Occasionally on Cultural Bytes I will review tools that help my ethnographer-self stay sane, organized and useful to society. I am confident to say that every researcher I know IS CURRENTLY dealing with what I am addressing below - citation and  PDF  nightmares. Today is the first day you can take a step towards freedom, organization, and access.

In Russian, Mendeley means comforter of the mind. What better name for a product that is a comforter for researchers! (here’s the founders’ explanation for the name, which I found out has nothing to do with the Russian meaning)

This software will change your researching-intellectual, academiky life forever! Sick of dealing with all those pdf’s on your computer, entering in citations by hand, looking for citations in your old documents, dealing with endnotes, and not being able to access your citations remotely? Most of us are dealing with this issue.  Olivia Judson recently wrote about her academic organizing woes with managing PDF’s in NY Times,

“…it became easier to re-research a subject each time I wanted to think about it, and to download the papers again. My hard drive has filled up with duplicates; my office, with stalagmites of paper…In short, access to information is easier and faster than ever before but there’s been no obvious way to manage it once you’ve got it.”

Well Julia there’s a solution, MENDELEY SOLVES ALL THESE PROBLEMS!  We all share similar citation nightmares! It’s time to get ride of endnotes, refworks, zotero and whatever other wannabe hawt citation software manager you use - and get yourself Mendeley! And they don’t discriminate - they love MAC and PC users!

This is cloud computing for researchers. How would you feel if you could access your PDF’s and citations anywhere in the world? if you could share citation lists with  colleagues in just one click? If you never had to re-download your PDF’s again? If you could search for books on Amazon.com and click one button to cite the book you are buying? If you could just drop citations into Word or whatever document without having to shell out a couple hundred of dollars for Endnotes? If you could network with other researchers and see their citation lists? If you could just add whatever books you see in Google Book search to your citation list with one click?

Imaginations for researchers come true also - with Mendeley you have can have all these desires fulfilled!

Think of this as an itunes for your pdf’s + Linkedin +  facebook + doppler + updated CV + Papers (for macs)+ all the features of every single citation manager out there + love + intellect + seamlessness.  Welcome to the world of Mendeley - Loveeee!

If you’re like me - traveling in different cities every week and working between 3 different computers (MACs and PCs) - then this is truly your dream come true. Or if you just work between your office and home computer this is a dream! And even if you are just on 1 computer  - this could just be as good as the invention of rss!

I suggest you take out a few hours to play with it and then set aside a week to import all your citations and get your academik life together! It’s worth it! They are still in beta, so there are little quirks here and there - but the Mendeley team is REALLY awesome and you can just write to them about your issues or post it online and they actually respond!

Below, I list my favorite features of Mendeley and some recommendations for how to use Mendeley.

1.) Mendeley works. It really works!!! that is a good enough reason to try it ou. In this picture of my Mendeley Desktop, I walk you through how to start it out! STEP 1.) create a group - you don’t have to do this but I like to organize my citations by topics, 2.) add a document - you can drag a PDF or do it this way below by clicking on the “add document” icon on top. STEP 3.) admire your pretty citations! update the info, make sure it’s correct, STEP 4.) check out their great search features!

2.) use it with  dropbox if you switch between several computers- keep your PDF’s in your dropbox, and rename the file with the author’s last name and year.  Dropbox is a virtual file folder that physically sits on each of your computers. It’s magic - you just have to install it and start moving your files there. You can access them online anytime!
store all your PDF’s in one folder - and never look at them again. Just like how you drop music in your itunes app without having to interact with the actual file itself, same thing here (this only works for people who are on 1 computer)! In this picture below you can see how my dropbox is on the far left, then I look for Victor Gonzalez’s work in my dropbox by his last name and just in case if I have to manually pull the file, (which I have to because I have I use dropbox on 3 different computers so once you switch it loses the directory path), you can then find it very easily in your folder. When I type in Gonzalez’s name in Mendeley, all his citations show up as linked to the files!

3.) Automatic recognition of a PDF’s meta-data when you drag and drop it into Mendeley. In the picture below, I show you how to just drag a PDF into Mendeley and it automatically recognizes the author, journal, pub date and etc. Think of this like itunes- when you drag a song over it copies a verion over to it’s own itunes folder.To activate this, you have to turn on File Organizer (they spell it “organiser” cuz they’re all british about it). The Mendeley Muz man says that “if you enable the File Organiser, this will make Mendeley create a copy of these files in their own folder, which it then links against. This means you’re then free to edit the original file names, or to move them about as need be without breaking the file links. To do this, open up Mendeley Desktop, go to the Preferences panel and select the “File Organiser” tab. From here, you can enable the file organiser, and also choose how it should store the files in this folder by enabling the rename or sorting into subfolders as you see fit.

Then I like to go to the tag-notes tab in Mendeley desktop and paste in the abstract and type in some tags. Make sure to SAVE it because pressing save in the meta-data tabs it doesn’t save the information for the entire file - you have to save in each tab. I hope they fix it next time update (update - they have said that this is fixed in the newest version).

4.) Access your PDF’s online anywhere! After you have dragged in a PDF sync your library and watch everything duplicate itself to your online library. THIS IS BIGG! That means just as long as Mendeley is not blocked where you are trying to access it, then you won’t ever have problems getting to the physical PDF online! And it’s not blocked in China so I am so confident about getting to all my files at any internet cafe!

