links for 2010-05-17

"‘Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter’ sets out to provide “original insights on corporate and organizational life, and renewed considerations of the negotiations of anthropological relations and knowledge” (pg. 23) and it succeeds, overwhelmingly. The motivating passion of many corporate ethnographers is to use their work to get their corporations to adopt a different relationships with their subjects – be they customers, markets or processes. This book succeeds in a similar way: it will, I am sure, be regarded as a vital contribution to the process of ongoing re-orientation by academia towards a not-so-new breed of practitioners wit"hin corporations. But it will also help inform the practice of corporate ethnographers already plying their trade in corporate jungles."

"The simplest way of describing the value anthropology is seen to offer to large organisations like Intel is that they increase the probability of creating successful products, services or strategies. According to this line of reasoning, anthropologists are well placed to infuse an organisation, and its development process, with powerful understandings of people and practices. These understanding can be used by strategists, designers, engineers and managers. "

"Our goal is to integrate paper-based geospatial data collection into traditional GIS systems by using QR-coded paper map templates & image processing technologies. This "smart paper" will streamline data collection in infrastructure-constrained environments, while allowing rich collection of both quantitative and qualitative spatial data."

"In an interview last month, Dan Houser, one of Rockstar’s founders and the company’s creative leader, described the challenge and opportunity quite aptly. “Westerns are about place,” he said. “They’re not called outlaw films. They’re not even called cowboys-and-Indians films. They’re called westerns. They’re about geography.”

“We’re talking about a format that is inherently geographical,” Mr. Houser added, “and you’re talking about a medium, video games, the one thing they do unquestionably better than other mediums is represent geography.” "