The best software for mobile or online ethnography studies. Includes user reviews and 2022 pricing information for 15 digital ethnography tools for UX researchers.
IT Tools - Handy online tools for developers
Collection of handy online tools for developers, with great UX. IT Tools is a free and open-source collection of handy online tools for developers & people working in IT.
IT Tools - Handy online tools for developers
Collection of handy online tools for developers, with great UX. IT Tools is a free and open-source collection of handy online tools for developers & people working in IT.
You can just review things: A digital ethnography of informal peer review
Across scholarly communities, manuscripts face similar evaluative rituals: editors invite experts to privately assess submissions through formal peer reviews. This closed, loosely structured, and...
The Local Relational Technologist
Who can we rely on for meaningful software in our communities?
Digital Art Enters the Museum Age — Social Software
We explore code and systems as a medium for creating new forms of art. We consider "software" in an expanded sense, examining the ways that we are programmed by technology around us and the ways we can write software to make change in the world.
The community-first software era
Some ideas about how to encode our values into the tools we use
You can just review things: A digital ethnography of informal peer review
Across scholarly communities, manuscripts face similar evaluative rituals: editors invite experts to privately assess submissions through formal peer reviews. This closed, loosely structured, and publisher-mediated process is now being supplemented by critiques on open, distributed platforms. We call this practice, a blend of three open peer review variants, informal peer review as it is accessible to outsiders, unmediated by publishers, and conducted across public platforms. Informal peer reviewers range from occasional error detectors to experienced sleuths who identify plagiarism, fraud, errors, conflicts of interest, and conceptual flaws. They may interpret methods, clarify jargon, assess value, and connect to related work. Here, we asked four questions: (1) Who are informal peer reviewers? (2) Where do they work? (3) How do they evaluate research? and (4) What are their impacts? To answer these questions, we conducted a cross-platform digital ethnography with participant observation. We traced discourse across communities over four months and revisited cases after nine and twelve months. From 15 communities, we selected 12 case mentions (10 unique cases) and 8 meta-commentaries from 26 reviewers. Using open and axial coding, we generated 1,080 codes and four themes: reviewers are a motley crew, they self-organize across subpar digital spaces, use deep, uncommon strategies, and they face resistance from authors, publishers, and editors. Informal peer review, we concluded, is a fragile, minimally governed patchwork of people, platforms, and practices, as well as an emerging evidence infrastructure that can be scaled up. We advise advocates and tool-builders to evolve informal review tools, communities, training, and governance by connecting to scholars' values, reducing participation friction, and rewarding attempts to extend the scholarly dialogue.
Local-first Software
Exploring software architecture that returns data to users and enables collaboration in every tool.
Augmented Text Tools. Minimalist writing, powerful tools
Augmented Text tools offer a new ecosystem for writing, reading and interacting with text. Author is a writing app for Mac which makes citations and concept mapping easier than ever before. Reader is a free minimalist PDF viewer with powerful interactions.
Open-source tools needed for the future of decentralized moderation
A small list of various open-source software that needs to exist to power the future of Trust & Safety for decentralized social networking software.
Apps - Social Media Lab
As part of our work, the Lab develops public-facing information-integrity dashboards, along with research apps and tools, to support social science research on online participation and communities. Our apps and tools are used by thousands of students, educators and researchers worldwide each year. If you are interested in developing a custom version of any of […]
Open Social Network Cookbook
The Open Social Network Cookbook is the collective product of the Open Social Incubator, a cohort that MEDLab hosted from Fall 2024 to Spring 2025. At the heart of our work together was the question: How can the online communities that we participate in use tools that truly reflect our values?
