What’s this? Open Ethnographer is a software to add ethnographic coding right into live online content. It is an open source plug-in for Drupal, and we use it to add semantic markup to edgeryders.eu content, empowering both our ethnographic research, website visitor’s navigation and discovery, and semantic search engines. Open Ethnographer is developed by the Edgeryders LbG company, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation.
What’s innovative? In contrast to existing QDA software, semantic markup (“coding”) is not inserted into an offline copy of the online conversation, but right into the live content. This preserves the context, enabling extended analysis later. In addition, the semantic markup can be created collaboratively, the saved coding effort allowing more detailed research later. Lastly, the semantic markup can be public, enhancing the original author’s content with semantic web integration “for free”. We believe this innovation to have potentially disruptive applications for how ethnography is done and what role it plays in societal advancement – see also our more detailed explanation.
This project is open! Which means, you are invited to browse through our project workspace below, contribute to the discussion, to software development, and of course to using the free and open source software application when it’s ready (about end of 2015-01). The Antiheroes project is already interested to use Open Ethnographer as well. Core documents and tools for collaborating here:
- Project workspace. You are already there :) Our project home and central disussion space. Core documents:
- Hackpad workspace. For drafting / co-writing texts, which are then later transferred to this project here on edgeryders.eu.
- Github repository and issue tracker. Contains Annotator and its two Drupal integration modules that we use as base software as git subtrees. See the manual for how to deal with them.