Words, get out of my head

I’m pushing the pause button on this blog, since it has become clear that it doesn’t fit my needs and practices right now.  Comments are turned off, so I don’t need to deal with spam moderation, but I’ll leave the archival posts up for the time being.  It is possible that I’ll revive this in a different form, should the need arise (and my disposition changes), so leave the feed in your reader if you want to be notified if/when it starts back up again.

Thanks,

Eric

Not sure if anyone is out there reading, other than the mangled-english porn-spam-bots that fill my comment moderation queue. But in case you are, I successfully defended my specialized field prelim on the morning of Feb. 8th. Shortly thereafter, as you can see above, cake was had.

Among other things, this milestone makes me wonder if I should wrap this blog up, now that its original purpose has come to a close. Clearly, I’ve not taken too well to blogging, as it involves freely revealing half-baked opinions and half-formed ideas to the world. This turns out to be a prospect that I’m either too Midwestern or too uptight (not mutually exclusive categories) to feel entirely comfortable with. So if I’m going to bother to continue this, I think I need to decide whether I’m going to a) try to get over those concerns, b) come to terms with a once-every-season posting schedule, or c) change to a more lightweight personal+research format.

An exchange from yesterday.

Me: “Mom is still at her meeting.”

Finn: (with great gusto) “I like meetings! I get bigger, I go to meetings sometimes. Go to work, go to meetings, when I get bigger.”

Anyone have a copy of this article? I’m having no luck finding it (locally or electronically), but keep seeing the citation pop up in papers relevant to my field prelim.

Musello, C. Studying the Home Mode: An Exploration of
Family Photography and Visual Communication. Studies in
Visual Communication 6, 1 (1980) 23-42

Figured I’d pass this along and activate the social networks of any readers doing LIS work, or with LIS friends & colleagues: SI is in another faculty hiring phase.

I’m happy to say that my poster abstract to ACM Group 2007 was accepted (and with nice reviews, as well!). If you look at the submitted draft, you’ll notice some familiar themes and diagrams.

If you’re local to UofM, come by SINorth tomorrow at 11:30 for the 4th annual PhD poster session, and FIRST kickoff event — I’ll be standing around and yapping in front of an early draft of the poster.

Last year at the SI PhD poster session, I thought “hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was a venue for all the SI faculty and students to hear about student research more than just once a year?”
So, now there is!

I’m helping organize a new SI student research series with Tom Finholt and Karen Woollams. Every two weeks, on Fridays through out the Fall, specific PhD and masters students will be invited to give a public talk about their research. (And yes, lunch will also be provided.) We’re also talking about having a scheduled faculty discussant there at each talk, which would be a nice addition to spur and shape audience response.
The series should help accomplish two goals:

1. For the individual student — Professional development. Each student will more practice talking about your work in front of a mixed audience, and to get additional feedback about the work. The public, mixed audience is key. While there are plenty of opportunities to give practice talks and so on to your lab group, we’ve all seen people in conferences and job talks get flustered and crash and burn when someone in the audience throws a curveball question that wasn’t expected. Given the interdisciplinarity of the work that goes on at SI, these kinds of questions are going to be thrown all of us students at some point, so we’d best practice on how to field them.
2. For the School — Raising the awareness and profile of student research (both internally and externally). I think the students here are doing some really interesting things, so this a more public way to showcase that work. It should also be a good bridge building endeavor between the PhD, MSI and Faculty populations as well.

I’m going to hold off on announcing specific speakers until we get some of the details a bit more hammered out, but the tentative Fall schedule is shaping up like this:

9/21: Phd Poster Session
10/5: eSocial Science talks
10/19: ASIST talks
11/2: GROUP talks
11/16: ICD talks
11/30: Master’s thesis talks
12/14: ARM talks

So now the part I need help with–the name. I’ve been calling it the “Featured Student Research Series”…which is accurate and descriptive, but dry. Any suggestions? I’m fresh out of clever acronyms.

