Though most look down on the rank of n00b, it’s perhaps the most valuable position in a new group. Why? Well, everything is new! You have no preconceptions of how it should be, you question everything, and you are able to provide insights on things that those who’ve been around a while just take for granted. Being a n00b means there are no expectations of you, and really when you’re learning all you can this is exactly where you want to be. People are more willing to forgive mistakes, to answer questions, and to be just overall helpful.

So the next time you’re new, appreciate the fact you’re a n00b. It’s the best place for an anthropologist to be!

Overall I was just surprised at how often the thought of visiting Facebook occurred to me. I remember just 5 years ago when it was Livejournal that filled up my pauses in work or school. Over 10 years ago it was a local message board for a club that kept me refreshing Netscape every five minutes as drama exploded online. What about 15 years ago? Well then it would have been my first college issued email account (yes, I’ve been in school a long time!) or my first Hotmail account. Two decades ago I was in high school and I filled all of my spare moments with a book. There was even a joke made about this at my senior assembly where a picture was taken of a woman at a mall reading a book and that was supposed to have been me 10 years later. (Instead it ended up being me on my Palm Treo 300. I like to think I invented mobile Googling to solve arguments almost 10 years ago. But, I digress….)

I suppose the point I am trying to make here is that no, it wasn’t that I missed Facebook itself. Rather, I realized that as of late I have been using Facebook as an escape that 20 years ago was reserved for mystery novels and fantasy books. I believe the reason for this is not that I value Facebook over my books of times past. Instead, it’s that I have so little in between time these days that I fill it with a brain snacks instead of a healthy meal. That said, with work and my PhD classwork I get plenty of high quality brain food. I guess what this all boils down to is that I just miss the brain snacks that were both filling and tasted good.

If you want to learn more about this, check out my SOPA Pinterest board.

On Friday December 30th, my husband and I had a wedding ceremony in North Texas exactly one year after we were married in South Korea where he was stationed serving in the US Army the year before. We planned our entire wedding from El Paso in far West Texas (only about 600 miles away from where we had it) as my husband is currently stationed at Fort Bliss, and I used Evernote to help us do that every step along the way.

Using Evernote meant that no matter where I was, I could add things to my todos, inspirations, growing expenses, guests lists, and more. I also used it to write my vows the day before the ceremony. This is where it gets fun.

About an hour and a half before the ceremony I realize that my vows and the reception music were still on my laptop, which was at the house where I had started getting ready and not at the venue of the wedding where I had already arrived. I had one of my bride’s maids shove it in the car of another to bring it so that I could fix my overlook. (Funny that my todo list on Evernote did mention putting the music on a flash drive, but alas in the chaos of it all I didn’t have a chance to refer back to it!)

All of my bride’s maids arrived in time and we were getting ready when we realized that the car where the laptop was had its keys locked inside. This meant that both the music and my vows were now in the car and I only had half an hour to go before the ceremony. Realizing that I had typed my vows into Evernote, I took out my phone and looked them up in an attempt to memorize them. Then one of my bride’s maids said, “Why don’t you just use your phone? Better to have it and read them, then not have it and forget them.” With that they all agreed that not only was the the best choice, but for me – a cyber anthropologist, it was apropos.

With that, my phone was handed to the officiant and off I was rushed to hide in the final moments before the ceremony began. It was a pretty emotional ceremony as we’ve spent almost as much time separated as together in our marriage due to the fact he’s serving his country. I had already been tearing up before he got to his vows and by the time he uttered his words to me I was about to start sobbing. That’s when it was my turn and the officiant took out my phone and handed it to me. All of the guests began laughing, which was a blessing in that I was able to laugh too. Otherwise, I may not have been able to actually read my vows without being a blubbering bride.

After all of that, and all of the other uses I have for Evernote as a PhD student (all of my class notes, paper drafts, project notes), Research Assistant (all of my meeting notes and todos), an Anthropologist (all of my field notes), and a User Experience Designer (notes, todos, ideas, drafts etc) – I just want to say thank you for making such a great product and for all of the extensibility that is offered through its various application interfaces. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise. Using your product really did save me on my wedding day!

For those interested, you can read the vows here.

Yours Truly,
A thankful bride

After I sent my email I then pondered on those two statements. It is very true that our discipline is misunderstood. I have often had to differentiate what I do from what an archeologist does. I have also had to explain that while yes our discipline previously studied far off groups of people in newly discovered areas of the world, that is not what the majority of us do today. That said, I do have to mention that when I specify that I am a “cyber anthropologist” (aka digital anthropologist, technical anthropologist etc) people do tend to perk up and lean in to learn more about what I do.

