Bergson & the machine...

On Monday I went to the gym and decided to read while I was on the treadmill. I saw other people doing it - reading that is - and I only walk on the treadmill because I need to do some moderate intensity exercise every other day.  Anyway, other people read magazines and newspapers, but I have no time for those. I had started the Bergson, but had not gotten very far. The Kindle version of Matter and Memory is not particularly well formatted which meant that some parts were often difficult to read, but on the whole, I think the reading/exercise thing worked out. I managed to read about 16% of the book (that is how Kindle does pages) and be thoroughly bombarded with information that was at the same time interesting and complex. Some of the most interesting things I took away from this book so far (and 16% is not much) is that perception is acknowledged by what we have known before (as symbols and memories). 

"With the immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience".  

There also seemed to some other logic going on concerned with perception without memory, but it is not in my notes and not in my tired brain right now. I really loved how Bergson talked about representation and it being virtual and I will have to look more closely at that in relation to my research. As well as Foucault's book on Bergson. 

The other thing I wanted to mention is a small hooray that I have nearly finished all my transcribing of interviews. I cannot believe it actually. I am still struggling with one particularly hard interview where the audio recording was SO bad it makes it very frustrating to listen to. I have even contacted some previous participants and asked them follow up questions related to the new transcriptions. 

Tomorrow and Friday I will be focussing on writing. I am behind in this matter a little, although most of what I have to do is re-arranging the content I have. I wanted to get done before Feb 8th the literature review chapter and the concepts chapter. The concepts chapter is where I talk in more detail about the reasons for doing this research project - following on from the impetus contained in the literature review chapter. The concepts is about exploring ideas such as complexity in research, complexity in Archival Science, complexity in social phenomenon and where that has taken this research into a journey about exploring sense-making and reflexivity in the social media website, YouTube. 

I had a major analytical breakthrough the other day in relation to the theory about digital recordkeeping, digital archiving, digital storage - particularly with reference to capturing or collecting cultural materials. I cannot write too much about it in this blog as it is a major outcome of my research, but it really has to do with understanding containers of data. Hopefully I will write something about it in the future - maybe a paper. 

I had to get back to transcribing - I am not completely finished, the hooray was only small after all.