The other day I saw a student walking past me, listening to an ipod, while reading a book.
Impressed as I was by his multi-tasking I felt a bit sad that he couldn't appreciate the environment without cocooning himself in another worlds.
It comes back to the soundscape/soundwalk idea - how can we become aware of our surroundings (even if it is only a dingy campus path) if we are visually entranced by a book, and aurally by music?
Perhaps this partly explains our increasingly weak relationship with landscape....
Thursday, 18 October 2007
Thursday, 19 July 2007
sense of place
How do we interpret the world around us? Does where we come from define who we are and our sense of identity? How is a 'sense of place' incorporated into the internet? Do we still need to relate to others online by where they are geographically located?
It seems to me that location is important - whether on Second Life(SL) or through geographical networks on Facebook (e.g. London, Manchester). But does this imbue us a with a sense of community with others that are co-located or simply allow us to form preconceived notions of others based on where they are?
Does the internet form its own 'sense of place'? As in, "where do you come from/meet? MySpace, Bebo." Some sites are trying explicitly to form places - Nuzizo is one example of this, with neighbourhoods inside an overall city complex and SL is another obvious example. Yet on SL I don't feel any affinity for a particular island or district, although maybe I've just not found 'home' there yet.
Does mobile technology infringe on our sense of where we come from? Personally, when people ask where I come from I feel partially at a loss. I normally claim Perth as that's where I currently live, but I don't consider myself to be from Perth and I normally qualify my answer with something to that effect. But in essence I don't know where I've come from, as I've probably only lived in any one place for a maximum of about 4 years at a time. I wonder if our increasing mobility leads us to a lack of roots. I've noticed that quite a lot of the Scottish travellers' stories are set quite precisely in location but not necessarily time. I'm not sure why that is, perhaps to give a common set of reference points to the audience or to authenticate the tale.
Final thought, I heard an interesting phrase yesterday whilst half-watching 'Building Britain' on BBC1:
"London does not belong to the people, people belong to London" - how true is this of social technologies?
It seems to me that location is important - whether on Second Life(SL) or through geographical networks on Facebook (e.g. London, Manchester). But does this imbue us a with a sense of community with others that are co-located or simply allow us to form preconceived notions of others based on where they are?
Does the internet form its own 'sense of place'? As in, "where do you come from/meet? MySpace, Bebo." Some sites are trying explicitly to form places - Nuzizo is one example of this, with neighbourhoods inside an overall city complex and SL is another obvious example. Yet on SL I don't feel any affinity for a particular island or district, although maybe I've just not found 'home' there yet.
Does mobile technology infringe on our sense of where we come from? Personally, when people ask where I come from I feel partially at a loss. I normally claim Perth as that's where I currently live, but I don't consider myself to be from Perth and I normally qualify my answer with something to that effect. But in essence I don't know where I've come from, as I've probably only lived in any one place for a maximum of about 4 years at a time. I wonder if our increasing mobility leads us to a lack of roots. I've noticed that quite a lot of the Scottish travellers' stories are set quite precisely in location but not necessarily time. I'm not sure why that is, perhaps to give a common set of reference points to the audience or to authenticate the tale.
Final thought, I heard an interesting phrase yesterday whilst half-watching 'Building Britain' on BBC1:
"London does not belong to the people, people belong to London" - how true is this of social technologies?
Thursday, 5 July 2007
can a soundwalk ever be simply sound?
I took part in a 'soundwalk' from the main conference building to the Whitworth Art Gallery at the Beyond Text? Conference last weekend.
A large group of us took the walk through the campus in the steady rain. We were advised to walk in silence and told that a true soundwalk should be taken in isolation, such that you should be unable to hear other people's footsteps. Alas in this case it was not to be, one of the female members of the group had clip-clop high heels on which resonated in the empty corridors between buildings.
It was an interesting experience, perhaps more so as I became aware, not of sound, but of the haptic nature of the environment. Apart from the clip-clop of shoes the most distinct sounds to me was the gentle insistent patter of the rain and the fading in and out of road traffic as we walked closer and further from the main road.