So here I thought would be the perfect place to really describe what it is I do as an anthropologist, why it’s important, and why I – though I am also a User Experience Designer and am working toward my PhD in Information Science – identify myself as an anthropologist above all else.

What do I, as an anthropologist, do?
So – I’ll preface this with this is what I do as an anthropologist and does not necessarily reflect what everyone else in the discipline does.

The simple answer is I study culture online and online culture.

Well, what does that mean?

Studying Culture Online: I study the way different people from different parts of the world use the Internet and how just having access to it can influence cultures and communities. Examples of this include China’s firewall, South Korea’s Starcraft fans, and how civil unrest across the world unfolds in social media.

Studying Online Culture: To keep it short, I study the way people interact online including their behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. Additionally, I analyze their artifacts for trends, memes, and emerging understanding of how the Internet affects people’s lives and how people’s lives affect the Internet. Lastly, I have specified my focus on gamers and developers. However, while those are currently my preferred groups to study, I do branch out into politics, brands, and education.

Why is what I do important?
By understanding those around us we can learn from them and apply the lessons they’ve already overcome to other groups and situations that can benefit from them.

For example:
By understanding how gamers organically develop communities of practice and use open source tools to assist in communicating over geographically dispersed areas in order to successfully support their self-created and self-organized groups both in and out of in-game encounters, we can help businesses learn how to improve their communication techniques for their geographically dispersed teams in our ever increasingly global society. (You can read more about this here.)

Another example from my own work includes:
Understanding the motivation for participation in open source development communities and using that understanding to help motivate others to participate in more volunteer opportunities within their own communities.

While I could go on and on, I think these two examples help illustrate my particular research focus and how it can actually be applied to several different contexts that go far above and beyond the original groups and situations studied to help our economies and communities be more successful.

Why I identify as an anthropologist above all else?
I like to help people.

Yep, it’s as simple as that. In fact, it is that one idea that affects my entire approach to life including my other career and educational choices. This is why I identify as an anthropologist above all of the other identities I have. It completely influences absolutely everything else I do.

As a user experience designer I strive to help the people using the applications I design, the developers developing these applications, and the companies for which these applications are implemented. Yes, what I do goes that far and affects all of those groups. Being an anthropologist helps provided me with this holistic perspective as well as an ability to understand all of these groups in order to find ways to help them in the best way possible. I could not do my job if I didn’t think it was helping others and I have in fact left other jobs because I did not feel that the work I was doing had a positive enough effect on those it touched.

As a PhD student in information science I strive to find ways to make information easier to access, understand, and share. In the end, it’s not about the information itself, but those who use it and how it and the ways it can be used can better the lives of those users. My specific focus within my course of study is human computer interaction. It is the human part of that, that makes all of the difference.

Final Thoughts
So there you go! This is really just a very small glimpse into what I do and why I do it. I am posting it here in hopes of making my discipline a little easier to understand. My intent was to also how the work I do, though it may seem somewhat inconsequential as it focuses on things like gaming, actually can be applied to groups and situations that can have a far reaching impact on our communities and economies.

I love what I do and I am thankful every day that I have an opportunity to do it.

“Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.”

It saddens me that you are ignorant of the fact that your state is the home of one of the best anthropology programs out there. That said, I think you should really do that thing we anthropologists call “research” before you make statements that you’re not prepared to defend.

Here, some University of South Florida students have given you a head start:
.

Lastly, I would like to state for the record that I am an anthropologist. I not only have a job, but a very good paying job. Additionally, I do research in everything from Open Source Software development to User Experience Design. I have conducted research for companies such as Microsoft, Motorola, General Motors, Red Hat, and am currently working on research for yet another tech company. Last I checked these all represent aspects of technology, one of those subjects that seems to be tremendously valued by you. Please learn more about my discipline before saying it’s useless.

Sorry to keep it short, but I have to get back to work.

I have worked from multiple parts of the world with people from all over the world, but this is the first time I’ve been sequestered to a single place with a single in person contact for multiple days on end. Here’s a bit of what it has been like to go from being some what of a highly motivated social butterfly both online and in person to someone who fell into social isolation and un-motivation before I even realized it and what I did about it.

When my husband was assigned to Fort Bliss in El Paso Texas, I was excited because that meant we could actually live together and I could still keep up with things like work and school. The company I work for gave me the opportunity to work remote and I was able to fill my semester with all online classes. We then traded in my sports car for an SUV and headed off to West Texas.

