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
Who will author the future of King’s Cross? You are invited to join us for an in-person and on-location collaborative update to Wikipedia’s entry for King’s Cross Central on 21st June at The Crossing, Central Saint Martins, 1 Granary Square, London N1C 4AA.We will consider the contents of the existing article and identifyContinue Reading
Haidy Geismar, UCL In this new series of summer posts, we, the editors look back at the past 8 or so years that Material world Blog has been going and curate a series of “best of” themed post. Here, I link to what I consider to be some of theContinue 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
And here, courtesy of the NY Times, is a summary of 2013’s notable events, seen through illustrations Continue Reading
… and the continuing legacy of Native appropriations in American fashion. By Emily McGoldrick (Independent Scholar, New York City) When Nike unveiled their Pro Tattoo line of women’s workout gear this summer, a wave of protest followed. The small collection included a sports bra, exercise tights, and a bodysuit decoratedContinue 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