However, as we walked my bag (containing my impractically heavy laptop, 3 books, notebook, brick of a phone, wallet etc) became heavier with each step, digging into my shoulder. I could feel the rain hitting my waterproof jacket and my hair and face. I felt the texture of the road beneath my (also impractical) thin soled boots and, once we reached the muted peace of the park, the squelchy soft mud underfoot.
Back in the conference, a interminably long closing session speech noted that someone (I didn't catch who) suggested that there is only one sense - touch. I.e. sound physically hits eardrums. It was only then that I realised that I had failed to listen after the first couple of minutes of the soundwalk and simply noted what was important to me. I query whether sound means much in isolation - in our Western culture anyway. Does anyone go to hear a band nowadays? Whenever I go to a gig it's a case of 'going to see a band'. After all I can hear them much better on CD and mp3. To me, sound is only one element - without the visual I lose interest.
In fact, I have to confess I fell asleep at one of Steven Feld's talks. He was playing a recording of water and sleigh bells. The concert hall was dark and the sounds so relaxing...
But maybe that's just me.
A large group of us took the walk through the campus in the steady rain. We were advised to walk in silence and told that a true soundwalk should be taken in isolation, such that you should be unable to hear other people's footsteps. Alas in this case it was not to be, one of the female members of the group had clip-clop high heels on which resonated in the empty corridors between buildings.
It was an interesting experience, perhaps more so as I became aware, not of sound, but of the haptic nature of the environment. Apart from the clip-clop of shoes the most distinct sounds to me was the gentle insistent patter of the rain and the fading in and out of road traffic as we walked closer and further from the main road.
However, as we walked my bag (containing my impractically heavy laptop, 3 books, notebook, brick of a phone, wallet etc) became heavier with each step, digging into my shoulder. I could feel the rain hitting my waterproof jacket and my hair and face. I felt the texture of the road beneath my (also impractical) thin soled boots and, once we reached the muted peace of the park, the squelchy soft mud underfoot.
Back in the conference, a interminably long closing session speech noted that someone (I didn't catch who) suggested that there is only one sense - touch. I.e. sound physically hits eardrums. It was only then that I realised that I had failed to listen after the first couple of minutes of the soundwalk and simply noted what was important to me. I query whether sound means much in isolation - in our Western culture anyway. Does anyone go to hear a band nowadays? Whenever I go to a gig it's a case of 'going to see a band'. After all I can hear them much better on CD and mp3. To me, sound is only one element - without the visual I lose interest.
In fact, I have to confess I fell asleep at one of Steven Feld's talks. He was playing a recording of water and sleigh bells. The concert hall was dark and the sounds so relaxing...
But maybe that's just me.
Tuesday, 3 July 2007
Beyond Text? Not that I could see...
I'm just back from Manchester, having attended 'Beyond Text? Image:Voice::Sound:Object Synaesthetic and Sensory Practices in Anthropology' conference, part of the 10th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film.
I was intrigued and amazed to note how reliant all the speakers were on text. Bar a couple of examples, I was stunned to hear entire academic papers read verbatim. As a result, I found them impossible to follow (and not simply because of the jargon-packed language). Many of the papers overran their time slot, and the ones that did manage it only accomplished the time keeping due to their ability to rattle off in excess of 250 words per minute, rendering their speech virtually unintelligible.
This text dominance seemed particularly ironic considering the conference's focus on visual anthropology and its apparent affection towards the visual arts.
The most refreshing presentation I saw was Tomie Hahn and Curtis Bahn's Sensational knowledge, Sensational Ethnography. They presented a live performance of 'Streams' which seemed to me to epitomise 'Beyond Text'.
In more conventional but less text-based presenations David MacDougall presented visual clips expressing non-visual sensory attributes and Steven Feld spoke about Honk Horn Music in Accra, Ghana.
I was intrigued and amazed to note how reliant all the speakers were on text. Bar a couple of examples, I was stunned to hear entire academic papers read verbatim. As a result, I found them impossible to follow (and not simply because of the jargon-packed language). Many of the papers overran their time slot, and the ones that did manage it only accomplished the time keeping due to their ability to rattle off in excess of 250 words per minute, rendering their speech virtually unintelligible.