After a month of spotty internet connections from the hotel we were staying in, the Starbucks down the street, and the public wifi on base, I was ever so thankful to finally get setup in our home off base. What I didn’t realize is that I would for 6 out of 7 days have only 1 person I would physically see and converse with now that I was at home. While I’m ever so happy this person is my husband, and after a year of him being in a foreign country I am definitely not complaining, I had no idea the effects this would have on my psyche.

What I have learned is that it’s not just about the fact that I am home alone all day. No, it’s also the fact that even if I wanted to leave I do not have the option to do so. You see, we opted to have a single vehicle because well it was cheaper and I didn’t have to drive to work. So, though it made sense at the time, I now see the error of my ways. This situation has set me up with the overwhelming feeling of being trapped in my own house!

After two and a half months of this (July, August, September), I found myself feeling more and more down, uninspired, and completely unmotivated. What was more alarming was I found that after the 3 to 5 days a month I spent in Dallas in the office and on campus I’d come home feeling renewed and refreshed only to have it all drain out of me within a day or two. For those who know me, this is the very opposite of who I am. I generally have so many projects going I don’t know what to do with myself! To go from that to having absolutely no interest in anything was a giant red flag for me.

I tried many tips and tricks including:

• Getting up and dressed for work even if you’re not leaving the house
• Having a specific room in the house where work is conducted
• Taking the occasional afternoon out where I worked on base until my husband got off

Unfortunately, none of these seemed to make a difference. I had to find a way to fix this or it was going to drive me crazy, and not in the figurative sense. To that end, I started running. Yes, running. I don’t know what it is, whether it is just getting out of the house farther than the few streets I normally go to walk my dogs or the resulting endorphins in my head – but it seems to be working. It helps now that it’s cooler outside so I’m not killing myself in the Texas heat. It’s also nice because it’s something physical and I completely leave all of my work and school work and RA work behind to just have a bit of time to myself, for myself.

Being the self-competitive person I am, it’s also turned into a bit of a game of going further, faster, longer. Though I love my computers and I love being online, sometimes you just have to step away from it all to get some perspective. This taught me something else as well, I need time away from work. Working from home means for most people, myself included, more hours and more varied work times.

I found myself finishing something Sunday night that I could have had completed the Friday before had I just had it in me to do it. Now I turn off my work email and chat at 5pm. My work day is done and it doesn’t start again until 8am. This means I HAVE to get my work done during the hours allotted. I get even more motivated when I spend my lunch hour running as that means I can’t do work during lunch time either! (Which I was guilty of doing while I was in the office all the time.)

This change in my schedule also meant I had to tell my boss, no I cannot work on that tonight – giving me time to set aside specific hours to work on school work as well. Funny enough, this in turn gave me more time to do things I enjoy doing outside of work and school like gaming! Putting exercise and more structure in my day was a brilliant way for me to get out of my funk.

Last week, not only did I run every day (2.5 miles), but I also took 3 quizzes, 1 test, participated in class discussions, conducted a bit of heuristic evaluation for my research assistanceship as well as completing all of my office work before the weekend. In addition to all of that, I also got a lot of work done for my wedding (yes, I’m already married – but we didn’t have a wedding as we go married at the US Embassy in Seoul, South Korea). This included designing and ordering save the dates and proper invitations as well as getting a photographer, a cake baker, a DJ and working with all of my bride’s maids to get their dresses ordered. This also meant that I actually got to play video games last weekend as I actually had free time for once.

So, there you have it. Now I actually get to take advantage of some of the freedoms granted to me by working from home even if I don’t have a vehicle and only see a single person in person 6 out of 7 days a week. All it took was a little organization and thinking outside of my computer screen.

My next couple of posts will go into some of the interesting things I’ve experienced in online gaming as of last as well as how I am using a Facebook group to organize my wedding. This is just my way of getting back into writing something at least a little relevant here. My hope is that someone gets some use out of this. If nothing else – this place will not look as dormant as it has of late.

Let’s talk about Agile:
Agile is defined as iterative incremental development methodology. What? This means the product we are working on has new features and bug fixes released, in our case, every two weeks. Everyone involved in the process works together within those two weeks to make it happen from graphic designers to quality assurance testers. This is different from waterfall where the discovery, architecture, development, design, testing, and release phases are all very separate from each other, happen in a specific order, and in the end the product is “final”.

While that may not sound revolutionary by any means, people moving from waterfall to agile tend to have a rough start. Biggest reason why? Things change, nothing is solid, it’s not final, and the team needs to be agile enough to roll with the punches. Let’s put it this way, I haven’t seen a statement of work or product requirements grid for nearly 4 years and I’ve never been finished with a project.

