Grafitti Archaeology

Have been exploring Grafitti Archaeology, a nifty site that won a Webby award. It won in an art category, but since I am trained as an archaeologist, I think it is fair to call it archaeology, since the site uses pictures to uncover the accretions of time--from present through the past to a sometimes "pristine" (non graffitoed) site (though not always).

Some of the sites change over a relatively significant amount of time, some fairly quickly over a few days...a social and visual history captured in photos. Another interesting thing is that a flickr community has built up around it, too.

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Storytelling

A couple of years ago I organized a conference session on storytelling as a means to communicate anthropological findings in non-academic environments. Storytelling is central to anthropology as a discipline—not only do we all study some aspect of human story, the stories of the cultures we study are key to our understanding of them. Stories become mechanisms for collaboration and change, as well as carriers of history. But we don’t always stop to think about the stories we tell, even though anthropologists regularly use storytelling as a communication device. In order to be relevant in settings dominated by non-anthropologists, we must not only pass on the data we have gathered, but convey its importance and convince decision makers in business, design, development, public policy, environment, and a myriad of other fields. Constructing these stories involves editing and carefully choosing what to relay to our audience. Delivering the stories involves performance on many scal...

Kids Day and India

Last Friday was bring your kid to work day at Pitney Bowes. It's all very fun, begins with breakfast and a magic show, followed by tours for the older kids, then a big outdoor picnic. I was a tour stop, "Let's Travel to India." They put the kids in groups by age, since some of the stops are better for older or younger ones...I ended up with groups ranging from about 8-13 years old. It was fun but exhausting. I figured the point was more fun than educational, so pretty much I set up a slide show to talk about the fact that we invent stuff by understanding how people live and work, and asking what they knew about India. Answers: lots of people, cows...Showed them pics of cellphones, malls and offices and lots of things that look pretty similar in India as in the US, then pictures of things that look different. Fun to see their reactions. They all noticed the Subway in the mall, and they all recognized the well in the village and understood what it was for and that...

Flat World

One of the next books on my list is Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century . Friedman is a columnist with the New York Times who spent a lot of time last year in Bangalore. I read his columns while he was there, and some excerpts from the book. His overall thesis seems to be that since there are intelligent, skilled people throughout the world, and broadband has made global interconnectedness real, the skills needed to do almost any work can be found anywhere, and employed from anywhere. There is a message for those of us in the US about education and skill training, but I also think there are some exciting possibilities. Rather than worry about how jobs might go overseas, I like thinking about how we work collaboratively with colleagues around the world. For the last year, I have been working on a project with Dina Mehta of Explore Research and Consultancy in India. The flatness of the world has enabled my company to conduct a long term resear...

A Visible City

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