Comments on: Geotagging Ethnographic Photos – Informed Consent?

By: Kerim

Kerim — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 11:09:15 +0000

Don’t you see the black helicopter outside your window?

By: maniaku

maniaku — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 10:06:37 +0000

Okay, fair enough. I just wanted to make clear that there was a decision. “Protect your credit card information”, not “The FBI is watching you”

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By: Kerim

Kerim — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 08:28:25 +0000

Well, that’s a decision that you’d have to make isn’t it: whether or not to remove the meta data. Making that decision is a privacy issue. Educating people about the need to make that decision is a privacy issue. I really don’t understand your point …

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By: maniaku

maniaku — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 18:49:29 +0000

How is there a privacy issue? If you don’t want the tracking info in it, you could just remove it from the metadata.

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By: FieldNotes: Notes on the Anthropology of British Columbia » New Book by Robin and Jillian Ridington

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 19:41:06 +0000

[...] The Ridingtons’s book is supported by a website hosted by the University of Nebraska Press. There, you can download five audio files of the Ridingtons’s informants telling stories and of the compilations the Ridingtons produced with audio documentarian Howard Broomfield. I love being able to hear the voices of the people telling the stories that are transcribed in this ethnography. It reminds me of Aaron Fox’s Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture (or here) which is also supported by a website with audio files. In a previous post about Fox’s book I raised some questions about posting audio files and wondered aloud about the longevity of such sites. Kerim Friedman’s recent SavageMinds post about the ethics of geotagging fieldwork photographs might be relevant in this discussion as well. Presumably ethnographers like Ridington and Fox have consent to distribute sound files on the web just as they would have permission to publish transcripts of talk. [...]

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By: Fred

Fred — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 16:25:55 +0000

I wonder how much of this “tracking” is due to security reasons, and how much is just “gee-whiz technology” that everyone has got to have. In London you are photographed around 300 times a day, and now European airports want to introduce tracking bracelets for passengers in the airport. Security technology is being sold as preventitive, the “if you ain’t got anthing to hide, well then …”. But what does this do to eye witness accounts, especially where there is a contradiction between the electronic device and the human account? What if the electronic device is hacked–paperless electronic voting booths jump to mind. As for field research, I can foresee papers published via geotracking of regional populations compunded with satellite photos (no need to talk to the people on the ground).

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