( ^ Or something like that)
Start 1 ---> Cooperation is an essential aspect of online collaboration - whether it is the editing of a single wikipedia article or the development of a complex piece of software.
Start 2 ---> The material aspects of a culture are central to conducting an anthropological study - this is true of traditional ethnographic work, like Malinowski's focus on exchange in Melanesia (1922), as well as Hine's virtual ethnographies in eScience (2007).
This talk offers an introduction to studying the material aspects of online collaboration through a technique called phylomemetics. Borrowing heavily form the field of evolutionary biology, phylomemetics uses encoded character data from digital objects to visualize their evolution as a (taxonomic?) tree. In doing so, it makes visible those moments when a cultural object deviates from its past - or ( <- assumption is object / material is refelctive of cultural shifts)
In this talk, we focus on a set of Free / Open Source Software (F/OSS) projects - notably Debian, a distribution of the Linux Operating System - as a case study. We focus on moments of cultural evolution - when an operating system substantively from one generation to the next.
Our insights can be compared to, and as we suggest, combined with an ethnographic mode of inquiry. For instance, we can combine our quantification of "speciation events" through phylomemetics with "ethical moments" documented in a deep ethnography of the Debian community (Coleman, 2005). In combination these two forms - ethnography and phylomemetics - offer digital humanists and social scientists a poweful way to intellectually engage with culture from both a material and hermeneutic perspective.
to do:
Hine - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00341.x/full