weekly INCITE

Introducing M a k i n g W i f i

To prevent Weekly INCITE from slowly turning into Kat’s random photoblog I’ve started a blog specifically for my Phd study in Australia looking at the visual culture of volunteer community wireless networks. It’s called M a k i n g W i f i. I’ll contine to blog here but I’ll try to keep it (mostly) related to INCITE work and research.

Add comment August 14th, 2006

In Eight-plicate, please

On Monday of this week, I rode my bicycle to the campus Kinkos, made $50 worth of photocopies, and inquired about the cost of sending the lot via FedEx to the UK ($90!). Moving swiftly onto the post office then, I stood in the queue for 40 minutes before paying $40 to send eight (8) copies of my ESRC End of Report Form and eight (8) copies of my Nominated Output to ESRC HQ in the UK.

It was worth every minute of queue and every penny of postage to have the bureaucratic endgame done. Not that I’m not deeply grateful to the ESRC for their support of my work. Not that I begrudge writing the report (it was actually really useful to write, if only because it convinced me that I got some things accomplished on this project). But it was a big task to fit in amongst lots of other big tasks, and at some level, filling out forms is just definitionally un-fun.

All done.

[But in terms of outputs and ongoingness, I've just had one paper, "A Welcome for Blogs," accepted to the journal Continuum, and I have two other papers, each of which is in a slightly different state of readiness, but both of which are pretty close to submittable. One is about online photography and publics; the other tries to draw some useful connections between online photography (photoblogs, flickr, etc.) and recent political Events like Abu Ghraib, www.nowthatsfuckedup.com and the ban on coffin photos.]

1 comment January 12th, 2006

Technology-as-Such

[NB: The following is a personal gripe upgraded to a kind of theoretical statement. A parvenu of a thought. But then, what is blogging? What is academic discourse?]

For the last couple of years, I’ve been bothered by something that is incredibly pervasive (like being bothered by air, one begins to suspect oneself as the problem). Viz., the confidence, brio even, with which people write about technology-as-such—all of technology, or the class of technology—as if that were any longer a cogent or stable category. But the real problem is, the problem with the problem (because doesn’t every problem need to become a problem in order to be a problem; no, surely that’s just sophistry; problems are problems, or else, they’re something else, right?)…anyway, the real problem is that I think it’s still important to be able to talk about technology-as-such. If only because the world (e.g. the Media, Bill Gates, the U.S. government, my father) still talks about it as such, and I believe it’s important for academic discourse and assorted meta-technological discourses to be able to take part in (and sometimes humbly comment upon) these discussions. And always starting one’s commentary with “But it isn’t possible to talk about this…” is perhaps not the most effective or endearing conversational strategy. But my thinking it’s still important to be able to talk about technology-as-such isn’t exactly a fiery manifesto, or even a modest proposal. Anyway, my point here being, I recently wrote a little unassuming paragraph which is the closest I’ve ever come to articulating how I think it’s still possible and desireable to write about technology-as-such. It’s not much; a slip of a thought; but it emboldened me:

Broader discussions of technology—of the sort which have so dominated conversations about online and digital photography, photoblogs, blogs, the Internet, etc.—often get caught up in their own problems of generality (or, of impersonality). What is a technology? And if we can identify one, does that mean we understand anything about how it functions technologically, in league with its sister technologies? Better, perhaps, to talk about a technological imagination, the circulation of certain forms, in public, as technologies and within a set of technological discourses.

-kris

p.s. there is a wonderful song called “Magnificence as Such,” written and first performed by The Red Krayola (on “Blues, Hollers, and Hellos”), later covered by David Grubbs (on “A Guess at the Riddle”).

Add comment December 30th, 2005

Kris Cohen’s photoblog paper in MC&S

It’s here.
Finally, after months of patiently waiting, Kris’s photoblog paper in Media, Culture and Society has been published. And it is worth the wait. Getting published in a journal like this is an incredible achievement at any stage in an academic career, considering Kris is just at the beginning of his, it’s indicative of bigger, even more impressive things to come.