5.) Seamless Syncing with your Mendeley Desktop and your online library! In this picture below I have side by side my desktop and my online Mendeley Library - you can see here that the citations match, and so do the grouping. completely identical! that means you could leave the country and then use a computer at an internet cafe or at a friend’s house and have access to all your citations and any synced pdf’s. And Last time I checked, Mendeley is NOT blocked in China!! (Drop box is blocked though which really sucks)

6.) import books from Amazon or Google Books! In this picture, I am looking at Go Away Dog in Google books - this is a very important book for academic researchers.  with one click this book shows up in your Mendeley reference list.  STEP 1.) read about the functions here, STEP 2.) install the bookmarklet by dragging it to your toolbar in firefox  STEP 3.) start looking for books in AMazon or Google books! you can import multiple books at one time or just a single book like in the picture below.

7.) Produces beautiful ways of visualizing information. I love that Mendeley shows you stats about the most cited authors and the research fields that have the most Mendeley users.

I liked that in the Social Sciences tag cloud, technology and nude,  were next to each other - kinda much us look like an exciting field huh?

Below you can see that bourdieu is the most cited, with Bruno Latour coming in second, then Manuel Castells, then Michele badass Foucault, and lastly WTF SAMUEL annOYING Huffington who wrote the Clash of Civilizations. We have to get Samuel off the top 5 and put someone - anyone  - up there!

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HOW IT COMPARES TO ZOTERO -ok so now that I’ve raved about Mendeley - I feel that I need to explain why I prefer Mendeley over Zotero since I wrote about how much I loved Zotero a few months ago on my old blog (I switched to tumblr for my personal blog!)

• Mendeley support team is wayy better than zotero. - For Mendeley, within 24 hours a staff (the co-founder!) responded to my questions. I have yet to hear back from Zotero staff about any of my problems that I posted in their help forum. I think that after I complained to some people who know some people at Zotero, eventually, one of the Zotero creators was sweet enough to write a personal email to me about my original zotero love post on my personal blog- he even offered to send me a t-shirt! So that was really nice of them, but I’m sorry Zotero staff - me firefox quits on me every time on zotero and i zpent a whole day trouble-shooting with no succezz!

• Mendeley staff actually write back to you! now I know that programmers, developers, and founders are busy and that they can’t write back to everyone - but after posting two problems on zotero i didn’t get any responses - still haven’t yet. In Mendeley land - I heard something back from the programmers within 8 hours!

• Mendeley’s help forums are better. l had to search through lots of support forums on Zotero to find out if others had similar problems in firefox as I did - and it wasn’t always clear if Zotero staff were aware of these problems. There was no clear mechanism for processing user-identified problems. In Mendeley, it’s clear that their staff are on top of the forum convos. It’s easier to navigate and they have a clear rating system that let’s you see how other users have prioritized proposed features or fixes to Mendeley staff.

• not firefox dependent. - THIS IS BIGGGGGG - You’re not dependent on firefox with mendeley. I love firefox - but my firefox started freaking out after a few hours of Zotero courtship.  Out of desparation to make Zotero work (because I thought it was the best thing out there at the time),  I actually spent  4 hours troubleshooting my firefox after I installed zotero - it messed with my extensions and eventually I had to perform a clean reinstall. Encountering the firefox crash again,  I tested out zotero in flock but flock 2.0 is still wayyyy tooo slow and there was no way that I was even going near netscape - that’s when I resorted to the clean reinstall of firefox. But still Zotero was buggy.  so the problem with having a browser dependent citation manager is that you’re dependent on that browser - and on that computer’s browsers.

• Mendeley has $$ - they just recieved $2million in VC money. Zotero is a non-profit model. While I work for non-profits and do see them as useful at times, I believe in the scalability of Mendeley more than Zotero. Now I am curious to find out Mendeley’s business model. right now I can upload ALL my PDf’s to Mendeley  But good services are worth it when the rates are reasonable and your entire life depends on it. Maybe they will start charging all of us once we all fall in love with Mendeley - or offer some kind of tiered service.  *but please don’t start charging me in the future  since I am one of your beta fans!

• Mendeley has $$ from realllly smart people - did I mention the investors behind the $2million are founders of last.fm and skype? that’s all that needs to be said.

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If you will notice that in my comments, the human side of the service is just as important as the software application itself. Especially when a program is in beta, you have to be super keen to talking to your users. I always think that companies have a lot more at stake when they are starting out and the period after they’ve hit critical mass. Becasse when you’re popular - everyone want to use you and they will be forgiving about mishaps, slow-downs and etc. But once you have your customers and you become lazy in your product/service, eventually something better will replace you. Mendeley  and Jan Reichelt, you have been wonderful during this courtship. So far your actions tell me that we will have a great relationship…so don’t mess it up.

For now, I will take on the responsibility of evangelizing Mendely around the world. Last time I checked on Mendeley user map, there were 3 users in San Diego, 1 in Mexico City and 1 in China. I think I can help increase those numbers. Just watch them go up!  And right now there are only 280 Social Science users - we need to change that also!

I love being a beta-user and I love getting excited about great products like Mendelye! The last time I was this excited is when I discovered rss, flickr, gmail, movable type, Jetblue, crack (just checkin!), Dunkin Donuts, Shakor’s, and Obama. So get yourself on it!

