Jo Cunningham, UCL Digital Anthropology Recently, a cohort of students from the Masters in Digital Anthropology course visited the ‘Big Bang Data’ exhibition at Somerset House.  Exploring the rise of Big Data, the exhibition featured a mix of pieces commissioned from media artists alongside exhibits explaining the history and scopeContinue Reading

Since the Material World Blog began, the digital media landscape changed dramatically. In social media terms, we have moved from Friendster, MySpace and Orkut to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp, with a range of other digital, mobile and social media becoming embedded within many people’s everyday lives around the world. TheseContinue Reading

In this post, I link to the very best posts in our archive focused on making, doing and craft. In Fixing, Things, Fixing Ourselves, Lydia Nicholas writes about Suguru, an open source material for extending the life of mass produced (or any other) artifacts. In Plan B for a NuclearContinue Reading

Valentini Sampethai, Goldsmiths University One day in the summer I turned eighteen, I was sitting on the deck of a boat with my friend Danae listening to the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks”. At some point, she turned and said to me, “Isn’t it sad, we’re not teenagers anymore?”. We both agreed thatContinue Reading

 Matt Voigts, UCL Digital Anthropology Alum The village youth elect their royalty, dance for the elders, and engage the nearby villages’ champions in combat. Gridiron combat, that is – high school football, American style, and the biggest game of the year is Homecoming (unless the team makes the state tournament).Continue Reading

Digital Ethnography Research Centre, School of Media and Communication and the Centre for Urban Research (Beyond Behaviour Change research program), School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University The Inhabiting Buildings project adopts an innovative participatory research methodology to map and promote change in the RMIT community to improveContinue Reading

Graham H. Roberts, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, groberts@u-paris10.fr   The aim of this contribution is to contribute to the growing literature on material culture and nostalgia in Russia and Eastern Europe.  In particular, I should like to take up the central themes of two articles published recently on MaterialContinue Reading