That brings us to the next part. What is it that I do?

User Experience Design:
Well, my official title is User Experience Designer (UXD). In short, I design user experiences.

So, what is a user experience? A user experience is what the user sees, feels, hears, touches, uses, understands, believes, and comes away from any application with. This means I’m a bit of a business analyst, information architect, interaction designer, art director, user researcher, usability expert, heuristic reviewer, and decipherer of languages of developers and business processes past.

But, what do I actually do? My main function is to do all of the above to create wireframes and application requirements from which developers take direction and create an application. Then I go through continuous reviews and revisions throughout the development cycle with the developers where we have to make changes and compromises due to time, resources, and hardware / software (API) restrictions that do not surface until we are already neck deep in the iteration. During that process I’m researching features for the next release and working those into wireframes which include processes and interactions that are then translated into stories. Let’s just say where people normally have peaks and valleys in their work, my work tends to run at a constantly high level.

Our Agile Process:
The other part of the Agile process is the use of stories and tasks by the developers which help direct how they spend their time and what they spend their time on for each iteration. A story is basically the development requirements for each piece of development occurring during an iteration. Each story has a set of tasks and subtasks that developers then divvy amongst themselves. Each story / task / subtask has an amount of time the developer thinks it will take to do, then as they work they report against it the actual amount of time it took. This gives us an idea from iteration to iteration what can be accomplished by the team given the tasks at hand. This helps for planning and keeping the team on task.

Our original process included a meeting to come up with the stories based on the wireframes for the devs to follow. This meeting was important because the stories had to be understood by the developers and had to capture all of the specific dev particulars that a wireframe doesn’t necessarily convey. After that meeting there were meetings to decide tasks, subtasks, and time allotted for each.

Getting Agile with Agile:
During the last two iterations we’ve change it up a bit where I wrote out the stories while I was doing the wireframes and we now use the story meeting as a brainstorming meeting for the devs. This was an important change which allows the developers time to actually collaborate together on the thinking part of development rather than just banging away on their separate pieces of code. It also makes the meeting less mind numbing and monotonous as they actually get to throw ideas out there and bounce concepts off of each other whereas before they had no time to do so. While there are specific Agile processes, we go with what works and the best part about that is it allows us to be agile with it.

There you go! Not the most earth shattering ideas or methods out there, but I think it’s always nice to document what works and to share what you can when you can.

1. I make sure I already have all my books

Yeah, this may seem like a “well duh” statement, but I take this one step further in that I put tabs sticking up off the top of the first page of each chapter. This helps me understand when the syllabus says “Read chapters 1 – 4″, I have a good idea ahead of time just how much work that is. Additionally, I can easily flip to any chapter I need to in an instant when I need to study.

2. I create my file structure

This is perhaps the IA coming out in me, but I like to have a place for everything from the beginning. I create a parent folder for the semester Fall_2011 and then I create a folder for every class. Once I get the syllabus and the class materials I create a folder for every week inside each of the class folders, as well as a homework folder so all of my assignments are in the same place.

3. I setup my Omnifocus database

Each class gets its own setup where I put in all of the assignments based on the syllabus once I get it. This way both my computer and phone go off to tell me when I have something due. I also get that bit of excitement when I get to check something off as done.

4. I setup my Evernote notebooks & tags

Each class gets its own notebook that all get stacked together in a notebook for the semester. I then setup tags for each class and the semester overall.

So there you go. It’s not the most exciting stuff ever, but it helps me stay organized which is very important for online classes – especially in grad school.

For those who want a little more in depth look into all of the tools I use check out my Signal to Noise post I made about 4 years ago.

Good luck this semester!

I have a few new projects that got put on hold as well including an in depth analysis and process for Lean Phd, setting up a consulting business as a Netnographer, and a blog I want to start about all of the things user experience research and design has done to make our lives better outside of the computer from gum packaging to packing building materials.

A few other things I want to do are get up to speed on HTML 5 and CSS 3 as well as getting my programming chops wet again by delving into Python. Oh, and now that I live in El Paso, I want to learn Spanish as well.

Let’s just say I could really use Hermione’s time turner right about now.

So out of all of those projects, I realize I need to really focus on one and then move on to the next after that is either completed or I have a really good start on it. I just have no idea how to prioritize any of this yet because I want to do it all!

Combine all of that with my regular full time job as a user experience designer, a full fall semester, and my new research assistanceship delving into virtual research environments, well I suppose I may just have to put all of my extracurriculars on hold for the time being.

Or, maybe I could pick just one?