UPDATE - May 30, 2010:

I’m still using Mendeley and loving it! which each new release they are improving their product. There are still a few bugs  that are really annoying and a few features that have yet to be introduced (like checking for double citations or customizable citations boxes), but hey there is nothing else like this!.

I want to share some tips after a year of using it.

Make sure that you back-up your files A LOT! I backup everytime I add tons of citations. Just go to to HELP-> Backup. I backup to a folder on my Dropbox labeled Mendeley backups that way if your computer ever crashes or is stolen, you will always have an online backup!  It takes no more than 30 seconds. I urge you to be fanatical about backing up because you don’t want to end up like me where one day my Mendeley panicked and shut down. I had just finished 2 days of intensive Mendeley citation work - so I lost about a few hundred citations and had to go back and re-add each one. Sadness.

2.) I prefer to import books using the Mendeley bookmarklet from Google books than Amazon books. Citations from Google will have the summary/abstract imported in with the meta-data. This makes book searching a lot easier!

3.) fyi - Mendeley still classifies most pdf’s as journal submissions. This is flustering for me because I download a lot of stuff from CHI and more techy journals where the presentation and publication format is a conference proceeding.

4.) I use the notes section as a way to annotate my citings. 

5.) I love Mendeley’s customer support!  Jan and Mustaquli you guys rock!

UPDATE - JUNE 2, 2010:

Someone asked me to clarify what I meant my setting up a folder just for PDFs on my dropbox. So let me explain how I do this. I pay $99 a year for 50 gigs of Dropbox storage space. If you just want to use it for free, you get 5 gigs free!  and if you refer people you can get up to 5 more gigs! That’s a lot of space for free. I use Dropbox because I live in the moment of crashing and file loss. Dropbox is an online cloud computing file storage system - so that means where ever I go, my files are always accessible online. You install Dropbox as a folder on your computer. You can put the folder anywhere and on the surface it functions just like any other folder on your computer. The most important part is that is done real-time syncing. So the nano-second I drop a file into my dropbox or even make a change, that change is updated to the my online dropbox

So by storing all my PDF’s in my Dropbox, that means I always have a backup online of all my PDFs. This is awesome. So in my computer crashes or is stolen, I don’t risk losing any of my PDFs or any of the material that I have in my Dropbox. I also do a third back-up on my mobile tiny 500gig Lacie drive and I do 4th backup on my stationary back-up located in a remote place that has the least chances of getting stolen. 

So here’s a screenshot of how you set it up to backup to a self-designated folder on Dropbox.

1.) install Dropbox.

2.) create a folder for all your PDFs and name it. I’ved named mine ALL PDFs. From now on this will be the folder where all your PDFs will be stored. However, you will NEVER have to change any of the files names in this folder. Mendeley will automatically do this for you. 

3.) go to your Mendeley Desktop, click on the top left MENDELEY DESKTOP —> PREFERENCES —> FILE ORGANIZER (3rd tab). 

4.) check the box ORGANIZE MY FILES

5.) click on browse and chose your PDF folder. So notice that the directory will show that this ALL PDF folder sits within your Dropbox. 

6.) check the box RENAME DOCUMENT FILES.

7.) chose how you want your files to be named. I chose the order, AUTHOR-YEAR - TITLE. I prefer author first because this is the easiest way for me to find the file by name in my folder if you were to click on it and look for it. For now I have it on Hypon-separate, but I should’ve chosen underscore.

8.) download a journal article or use an existing journal article.  Physically DRAG the file over with your mouse into your mendeley. Mendeley will automatically download the meta-data AND it will be create a copy in your ALL PDF folder AND it will rename the file according to your instructions. 

9.) you can double check for yourself - go look in your ALL PDFs and you will see your file there renamed! 

10.) delete your downloaded file or wherever the file was located. Now all your PDFs will sit in your ALL PDF folder, Mendeley will handle everything!

11.) here is something important to know - Mendeley automatically REANMES all pdfs! so if you make a change to the author or title of a document in Mendeley, that file will automatically be renamed in your ALL PDFs folder. you can test it out and see for yourself! This feature is awesome because I will often put PDFs into MEndeley that it doesn’t properly recognize the meta-data - so I will have to manually copy and paste in the author’s name and correct title. Whatever changes I’ve made in Mendeley are updated in the ALL PDFs! 

UPDATE - JUNE 15, 2010:

OMG I just discovered a new feature! Mendeley allows you to set a “watched folder” where it automatically imports all PDF’s and if you followed my instructions above for how to tell Mendeley to automatically rename your files, after automatically importing your PDFs it will rename your files also!  That means I NEVER have to drag and drop a downloaded PDF into Mendeley again! this saves me sooooo much time!  I don’t know when this feature became available but I can’t believe that I misssssssed it! Let’s explore this awesome new function. 

Let’s try this out with an excellent piece of scholarship: Jonathan Coopersmith’s article, Does Your Mother Know What You Really Do? The Changing Nature and Image of Computer-Based Pornography, History and Technology, Volume 22, Issue 1 March 2006 , pages 1 - 25.

ok so I assume you’ve already read my June 2nd update that explains how to set Mendeley to automatically rename your files in a new folder for all your pdfs.