What does the photoblog want?
Media, Culture & Society 2005 27: 883-901

Theoretical accounts of photography have persistently emphasized, departed from and returned to the issue of the Real, thereby positioning the Real behind or at the heart of what photography purportedly is and does. But these familiar and familiarizing consistencies in the writing about photography do not make photographs less of a paradox at the level of being (what they are), or less equivocal at the level of their expressive content (what they mean or know). Digital photography problematizes the issues yet further even while writing about photography reasserts the familiar pieties. This article presents the results of an ethnographic study of photoblogs as a way of addresssing impasses in the literature on photography and digital photography. Blogs have become popular in the last three years as an internet-based technology for writing the self. Photoblogs are a type of blog that adds photographs to text and hyperlinks in the telling of stories. In this article, I argue that photoblogs are (1) entities that identify the repetitions which paralyse writing about photography and (2) entities that want to position photographs as something more than an outcome, photobloggers as something more than selves (or authors) and the photoblog as something more than technology.

Requests for autographs from the author can be posted here. Oh, and any questions or queries about the paper can be left here as well.

Add comment November 25th, 2005

‘Methods in the real world’ in Bournemouth

Kate OJ and I are running a workshop called The problem of methodology this weekend in Bournemouth as part of the annual UniS MSc Social Research Weekend Conference. The theme this year – Doing it for Ourselves’: Revisions & renewals in social science methodology.

This is the blurb for our session on saturday:

Drawing on the conference theme of revisions and renewals in social science methodology this session will explore ways in which methodologies are challenged, reformulated and regenerated in the process of social research.

The first part of the session will reflect on the revisions and renewals in social science methodology prompted by new information and communication technologies and will discuss the ways in which using the internet, as both a research tool and a fieldsite, provides new ‘tools of the trade’ which pose particular methodological pitfalls and potentials for the researcher. Part two of the session will present a current case study of the challenges and rewards of methodological innovation. 73UrbanJourneys.com, an INCITE research project, looks at the relationship between technology use and senses of place through the lens of the bus. Using a website and weblog to gather, collate, analyse and present data presents many challenges to traditional ethnographic research such as new ways to consider the role of the researcher, interventions in the field, issues of transparency and representation. Part three of the session, taking a reflexive turn, will use vignettes developed from the experiences of past MSc students, now working in a variety of research settings, to form a basis for a more general discussion about the revisions and renewals in methodological strategies demanded by ‘real world’ research. Participants will be encouraged to draw on their own experiences in an exploration of ‘methodology’ as a dynamic, provocative part of the research process.

Nina, Vicky and I will also be running a workshop on sunday – When sociologists work with others: the challenges of an INCITE/RCA experiment – in which we will reflect on the interdisciplinary collaboration we were all involved in earlier this year. For a week in May seven sociologists from INCITE, UniS and Goldsmiths College were paired with seven Interaction Design students from the RCA. The original project webpage is here. Here is our abstract.

Social researchers often work in interdisciplinary teams. Learning the skills to work confidently and effectively in such situations is crucial, particularly as often you have to explain the nature of your methodologies to those who might be trained in completely different traditions. Yet through such collaborations renewals in sociological methodologies are possible. Furthermore, they are not only challenging but can be very enjoyable! In this session we will present a record of a collaboration between the Department of Sociology (through INCITE) and the Royal College of Art. For a week this Spring members from the Dept, both graduates and post-doctoral researchers, teamed up with interaction designers from the MA in Interaction Design. Much was explored about the nature of ‘translations’ necessary for sociological work to move outside its usual textual format. We will talk about what we learned and show you some of the prototypes which were developed directly out of ongoing social research projects.

I’ve never been to Bournemouth before. I’ve heard lots of things, both good and bad about it. But it’s near the sea, what can be bad about that, right?

Add comment November 16th, 2005