This text dominance seemed particularly ironic considering the conference's focus on visual anthropology and its apparent affection towards the visual arts.
The most refreshing presentation I saw was Tomie Hahn and Curtis Bahn's Sensational knowledge, Sensational Ethnography. They presented a live performance of 'Streams' which seemed to me to epitomise 'Beyond Text'.
In more conventional but less text-based presenations David MacDougall presented visual clips expressing non-visual sensory attributes and Steven Feld spoke about Honk Horn Music in Accra, Ghana.
Wednesday, 28 March 2007
Massively Multi-Learner Workshop
This workshop was one I attended last week (22nd March 07) at the University of Paisley and centred virtually (no pun intended) exclusively around SecondLife. I thought it covered some fascinating projects and ideas and so decided to write up my notes here on my blog rather than condemning them to my handwritten, archaic paper journal.
NB. A lot of these relate to Second Life spaces and are predominately for my own benefit.
If any of the speakers/organisers ever happen to read this and feel misrepresented then please feel free to contact me and I will happily edit my interpretation of events :-)
The overall themes centred around education and the role of learning in virtual environments. Unfortunately, the first scheduled speaker Carl Potts was unable to attend which was disappointing as the presentation was about World of Warcraft. So the first speaker was actually Dave Taylor from NPL, presenting Knowledge Transfer & Public Engagement in Second Life, where Knowledge Transfer means a knowledge that will cause receiving party to change or alter their behaviour. Dave's blog describes NPL's presence and work in SL much more eloquently than I can so I will not try and replicate it here. Suffice to say that my eyes were beginning to be opened to the possibilities of SL at this point, in terms of the Info islands and the New Media Consortium, Space Island Cluster - most of which I have still to explore! An interesting development with potential for my research is the current beta testing of spatialised sound and speech in SL, where stereo sound and volume is varied depending on the virtual source and distance from your avatar. One of the potential uses for this Dave cited is in learning languages where your tutor accompanies you to shops, restaurants etc., so you can practice your language skills. Final news flash - other species may be in SL in the near future... some form of primates I think.
Finally, I see the benefit of posting online - the ability to link! Aleks Krotoski (Social networking in Virtual Worlds) was the next speaker and you can even see her presentation slides online at SlideShare. She cunningly reminds me that the presentations were filmed and should be posted online shortly. However, here's a couple of notes from her talk that I scribbled down. Firstly, virtual communities can be places of ritual - soon after the July bombings in London a virtual memorial appeared on SL. Secondly, I found the sheer scale of her (phd) research staggering. Aleks has surveyed over 10,000 SL members and mapped their social networks. Even the small scale, localised versions she showed us onscreen were a tangled web of complexity. Just thinking about the wealth of data scared me! I suppose it depends on the depth of collected info from each member...
Schome from Peter Twining was the next presentation. Schome proposes a lifelong learning environment. Conventional style research (e.g. focus groups, interviews) with students and educators on improvements on education revealed little. So, how do you 'break free' and generate 'out of box' thinking? One solution is to use SL and provide lived experiences, where virtually anything is possible. How will these new forms of representation and information change us and the way we communicate? Part of the benefit to me of attending the workshop was discovering new (to me) web technologies - like a bliki (it's a blog with wiki features).
Laz Allen from TPLD presented Games in the Classroom. This was the only non-SL based presentation. An overall theme of the talk was that graphics (essentially 3D) don't matter to the users - the game play is what is important. Bad 3D graphics are more likely to turn players off than good 2D graphics.
Jeremy Kemp presented Sloodle - really interesting but not that relevant to my research I think. Slides online available here. I think it's like a SL version of Moodle...
Mike Hobbs discussed the possible use of SL in teaching programming skills to students. This seemed to be slightly constrained by the limited type of scripting available in SL (LSL - Linden Scripting Language). The aim in this project now is to teach programming design not how to code.