1.) go to Mendeley Preferences (top left corner), click on “WATCHED FOLDERS” tab, select the folder where you download your academic files (I call mine downloads for chrome), click on “OK”

2.) download Coopersmith’s article.

3.) your file will then show up in the download folder, right now the file downloaded as “741530078.pdf”

4. watch the file AUTOMATICALLY Show up in your Mendeley! OMG NO MORE DRAGGING! before I had to drag every downloaded file into my Mendeley! this saves sooooo much time! THIS IS AWESOME!

5.) then see the file magically appear in your designated ALL PDFs folder! 

Some things to be aware of:

1.) delete downloaded file: you still have to delete the downloaded file from your downloads folder. This is because Mendeley automatically creates a copy of the pdf when it renames it and puts it in the ALL PDF’s folder (or whatever you call yours).

Hey Mendeley team- can you guys create the option to DELETE a file after it is automatically renamed and copies to a new folder?

2.) all pdfs will be imported! Warning - if you set MEndeley to watch your DOWNLOADS folder for automatic PDF import, it will import every single PDF that you download! This can become annoying cuz it doesn’t discrminate beween academic articles vs some PDF that you download from your email or from Google Docs. I realized this after I tried to print from my Google Docs cuz it creates a PDF to print and downloads it to your computer - these PDFs then started showing up in my Mendeley.  I suggest that you only use one browser for downloading academic folders and designate a folder JUST for that browser and then set that to be the special downloads folder that Mendeley watches. So for example,  I use 3 browsers, firefox, chrome and safari. I have created 3 separate downloads folder for EACH browser. Mendeley only watches my CHROME downloads folder. 

Another option is for you to use a firefox downloads manager plugin where you can create separate folders. But my firefox crashes a lot when I add too many plugins and it was laborious to manage the folders - so that’s why I just use 3 separate browsers. 

UPDATE September 29, 2010

I’ve written about new academic work flow that now incorporates Calibrae (book organzer) and ipad. My New Academic Workflow With My Ipad, iAnnotate, Mendeley & Dropbox 

In preparation for my summer research project, “China’s Internet Policy and Digital Network Architecture: Information Communication Technology (ICT) Practices among Youths and Migrant” at China Internet Network Information Center 中国互联网络信息中心 (CNNIC), I went to DC for an NSF-sponsored meeting for the EAPSI program through the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE).

I was finally able to meet up with two Bill’s who made this oppotunity possible, Bill Blanpied on the left and Bill Chang on the right. I am grateful for their introductions to Dr. Mao Wei, who I will be working with this summer at CNNIC along with his amazing office of reseachers, including Wan En Hai! This is so exciting to work with Dr .Mao Wei - the person who started CNNIC and established many of the early efforts in China that has allowed it to grow so quickly and efficiently.

I met Bill Blanpied in India during the summer of 2008 for the China-India-US Workshop on Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in Bangalore, India. After the informative conference I was heading off to China for fieldwork from India, so Bill suggested that I meet up with Bill Chang, the Director of NSF’s Beijing office at that time.

I am so grateful for the guidance from Bill-Squared - thank you for all your encouragement on my project!

7th Chinese Internet Research Conference: The Chinese Internet and Civil Society: Civic Engagement, Deliberation and Culture May 27-29, 2009

This was a conference that I am very upset that I couldn’t attend! It was help at U. of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication’s Center for Global Communication Studies. I found out last minute while attending the 2009 International Communication Association Conference (May 22-26) in Chicago.

Hopefully I can go to the 8th CIRC wherever it will be held. Webcasts of the 2009 conference are available here.

CIRC 2009 “is designed to bring together scholars and professionals to examine the Chinese Internet from socioeconomic, political and cultural perspectives. While there has been significant research on the political implications of the Internet in China, we have yet to fully understand the changes the Internet is fostering in civil society, or on the intersection between the market and the state, as well as the Internet’s cultural implications for identity formation, emergent cultural phenomena and social networking. This conference seeks to explore these uncharted areas through sessions on Public Sphere and Deliberation; Censorship, Surveillance, and the State of the Chinese Internet; Civil Society in China - Challenges and Opportunities; Women and Minorities; Civic Engagement and Participation; Panics, Nationalism; and Grassroots Culture, among others. On May 29, a small post-conference workshop will concentrate on prominent academics, bloggers and policy analysts on Chinese Perspectives on Internet governance. “

Nokia Talk - Values in technology design and use: ethnography’s contribution View more presentations from triciawang.

I gave a presentation at Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto back in June, 2010.  I’ve already written a post that explains my sides on China, but I still need to create one for Mexico. So stay posted! In the meantime, the abstract is below and here’s the slideshow.

Values in technology design and use: ethnography’s contribution
As a sociologist, I’ve been trained to ask macro questions about underlying social conditions. While illuminating for society at large, sociological findings do not always readily appear to be relevant for the technology industry and/or people outside of academia. As an ethnographer, I’ve been trained to ask more grounded questions about the everyday lives of people and how they experience underlying social conditions. Ethnographical insights can offer more tangible, immediate, and actionable analysis. As such, companies have started incorporating ethnographic research into their strategy, product design, and marketing.

