As an anthropologist, Paula Uimonen is one of the pioneers of the emerging sub-discipline digital anthropology, which focuses on digital media and communication technologies in different social and cultural contexts. Her published PhD dissertation, Transnational.Dynamics[@]Development.Net (2001) was the first book to provide a comparative, empirical study of Internet development in the developing world, based on multi-sited fieldwork in Southeast Asia and cyberspace.
Digital anthropology is closely related to transnational anthropology, media anthropology, and visual anthropology. The first scholar to treat the Internet as a tool for social development (1997), Paula Uimonen has worked entensively in ICT for Development (ICT4D), advising UN, development, and government agencies on the strategic integration of ICT in poverty reduction. This book builds on her professional trajectory within and outside academia. Paula Uimonen is currently Director of The Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions (Spider), a resource center for ICT4D based at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University.