The most interesting and intriguing presentation to me was by Annabeth Robinson, entitled Integrating Second Life into Design for Digital Media. As AngryBeth Shortbread (SL) she makes virtual interactive art installations as seen on blip.tv and obviously in SL. Apart from this, what I found exciting was the way that she uses SL to teach students video production and animation skills. Animation skills can be taught through either using SL to produce machinima as a finished product or as an animatic, where custom animations can be created externally using Poser or something similar and creating the animation rigs too. Video skills can be learnt through scripting and storyboarding, shot composition & camera movement, sound design, production design (in terms of textures, objects etc) & directing skills (other avatars). Obviously one of the huge benefits of SL is the ability to create shots that would impossible in a real-world student film project sense (e.g. huge sets, stunts etc).
The final speaker of the day was Mike Reddy - Putting the Real in to Surreal. To be honest, by this point in the day my mind was a bit frazzled so my memories of this talk are hazy. I think it was quite AI and scientific - one of the PhD students is working on creating plants/flowers that mutate once copied and recreated.
All in all, interesting day - makes me want to use SL a lot more!! Now I just have to get a laptop so I can...
NB. A lot of these relate to Second Life spaces and are predominately for my own benefit.
If any of the speakers/organisers ever happen to read this and feel misrepresented then please feel free to contact me and I will happily edit my interpretation of events :-)
The overall themes centred around education and the role of learning in virtual environments. Unfortunately, the first scheduled speaker Carl Potts was unable to attend which was disappointing as the presentation was about World of Warcraft. So the first speaker was actually Dave Taylor from NPL, presenting Knowledge Transfer & Public Engagement in Second Life, where Knowledge Transfer means a knowledge that will cause receiving party to change or alter their behaviour. Dave's blog describes NPL's presence and work in SL much more eloquently than I can so I will not try and replicate it here. Suffice to say that my eyes were beginning to be opened to the possibilities of SL at this point, in terms of the Info islands and the New Media Consortium, Space Island Cluster - most of which I have still to explore! An interesting development with potential for my research is the current beta testing of spatialised sound and speech in SL, where stereo sound and volume is varied depending on the virtual source and distance from your avatar. One of the potential uses for this Dave cited is in learning languages where your tutor accompanies you to shops, restaurants etc., so you can practice your language skills. Final news flash - other species may be in SL in the near future... some form of primates I think.
Finally, I see the benefit of posting online - the ability to link! Aleks Krotoski (Social networking in Virtual Worlds) was the next speaker and you can even see her presentation slides online at SlideShare. She cunningly reminds me that the presentations were filmed and should be posted online shortly. However, here's a couple of notes from her talk that I scribbled down. Firstly, virtual communities can be places of ritual - soon after the July bombings in London a virtual memorial appeared on SL. Secondly, I found the sheer scale of her (phd) research staggering. Aleks has surveyed over 10,000 SL members and mapped their social networks. Even the small scale, localised versions she showed us onscreen were a tangled web of complexity. Just thinking about the wealth of data scared me! I suppose it depends on the depth of collected info from each member...
Schome from Peter Twining was the next presentation. Schome proposes a lifelong learning environment. Conventional style research (e.g. focus groups, interviews) with students and educators on improvements on education revealed little. So, how do you 'break free' and generate 'out of box' thinking? One solution is to use SL and provide lived experiences, where virtually anything is possible. How will these new forms of representation and information change us and the way we communicate? Part of the benefit to me of attending the workshop was discovering new (to me) web technologies - like a bliki (it's a blog with wiki features).
Laz Allen from TPLD presented Games in the Classroom. This was the only non-SL based presentation. An overall theme of the talk was that graphics (essentially 3D) don't matter to the users - the game play is what is important. Bad 3D graphics are more likely to turn players off than good 2D graphics.
Jeremy Kemp presented Sloodle - really interesting but not that relevant to my research I think. Slides online available here. I think it's like a SL version of Moodle...
Mike Hobbs discussed the possible use of SL in teaching programming skills to students. This seemed to be slightly constrained by the limited type of scripting available in SL (LSL - Linden Scripting Language). The aim in this project now is to teach programming design not how to code.