My talk today is about how I came into my research at Nokia wanting to answer the question: how can ethnographers contribute to the product design process of a mobile device? Ethnographically grounded research for technology use is a method that aims to reveal users’ values, beliefs, and ideas. Nokia was one of the first mobile companies to concertedly hire ethnographers as part of its design process,
In the mid to late nineties, Nokia changed the mobile industry forever by creating affordable, user friendly phones. More than a decade later, the hardware mobile phone market is nearing saturation. With Nokia transitioning from a company that produces hardware to software, how can ethnographically driven research  provide strategic insights for this shift?

I start off the presentation by reviewing the following  projects I worked on while at Nokia.
1.) Farmville:  (w. Liz Bales, Jofish Kaye): We did some preliminary surveying to gain insight into the most popular facebook game. I discuss my interest in how games like Farmville support less-meangingful social ties.  I wrote a blog post about this: Playing FarmVille?: Casual Games maintaining Less-Meaningful Ties on Facebook

2) Inventive Leisure Practices (Jofish Kaye): I interviewed local hackers to better understand how they form communities around their practice. We see leisurely hacking communities as critical, yet understudied sites of innovation.
3.) If time permits, towards the end of my presentation I will also discuss a third project, The If I Can Dream House. (w/ Janet Go, Liz Bales) The If I Can Dream House is the first “post-reality entertainment” production. As the show is only available online through a 24/7, 60+ camera live stream and weekly Hulu releases, we wanted to better understand how audiences connect with this new form of interactive media.

In the second half of my talk, I discuss how working at Nokia these past three months have initiated a critical shift in my research practices from being an ethnographer in the clouds to an ethnographer on the ground.
I provide two examples of how I’ve reframed my research in terms of how values influence technology design and use.
1.) The first case is from my ongoing fieldwork in Mexico where I have spent over three years in a rural, migrant-sending village. I share my analysis on how my research on Mexican migration and migrants’ use of technologies in Mexico and in the US had led me to believe that Nokia already has an American market with a strong brand connection with unfulfilled technology needs.
2.) The second case is my ongoing dissertation work in China where I discuss how my future fieldwork will include four central themes: gaming and leisure, value clashes, social connections, and communication.  I will also be interviewing Chinese entrepreneurs of failed copy-cat social networking technologies. Here’s the post that explains in greater detail my slides about social connections in China: Privacy and The Anonymous user in China: Importance of understanding multiple cultural orientations towards guanxi/social connections

ok one more blog post on something that informs thought process (again Kevin this is your fault!)

I read lots of books from economic geographers and communication theorists about the effects of new technologies on society. Many theorists agree that digital tools cause spatial and temporal disconnects, shifting the way we experience everyday life. Within this group are scholars who propose widely popular and cited phrases about time and pace.

Some examples:

• David Harvey says that this creates “time-space compression.”
• Manuel Castells claims that the global IT workers in the tech industry are increasingly located in the “space of flows,” the distributed geographic digital networks that mediate virtual communication.  In such a society, “places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network” so that the structural logic that runs a network society is not based on places (pg 443).
• Even the economists agree but they tend to have a more positive take. George Gilder (2000, Telecosm: the world after bandwidth abundance) believes that global diffusion of telecom will emancipate people from face-to-face relations.
• Frances Cairncross (2001, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution is Changing our Lives) doesn’t see distance as a limiting factor in social interaction.     

Essentially, what these authors claim of digital tools are the same claims that we have heard about all preceding technologies from trains to telephones to the cotton gin to cars - technologies compress space-time. They create confusion, chaos and overload. 

There seems to be a great sense of urgency on the affects of our new digital time. This urgency is borderline fear and fetish of a new so-called compressed space-time experience where daily life at increasing at speeds so fast, so FAST THAT WHAT? What will happen??? We will explode!!! And now social media is killing us! Info Overload! 

Paul Virillo, a theorist on speed, politics, and wars, is very concerned about time-space compression and outlines a possible future of time concussions:

What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. The specific negative aspect of these information superhighways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding alterity (the other), this disturbance in the relationship with the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this non-situation, is going to usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy……For the first time, history is going to unfold within a one-time-system: global time. Up to now, history has taken place within local times, local frames, regions and nations. But now, in a certain way, globalization and virtualization are inaugurating a global time that prefigures a new form of tyranny. If history is so rich, it is because it was local, it was thanks to the existence of spatially bounded times which overrode something that up to now occurred only in astronomy: universal time. But in the very near future, our history will happen in universal time, itself the outcome of instantaneity - and there only.

Now when I need to find some sanity in all these calls to deconstruct grand meta-narratives of  super-modernity’s time-space compression - there is one woman that I always call upon, the amazing Doreen Massey. She is freaking AWESOME. I worship her brain. I put her in the cloud with Donna Haraway. Donna and Doreen  - solid.

Doreen Massey’s work is in many ways a response to a deficiency in spatial theory to account for practices and conceptions of place beyond elite individuals who can jet set from one time zone to another and effortlessly relocate and disassociate from places. Many of the compression-space-time scholars theorize broadly about a very elite and narrow experience of life with digital tools, of which Massey avoids doing.  She is one of the key thinkers who deplore universal accounts of place as bounded and fixed across social relationships and the dichotomy of place as bounded and space as open. 

For Massey, even if a place appears to be bounded, she argues that this place is located in a grander scheme of space that is constantly in flux.  She employs the concept of “power geometry” in insisting that the production of place and space be examined across class, gender, nations, cultures, economies, and race, and that this analysis  must be examined together in relation to the flow and movement within one place and in relation to other places (1993).  For Massey, places are constantly in flux and reflect hybrid forms of power and culture, and to see it any other way would gloss over the mobile, imaginative and unpredictable practices of everyday life. 

