My name is Oliver Ding and I am the founder of CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab). The Activity Analysis website is an upgraded version of the Activity U project which is a knowledge curation project of CALL.
The name of this website is inspired by the above two books. The word "Activity" is adopted from Perspectives on Activity Theory while the word of "Analysis" is inspired by Frame Analysis.
- Activity: looking at human activities and social practices.
- Analysis: linking theory and social research.
This website is designed for people who want to conduct studies of human activities and reflect on their own daily life world with theoretical perspectives.
- Research: scholars, students, professional researchers, independent researchers, policymakers...
- Reflection: creative people...
Connecting Theory and Practice
The seed of this website is Oliver Ding's Activity U project which is a Knowledge Curation project. Oliver started the project on August 19, 2020, with a diagram called "Activity U" which is a test of the "HERO U" framework. He wrote an article to explain the diagram. Eventually, it expanded from one post to a series of articles. Finally, he wrote three books (drafts) from August 2020 to March 2021.
This is a fantastic journey.
In Oct 2021, Oliver returned to the Activity U project and started the Phase II of the project. Activity Theory has inspired many empirical studies in various domains. Oliver planned to curate some domain special empirical studies and useful heuristics for practitioners. However, he was busy on the D as Diagramming project from April 2021 to Oct 2021.
He once mentioned that a database or wiki may a good approach for curating heuristics for activity-theoretical studies. This idea led to the Activity Analysis website.
Though the original idea of Activity Analysis is the Activity U project (Phase II), Oliver expanded the scope of the site from Activity Theory to Practice Theories and beyond.