to build the required knowledge.
By now, we have just started the project. This means anyone who wants to contribute about any technical aspect or not is welcome. If you are interested about this project or in general about making social valuable things with data, please have a look at our website where all currently active projects are listed.
Stay tuned for more news,
Gabriele Etta