The most interesting and intriguing presentation to me was by Annabeth Robinson, entitled Integrating Second Life into Design for Digital Media. As AngryBeth Shortbread (SL) she makes virtual interactive art installations as seen on blip.tv and obviously in SL. Apart from this, what I found exciting was the way that she uses SL to teach students video production and animation skills. Animation skills can be taught through either using SL to produce machinima as a finished product or as an animatic, where custom animations can be created externally using Poser or something similar and creating the animation rigs too. Video skills can be learnt through scripting and storyboarding, shot composition & camera movement, sound design, production design (in terms of textures, objects etc) & directing skills (other avatars). Obviously one of the huge benefits of SL is the ability to create shots that would impossible in a real-world student film project sense (e.g. huge sets, stunts etc).
The final speaker of the day was Mike Reddy - Putting the Real in to Surreal. To be honest, by this point in the day my mind was a bit frazzled so my memories of this talk are hazy. I think it was quite AI and scientific - one of the PhD students is working on creating plants/flowers that mutate once copied and recreated.
All in all, interesting day - makes me want to use SL a lot more!! Now I just have to get a laptop so I can...
Monday, 12 March 2007
Social presence & Sherlock
I was re-reading an article yesterday by Rogers & Lea (2005) on 'Social Presence in Distributed Group Environments: the role of Social Identity' and I got to thinking (somewhat convolutedly) about ubiquitous computing and interactivity. And, bizarrely, Sherlock Holmes.
My train of thought (I think) ran something like this:
Rogers & Lea discuss social presence as key to developing meaningful relationships and group dynamics, whether this is virtual or real life. Presence is either social or physical, where social 'refers to being and communicating with the implication that the medium appears to be transformed into a social entity' and physical presence is the 'sense of being physically located somewhere and implies that the medium appears to be invisible.' So, equally, the physical presence can exist in online and offline situations, where the degree of immersion renders the medium transparent.
In 'real' face to face conversation both the social and physical presence exist, in the form of socially learnt context and geographical location. Rogers & Lea claim that this can exist in online situations where the social presence (through our socially constructed identities) is carried as a personal cognitive representation. It is social presence that bonds members of a group together, working for a common cause/set of principles and, paradoxically, 'environments rich in interpersonal information may, in fact, undermine group identity and result in process losses for the collaborating group.'
This links to the uses of storytelling (where the stories are not your own) as a means of revealing aspects of yourself and your personality, and similarly, I think the multiplicity of identity through different media.
So this ties in with ubicomp quite nicely in terms of physical presence and the 'invisible computer'. For me, reading can provide the invisible medium, more so than any other (which may explain my addiction to buying books) but there is a school of thought which suggests that this a dying hobby. Technology changes the way we write. I used to compose essays in their entirety on paper, only using a computer to type up. Now, I switch between the two, using my pc to compose and edit as I write. But I still print them off to re-draft.
Where are the multimedia essays technologists have promised? Combining text, visuals, audio and video? Is it because creating high quality of each compromises the whole? Each media requires a different skill set.
And so, anyone who has managed to keep reading this blog might be asking - where's Sherlock? It was related to lateral thinking and thought processes. I was reminded of Sherlock following Watson's silent thinking, similarly, Poe's character Dupin is able to interrupt a thought conversation at the right point by reflecting on external stimuli. Admittedly, I did say at the start that it was a convoluted link, which mirrors the final thought processes quite neatly. I suppose Joyce's stream of consciousness extends this.
My train of thought (I think) ran something like this:
Rogers & Lea discuss social presence as key to developing meaningful relationships and group dynamics, whether this is virtual or real life. Presence is either social or physical, where social 'refers to being and communicating with the implication that the medium appears to be transformed into a social entity' and physical presence is the 'sense of being physically located somewhere and implies that the medium appears to be invisible.' So, equally, the physical presence can exist in online and offline situations, where the degree of immersion renders the medium transparent.
In 'real' face to face conversation both the social and physical presence exist, in the form of socially learnt context and geographical location. Rogers & Lea claim that this can exist in online situations where the social presence (through our socially constructed identities) is carried as a personal cognitive representation. It is social presence that bonds members of a group together, working for a common cause/set of principles and, paradoxically, 'environments rich in interpersonal information may, in fact, undermine group identity and result in process losses for the collaborating group.'
This links to the uses of storytelling (where the stories are not your own) as a means of revealing aspects of yourself and your personality, and similarly, I think the multiplicity of identity through different media.