Doreen Massey reminds me why I do the research that I do with who I do it with. Massey always has a great sense of justice and power infused into her work. Working in low-income or marginal communities isn’t exactly sexy and I don’t produce research that affirms what Western tech companies want to see or hear. But I have tons of fun and I believe in the importance of my work because it addresses uneven distribution of power and resources.

Massey is so awesome that I’ve cut some of my fave sections out of one the most beautiful essays every written by a geographer - A Global Sense of Place in Reading Human Geography (1997). Someone has put her essay up here - download while it’s avail!

I’m just going to let Doreen do her thing now - these are several excerpts that I can’t even cut up - every word is beautiful. But the essay really does need to read in its entirety so that you can see the narrative she traces. If you end up really liking her, I suggest that you also read For Space. It’s another deeply thoughtful meditation on space and place.

Now I want to make one simple point here, and that is about what one might call the power geometry of it all; the power geometry of time-space compression. For different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also
about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.

In a sense at the end of all the spectra are those who are both doing the moving and the communicating and who are in some way in a position of control in relation to it  - the jet-setters, the ones sending and receiving the faces and the e-mail, holding the international conference calls, the ones distributing films, controlling the news, organizing the investments and the international currency transactions. These are the groups who are really in a sense in charge of time-space compression, who care really
use it and turn it to advantage, whose power and influence it very definitely increases.

On its more prosaic fringes this group probably includes a fair number of western academics and journalists - those, in other words, who write most about it. But there are also groups who are also doing a lot of physical moving, but who are not ‘in charge’ of the process in the same way at all. The refugees from El Salvador or Guatemala and the undocumented migrant workers from Michoacan in Mexico, crowding into Tijuana to make a perhaps fatal dash for it across the border into the US to grab a chance of a new life. Here he experience of movement, and indeed of a confusing plurality of cultures, is very different. And there are those from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Caribbean, who come half way round the world only to get held up in an interrogation room at Heathrow.

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This is, in other words, a highly complex social differentiation. There are differences in the degree of movement and communication, but also in the degree of control and initiation. The ways in which people are placed within ‘time-space compression’ are highly complicated and extremely varied.

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But this in turn immediately raises questions of politics. If time-space compression can be imagined in that more socially formed, socially evaluative and differentiated way, then there may be here the possibility of developing a politics of mobility and access. For it does seem that mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power. It is not simply a question of unequal distribution, that some people
move more than others, and that some have more control than others. It is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people. Differential mobility can weaken the leverage of the already weak. The time-space compression of some groups can undermine the power of others.

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Many of those who write about time-space compression emphasize the insecurity and unsettling impact of its effects, the feeling of vulnerability which it can produce. Some therefore go on from this to argue that, in the middle of all this flux, people desperately need a bit of peace and quiet - and that a strong sense of place, or locality, can form one kind of refuge from the hubbub. So the search after the ‘real’ meanings
of places, the unearthing of heritages and so forth, is interpreted as being, in part, a response to desire for fixity and for security of identity in the middle of all the movement and change. A ‘sense of place’, of rootedness, can provide - in this form and on this interpretation - stability and a source of unproblematical identity. In that
guise, however, place and the spatially local are then rejected by many progressive people as almost necessarily reactionary. They are interpreted as an evasion; as a retreat from the (actually unavoidable) dynamic and change of ‘real life’, which is what we must seize if we are to change things for the better. On this reading, place
and locality are foci for a form of romanticized escapism from the real business of the world. While ‘time’ is equated with movement and progress, ‘space’/’place’ is equated
with stasis and reaction.

There are some serious inadequacies in this argument. There is the question of why it is assumed that time-space compression will produce insecurity. There is the need to face up to - rather than simply deny - people’s need for attachment of some sort, whether through place or anything else. None the less, it is certainly the case that there is indeed at the moment a recrudescence of some very problematical sense of
place, from reactionary nationalisms, to competitive localisms, to introverted obsessions with ‘heritage’. We need, therefore, to think through what might be an adequately progressive sense of place, one which would fit in with the current global local times and the feelings and relations they give rise to, and which would be useful in what are, after all, political struggles often inevitably based on place. The question

is how to hold on to that notion of geographical difference, of uniqueness, even of rootedness if people want that, without being reactionary.

There are a number of distinct ways in which the ‘reactionary’ notion of place described above is problematical. One is the idea that places have single, essential, identities. Another is the idea that place - the sense of place - is constructed out of an introverted, inward-looking history based on delving into the past for internalized origins, translating the name from the Domesday Book.

These arguments, then, highlight a number of ways in which a progressive concept of place might be developed. First of all, it is absolutely not static. If places can be conceptualized in terms of the social interactions which they tie together, then it is also the case that these interactions themselves are not motionless things, frozen in time. They are processes. One of the great one-liners in Marxist exchanges has for long been, ‘Ah, but capital is not a thing, it’s a process.’ Perhaps this should be said also about places, that places are processes, too.

