Paper Reading #7 - Grassroots Heritage in the Crisis Context: A Social Media Probes Approach to Studying Heritage in a Participatory Age

Comments
Aaron Kirkes
Stuart Jones

Reference Information
Sophia B. Liu, CHI 2010 Atlanta, GA April 2010

Summary
This article is about how the study of social networking methods have impacted the way people record crisis events happen and how they are documented for the heritage purpose. The widespread use of this social networking tool will drastically allow for widespread documentation of things all around and in different cultures to come together. The new idea that has come around lately is that crowd sourcing is a very important and powerful new tool that how come to allow for massive data handling. To write history essentially, it is crowd sourced through these social networks and the best, most informative things will come out on top.

Discussion
I did not particularly like the format of this paper. It was quite convoluted and all over the place. His intent on what he was doing was a little confusing and unclear. Once I finally followed his logic, I believe that this is a very important ethnographic study to be done. The role of social networks will become very important in the short future as new ways to get information disseminated all over the globe. This is very much in its infancy and I am excited to see what comes of it.