Ok, still trying to do shorter, more regular posts.
Last week was a good week. I got letter of intent for an NSF pilot grant put together and shipped out, related to my ongoing interests about the interactions of amateurs and professionals in online creative communities. Now to start fleshing out the full proposal over the next 2 months…

I also whipped together a poster abstract for Group 07 dealing with my ongoing field prelim work. I wasn’t planning on submitting anything, but then the conference organizers extended the deadline by a week…and I couldn’t think of any good reason not to want to go to Sanibel Island in November.

I was fairly pleased at how both turned out, and though they were just short pieces, I was particularly pleased that I was able to kick both of ‘em out fairly rapidly. At times, I feel like I’m getting slower and slower at writing the further I go along in grad school, so it was nice to prove myself wrong.

This week, I’m camping out on central campus. I need to pick up my reading and notetaking pace for the field prelim, and have related meetings with two of my committee members. The basement GSI office @ Shapiro is pleasantly unoccupied and low in distractions, so I’ll be in there with the shades drawn for most of the week.

I’m way behind in the blogging. I cast envious eyes at Libby’s increasing dexterity at the short off-the-cuff style post, and Emilee’s sincere excitement in her (sometimes seriously detailed!) process posts. I’ve been doing more private writing this summer, but moving it public has been a different matter.

I should tell you where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing over the past month (as well as some of the interesting and related work I heard about). But instead, I’m just going to ramble a bit about this evening’s note-taking:

One key point that Charlotte Linde makes when she talks about the construction and presentation of “life stories” is that they need to be plausible rather than correct, and that plausibility is highly specific to the social setting in which that life story is being told.

In taking notes on a Jerome Bruner article from 1991, I found this nice quote reiterating this point:

“We organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative—stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on…Unlike the constructions generated by logical and scientific procedures that can be weeded out by falsification, narrative constructions can only achieve ‘verisimiltude.’ Narratives, then, area a version of reality whose acceptiblity is governed by convention and ‘narrative necessity’ rather than by empirical verification and logical requiredness…”

In this quote, you can see how Bruner goes out of his way in this article to position the narrative perspective against classic Piaget-style rationalist viewpoints – eg. we have studied how kids learn to be ‘little mathematicians’ because it was easy to study, not because it is an accurate description of how kids actually think.

Bruner also positions narratives as interactional from the get-go in his framework, and is thus they’re related not only to the current social context, but also to notions of situated knowledge and situated skills: “Narrative is a conventional form, transmitted cultural and constrained by each individual’s level of mastery and by his conglomerate of prosthetic devices, colleagues and mentors.”

I thought it was interesting point of connections, but maybe I’m seeing forests at this point in the process where there are really just still trees.

Really enjoyed reading Chalfen’s “Snapshot versions of life” last week. His analysis of ‘home mode production’ of snapshots, photo albums and home movies gives me an additional set of vocabulary for my areas of interest. The book also provides a lot of very concrete descriptive data about norms of content and behavior in this area. This helps emphasize the point that evaluating home mode content through a lens of what is “correct” or quality (in professional/mass market terms) largely misses the point — and obscures a lot of the distinct motivations and contexts of home mode production.

Some of the behavioral summaries may no longer be entirely accurate (the book was written in 1987), but hey, that’s why researching emergent social effects of ICT is fun, no?

One of the more interesting concepts that came out of this and other related recent readings about amateur/home photography (Jo Spense, Patricia Holland, Don Slater) is the fact that snapshots serve social and communicative functions, but not as standalone visual narratives. Rather, they serve as mediating objects – they don’t contain “contentâ€? as much as they provide an occasion and focus for reflection. “The narrative remains in the heads of the picturemakers and on-camera participants for verbal telling and re-telling during exhibition events. Significant details remain as part of the context; the story does not appear in the album or on the screen; it is not ‘told’ by the imagesâ€? (Chalfen, p. 70)
This might position snapshots as connecting to (and facilitating) oral traditions of family history, which is an interesting spin to consider.