Second, places do not have boundaries in the sense of divisions which frame simple enclosures. ‘Boundaries’ may be of course be necessary, for the purposes of certain turn of studies for instance, but they are not necessary for the conceptualization of a place itself. Definition in this sense does not have to be through simple
counterposition to the outside; it can come, in part, precisely through the particularity of linkage to that ‘outside’ which is therefore itself part of what constitutes the place. This helps get away from the common association between penetrability and vulnerability. For it is this kind of association which makes invasion by newcomers so
threatening.

Third, clearly places do not have single, unique ‘identities’; they are full of internal conflicts. Just think, for instance, about London’s Docklands, a place which is at the moment quite clearly defined by conflict: a conflict over what it past has been (the nature of its ‘heritage’), conflict over what should be its present development, conflict over what could be its future.

Fourth, and finally, none of this denies place nor the importance of the uniqueness of place. The specificity of place is continually reproduced, but it s not a specificity which result from some long, internalized history. there are a number of sources of this specificity - the uniqueness of place. There is the fact that the wider social relations in which places are set themselves geographically differentiated.

Globalization (in the economy, or in culture, or in anything else) does not entail simply homogenization. On the contrary, the globalization of social relations is yet another source of (the reproduction of) geographical uneven development, and thus of the uniqueness of place. There is the specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations. There is the fact that this very mixture together in one place may produce effects which would not have happened otherwise. And finally, all these relations with and take a further element of specificity from the accumulated history of a place, with that history itself imagined as the product of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world.

Good day world! it’s finally happening! I’m moving to China to do my research! wooohoo!

So I’m moving to China to do my research, and then coming back to write something that I hope to buddha doesn’t kill my soul to write creative non-fiction. (here’s some more details about my research). I have a post on my personal blog about all the things and people that I will miss so dearly.

So in addition to doing my research, I’ll be posting daily observations on Bytes of China. I’m making a committment to post a little thought every other day. One, this let’s friends know that I’m alive, and second when I’m writing up my fieldnotes every month I would love to see over time what observations I chose to make public. While I plan to keep 99% of notes just for my eyes, there’s something very lovely about posting a short blog post that will be immediately read. It keeps me connected to the real world - otherwise I would get lost in my thoughts and forget that I have a responsbility to carry out when I return from the field - a responsibilty to translate what I see into greater understanding.

New RSS Feeds!

And for people who use RSS readers - I’ve combined all my blogs into ONE feed (using yahoo pipes). I created one feed just for research blogs and another feed for all blogs. You can find all the rss feeds at the bottom of my website.

A New Vision for Field Work

I’m trying to re-envision what fieldwork will look like for me in China for the next year. Every past fieldwork trip for me in India, Mexico, US, or China has been under 3 months - which meant that I always working 15 hours a day minimum.

But now that I will be in one place for a year, I want to re-envision what does emotionally and physically sustainable ethnography look like in a fieldsite that never seems to sleep? I’ll be hanging out with a variety of groups from people who work at night to people who work 15 plus hours a day. How can I be everywhere - how can I see everything - how can I document it all -without wearing myself down physically or mentally?

I’ve come to the conclusion that in order for me to do great fieldwork I must be fully present. This past summer I learned that being fully present starts with sleeping, eating, and dancing. I know it sounds simple - but it’s taken a while to get here. Thich Nhat Hahn’s quote on being present for your loved ones is actually very relevant for ethnography.

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.

In ethnography and qualitative how-to books, they don’t really emphasize how the ethnographer’s energy can affect the types of observations that are gleaned from the fieldsite.  But I think it’s actually super important to think about how to keep yourself super balanced.  Does anyone have any tips? I would love hear them! Some ideas for taking healthy breaks from my field site:

• I won’t be near any dance studios in China, so I will have to make time everyday to turn on the music and blast it out!
• I also was thinking that it would be good to take 1 week off every month just to reflect.

Here are some important things for the fieldsite that I will packing:

I’m super big on brainstorming so I’m bought 4 of these white board dry-erase contact sheets from Go Write! on Amazon. I plan to transform my entire office into a dry erase heaven.
And of course I will be bringing box loads of Ssicky notes! this is beyond important.

I don’t like the idea of having to always pull out of my cellphone to look at the time when I’m hanging out in the field.  But I also hate the idea of wearing a watch - I find them ugly and annoying.  And watch jewelry is usually too pretty and shiny to wear in the fielsite.
But then I found this awesome robot necklace watch that wasn’t shiny but stylish at the same time - I thought this was a very appropriate for the field.
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Nail polish art  - this will be a great conversation starter in the field!  I will turn my nails into bunnies and other fun animals.

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Thieves hand sanitizer - very imporatant - non-toxic, no alcohol, and no preservatives. it’s my goal it NEVER get sick. I am not a clean freak but there will be times when it will be difficult to find running water for days at a time  - esp in the rural areas. So this will be life saver!

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I bought four 2TB external Western Digital drives and one 1.5 TB portable external drive. You never know what will happen to your data -  I’m preparing for my digital data to disappear at all times. I’m leaving two drives in two different locations in the US, and two others in two different locations in China. The portable drive I will always have on me or in my apt.

I have always treated encryption as something that just slows down someone who really wants to get to your data. But I do care about ensuring that the info for my informants are subjected to the best data protection I can personally enforce. So I will be storing all my contact data on an iphone - it’s pretty much the most secure mobile device out there after all the research I’ve done and it has remote wipe. Blackberry is secure too, but it doesn’t have a camera or a good app store! And android mobiles are no where near secure enough. Geeky Scmidt provides an excellent review of the most popular cellphones and their encryption plans (btw his blog is awesome!)

