The Chickens and Goats of Uganda’s Internet

An Xiao Mina

Editor’s Note: Memes means, “unit of cultural transmission,” and that’s what designer and artist An Xiao Mina @anxiaostudio does in the Story to Action edition of Ethnography Matters. She moves from Ugandan chickens to Western Lolcat, from meme to meaning, deconstructing each meme with cultural analysis. The “action” in this case is a new model for internet culture analysis and a new project that An Xiao is launching in the coming months, the Civic Beat. Her analysis and project compliment the recent publication of Henry Jenkin’s, Sam Ford’s, and Joshua Green’s Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture.

An Xiao shared this story below at Microsoft’s annual Social Computing Symposium organized by Lily Cheng at NYU’s ITP. 

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In my first week in Uganda, I was scheduled to give a lecture at a local university, discussing memes and civic life in China. I used a modified version of a talk I’d given previously, tailored slightly for what little I knew about Uganda at the time. The talk and venue themselves were quite familiar—smart people sitting in a row, an air-conditioned room, a shiny projector. It looked like any lecture hall I’d spoken in.

Different humorous chicken and goat memes found on the Ugandan web. Images compiled by Samuel Kamugisha.

But the story of getting there was another matter entirely. I decided to take a long route, which had me walking past some chickens in coops. The road was mostly paved, but sometimes I had to walk on a dirt road. And that particular day I didn’t see any goats, but every now and then they’d cross my path.

As I’ve spent more time in Uganda and explored both Kampala and the upcountry regions, I saw more and more of them: chickens, goats, cows, a few pigs, the occasional duck. In the urban areas of the US and China, I’d grown used to a different menagerie, consisting mainly of cats, dogs and squirrels. But as a majority agricultural society, Uganda and its capital are filled with livestock, and the animals waddle, meh, oink and cluck away like a scene from the Farmer in the Dell.

I hadn’t realized it at the time, but my physical journey to talk about social and political memes from China helped gave me some insight into Uganda’s meme culture, and global internet culture in general.

Designing for Stories: Working with Homeless Youth in Boyle Heights

Editor’s Note: This post for the February ‘Openness Edition‘ comes from Jeff Hall, Elizabeth Gin and An Xiao Mina who discuss their project to facilitate personal storytelling by homeless youth from Jovenes, Inc. in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood in East Los Angeles. The team from the Media Design Practices/ Field Track program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California had so much success with the timeline structure that they’re packaging it for future use at Jovenes, Inc. and releasing it under a Creative Commons license so others can try it out in the field. This kind of repurposing of ethnographic tools is exactly the kind of sharing that we get excited about at EM and we encourage others to share their own tools and work processes in similar ways.

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Photo by the authors. All rights reserved.

Ethnography has a lot to offer design, as evidenced by the growing field of design and design-related research informed by the methods and practices of anthropology.  Within this emerging interdisciplinary space, the design community and the anthropological community now have an opportunity to ask the question – “If anthropology has offered so much for design – what can design offer anthropology?”

We explored this question as part of our work with Jovenes, Inc., a center for homeless youth in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood in East Los Angeles.  Our goal was to provide an opportunity for youth to tell their personal stories and experiences. These stories would assist the organization in learning more about its constituency and support applications for additional funding to improve its programming and services. We worked in the vein of Participatory Action Research, by Alice McIntyre, taking a collaborative approach to the design and storytelling process, ensuring that both the youths’ untapped creative abilities and our expertise and research were consistently utilized throughout the experience.

Instagram Ethnography in Uganda – Notes on Notes

Editor’s Note:  At Ethnography Matters, we love featuring the new generation of ethnographers who are experimenting with innovative techniques.

An Xiao Mina @anxiaostudio is a researcher, design strategist, and artist. She moved to Uganda for a few months to conduct ethnographic fieldwork. Instead of just using a traditional field toolkit (audio recorder, camera, notebook, laptop), An Xiao also incorporated social media apps into her documentation practice. In her first guest post on Ethnography Matters, An Xiao shares with us her methods for using Instagram and Tumblr to live fieldnote. 

An Xiao plays a central role in leading the ethnographic documentation of global memes. Her most recent talk dissects the political nature of memes in China. She writes about design and people on Core 77.  She has a  beautiful piece on the close collaboration of artists and villagers to save a Chinese village from demolition in Design Observer. And follow her on Instagram (@anxiaostudio) and tumblr for live fieldnotes! 

Check out past posts from guest bloggers. 

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In October and part of November, I had the privilege to live and work in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, and to spend additional time in nearby areas such as Masaka in Western Uganda and Oyam in Northern Uganda.  As I was traveling to explore technology use in urban and rural contexts around the country, I thought it would be a great opportunity to practice live fieldnotes on Tumblr and Instagram, a technique I picked up from Tricia Wang’s ethnographic practice.

I found that live fieldnotes came naturally to me.  I took photos with multiple cameras–a Canon SLR, a Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot, and of course my iPhone.  Thanks to Apple’s camera connection kit, I used my iPad to consolidate images, highlight my favorites, and then queue them up on Instagram.  Since I did not have regular internet access either via wifi or 3G, I would wait until I reached home to post them all.  The great convenience of Instagram is that it would then port the images directly to Tumblr and Flickr, where they would be tagged and sorted.