So this ties in with ubicomp quite nicely in terms of physical presence and the 'invisible computer'. For me, reading can provide the invisible medium, more so than any other (which may explain my addiction to buying books) but there is a school of thought which suggests that this a dying hobby. Technology changes the way we write. I used to compose essays in their entirety on paper, only using a computer to type up. Now, I switch between the two, using my pc to compose and edit as I write. But I still print them off to re-draft.
Where are the multimedia essays technologists have promised? Combining text, visuals, audio and video? Is it because creating high quality of each compromises the whole? Each media requires a different skill set.
And so, anyone who has managed to keep reading this blog might be asking - where's Sherlock? It was related to lateral thinking and thought processes. I was reminded of Sherlock following Watson's silent thinking, similarly, Poe's character Dupin is able to interrupt a thought conversation at the right point by reflecting on external stimuli. Admittedly, I did say at the start that it was a convoluted link, which mirrors the final thought processes quite neatly. I suppose Joyce's stream of consciousness extends this.
Monday, 19 February 2007
Ears that open mouths
"There are ears that have the power to open mouths" - I'm not sure who said that...
I heard the above quote just last Saturday at a storytelling workshop "Looking for Peace" led by Angela Knowles. I think it was only then that I realised the importance of listening.
Storytelling fascinates me. I think it's because it's similar to reading a novel. There are different styles of storytellers, different types of stories, yet the same stories are told uniquely. I'm not sure what it is that I find so compelling - it may be because, unlike a film, where you don't have to use imagination, a story can be more vivid because you do. Maybe it's the slower pace, the concentration on one thing as opposed to 101 things.
We had to split into groups at the workshop and each learn and tell a story to the rest of the group. I saw a fantastic bird which had 'flown through a rainbow' and smelt freshly baked bread and cinnamon buns.
I suppose the importance of the initial quote is for me the crux of storytelling. As a 'listener' I find it absorbing - a collective experience which wouldn't happen if the audience didn't listen or participate.
Perhaps one day an audience will 'participate' and be immersed in a story I tell...
I heard the above quote just last Saturday at a storytelling workshop "Looking for Peace" led by Angela Knowles. I think it was only then that I realised the importance of listening.
Storytelling fascinates me. I think it's because it's similar to reading a novel. There are different styles of storytellers, different types of stories, yet the same stories are told uniquely. I'm not sure what it is that I find so compelling - it may be because, unlike a film, where you don't have to use imagination, a story can be more vivid because you do. Maybe it's the slower pace, the concentration on one thing as opposed to 101 things.
We had to split into groups at the workshop and each learn and tell a story to the rest of the group. I saw a fantastic bird which had 'flown through a rainbow' and smelt freshly baked bread and cinnamon buns.
I suppose the importance of the initial quote is for me the crux of storytelling. As a 'listener' I find it absorbing - a collective experience which wouldn't happen if the audience didn't listen or participate.
Perhaps one day an audience will 'participate' and be immersed in a story I tell...
Tuesday, 6 February 2007
What constitutes ethnography?
I'm writing up my transfer report at the moment and I've hit the 'methods' chapter. Originally I intended using ethnography to explore information seeking in oral cultures, however due to difficulties in accessing study groups and my evolving research themes, I decided that ethnography was not the best method for me.
Still I got to thinking, what actually is ethnography? Today, in the modern, electronic world? Ethnography seems to be a buzz word at the moment adopted by non-anthropological fields, such as HCI. Denzin talks about the stages of ethnography, its evolution from imperial roots looking at 'primitive' cultures to reflecting on our own culture and society.
Perhaps the terminology is too sweeping, the meaning of ethnography seems to have changed, comparatively experimental writing styles such as poetry and auto-ethnography strive to establish validity.
Still I got to thinking, what actually is ethnography? Today, in the modern, electronic world? Ethnography seems to be a buzz word at the moment adopted by non-anthropological fields, such as HCI. Denzin talks about the stages of ethnography, its evolution from imperial roots looking at 'primitive' cultures to reflecting on our own culture and society.
Perhaps the terminology is too sweeping, the meaning of ethnography seems to have changed, comparatively experimental writing styles such as poetry and auto-ethnography strive to establish validity.
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