1. iOS – Encrypts the storage and allows developers to access the crypto library
2. Blackberry – Encrypts enough that countries around the world are putting pressure on RIM
3. Windows Mobile 6.5 – Encrypts storage and allows access through .Net
4. Symbian – Nope
5. Android – Nope
6. Meego – Nope
7. WebOS – Nope
8. Windows Phone 7 – Nope

Dan Lockton’s blog post announcing his PhD, ‘Design with Intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental & social behaviour change,” is super inspiring. 

My PhD involves developing a ‘design pattern’ toolkit, called Design with Intent, to help designers create products, services and environments which influence the way people use them. The toolkit brings together techniques for understanding and changing human behaviour from a number of psychological disciplines, illustrated with examples, to enable designers to explore and apply relevant strategies to problems.

I always love keeping an eye on thinkers whose work engages with academia and industry. Like Christina Dennaoui, Leila Takayama,  Danah Boyd, Barry Brown, Laura Watts, Paco Underhill, Nicholas Nova, Julian Bleeker, Lyn Jeffery, Jane Fulton Suri, Ian Bogost, Sam Ladner, John Battelle, and  James Landay. I try to learn from their work because they draw on academic research yet communicate their thoughts without the academic jargon. 

I now have to add Don Lockton to the list!

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Lately, I have been dreaming up of a visual component to my dissertation when I write it up next year after I finish my fieldwork in China. I have a collection of small books, pamphlets, guides, and materials from organizations that give me inspiration for my creation.

One of my favorite examples is Laura Watt’s ethnographic work on Orkney Islands in Scotland. We were both guest lecturing at Irina Shklovski’s seminar at IT University in Copenhagen, and Laura gave an amazing presentation about her research. In addition to her talk, she passed around a fieldwork tool kit that  created to help clients understand her research. I remember that her research was one of the first and few times (to date) where I can hear the word “innovation” and not roll my eyes. She created a beautiful book of stories and poems about possible futures of Orkney Islands and a digital booklet about the future scenarios of infrastructure.

Oh and another super cool project coming out of academic research is Reframing Mexico City, an interactive website from University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Tecnologico de Monterrey. To create part one of the scenarios on the website, UNC & TM students used data collected from UCSD Center for Comparative Immigration Studies’ (CCIS) interviews with Mexican immigrants on how they crossed the border into the US (research led by Leah Muse-Orlinoff). Data from the interviews were used to convey the perils and experiences of clandestine border crossing in Tijuana, Tecate, and Sasabe. Then users on the website actually have the opportunity to experience the border crossing - they get to “make decisions about where they would like to cross, how much they want to pay a coyote, and what to do when confronted with certain obstacles such as apprehension by the border patrol, extreme climatic conditions, and injury.” This is an excellent example of how academic research can be turned into story-telling and creating empathetic experiences.

Well, now I get to add Lockton’s toolkit to my collection! He (and David Harrison, Neville A. Stanton) created a wiki for the toolkit where you can download the cards and purchase a set.

Reading his dissertation summary reminds me of all the educational toolkits that I created for workshop that I led before I started my PhD. (I created conferences and workshop for educators on how to incorporate popular culture like hip-hop into educational curricula, and how to use new media in after-school programs in low-income communities.)

While my dissertation is vastly different from Lockton’s and making a toolkit does not make sense (at least for now), it’s inspiring to see how it could be done. It makes me excited to figure out the appropriate tools to create when it comes to my dissertation!

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Aside from creating a lovely tangible set of materials, Lockton’s dissertation has intellectual teeth.  His primary research questions is:

Can industrial designers use the Design with Intent toolkit to apply insights from other disciplines (psychology, ergonomics, architecture, human-computer interaction, behavioural economics) to generate novel, realistic design concepts, addressing briefs on influencing user behaviour, primarily to reduce the environmental impact of technology use, but also in other social benefit contexts?

One field to add to the disciplines that he’s mentioned is Sociology! While psychology helps you understand beliefs that influence user behavior from an individual’s point of view, sociology takes a more meta approach by situating beliefs that influence the user from a communal point of view.

Drawing on sociology would compliment Lockton’s last section that seeks to understand designers’ and users’ mental models about technological systems.  Sociological research on culture and group interaction can be incredibly useful to answering how mental models affect designers. Mental models are culturally grounded. As such, one has to understand the broader context of the society that that the designer AND user is embedded in to really get at this question.

Now I already anticipate some academic purists arguing that Lockton’s dissertation is super normative  - he’s explicitly trying to change user behavior, or that his work is too subjective - like creating his own index of measurement for his own products, or that it just isn’t academic to do a dissertation on something that one invented for industry use. But that’s really not fair to say this. Physicists, geneticists, or educators come up with their theories or ideas all the time and test it out with their dissertation. And just because research is normative form the get-go doesn’t mean that this isn’t legitimate academic research. Lockton is explicit in his research questions, and I think that is most important. Whereas many of academic research is hidden in super jargony language that is trying to prove something they already believe in, but hiding it under the cloak of reflexivity. Reflexivity is a mirage (according to Mike Lynch).

Thank you to Mark Vanderbeeken for tweeting & blogging about this!