Culture in the Continuum: Youtube, small stories and memory making

Bergson & the machine...

2012-01-25T19:55:00.001+11:00

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.

Yeah but...

2012-01-21T12:12:00.001+11:00

I wrote an article in 2007 about indie film makers and how their work was highly perishable. Well, the article was not about digital formats, rather, that indie film often does not get included in mainstream institutions. In Australia we have the National Film and Sound Archive, who will collect indie works, so long as they are significant, whatever that means. The issue I sought to address in my article was that these institutions were focussed on content as being the 'object' for collection, rather than thinking about anything else. What else might there be? Well, my research project goes some way to addressing this (and now I realise I did not add this context to the introduction I thought I finished yesterday - damn). But when the focus is on content above anything else - take for example the recent Variety article I found through a friend on Facebook - it becomes an issue of preservation of master copies of a film. Is working with/collecting/researching/analysing/understanding digital film and processes of digital film making actually about preserving master copies as if they were reels in canisters? In the Variety article it talks about digital workflow - now that might be interesting to keep for posterity. Why? Why aren't institutions asking people what they would like to have kept? Who are the researchers of the future? When might the future come? What about using digital film for use to create new things? I know we love our copyright legislation, but who knows what might be the creative process and standards for 'copying' in the future? This is what my research is about - how to go about asking people what they want? Who do you ask? What questions might archivists want to ask people now to anticipate for the future? Is the collection policy an outdated tool for developing collections? Are the institutions we have now actually collecting what is useful for the future? It took film archives ages to start collecting scripts and all the rest of the so-called, ephemera (grrr. this term makes me cross) because people are interested in context. What is the context of digital? These questions have been asked plenty before, but I think that some research and recordkeepers think they can answer this question with their own intelligence/learning and not by asking the communities that would like to see digital film captured and retained as evidence of culture.

And now I realise that there is something else I need to add to my introduction.

How to define complexity...

2012-01-17T16:31:00.001+11:00

I have been writing the introduction to my thesis over the last week or so and I think it is looking good. One of the issues I have come up against is how to describe and explain the concept of complexity. Its complex right? I think I have written before in this blog about not being able to figuring out that the primary theme of the research was about complexity. This is well and good, but how can complexity be described? Over summer I have been reading the book by Norman, that I have also mentioned in another blog post, about complexity and this book has been quite useful in helping to understand it, but how can I apply it to my context? I realised when I was writing the introduction that I need to adapt and explain concepts so that they are applicable and useful in an Archival Science (research) context. Hence my issues with complexity.

I have come up with some ideas about how complexity can be understood in my research. Firstly, complexity is about movement, space and time. I talk about it unfolding as part of the research process. I also talk about it being concerned with multiple processes and inter-activities that take place between people and technology. My specific context is the digital and this is where the first point of complexity occurs. People may refer to social media as being part of the virtual or digital world, which often refers to the internet. But social media and the digital tools and outcomes for social media, such as video, is not just about the online world, but also about living in multiple worlds. People take photos and add it to their computer, or print them, or put them on Flickr or post them to Facebook or show them on their laptop or tablet to friends. The camera itself does not live in the digital world. It does not even live!

I have explained complexity as about understanding or embracing contextuality or layers of context. This is about understanding identity and levels of identity as they are formed in communities, in families, in ourselves, in workplaces, in nations and so on.

I have also explained complexity as being a theoretical construct, which is a kind of reference to complexity theory, which is used like a model to help people make sense of multiplicity. Particularly when it comes to the way people interact with communities and technology (and technologies and communities).

I have also said that complexity in Archival Science is about researching something in the now - about researching the story as it is unfolding. With Youtube there is no real sense of its place in history - only speculation. Although I guess people can argue that history is speculation.

Complexity is also investigation into something that is complex - such as social media. The inherent complexity of a phenomenon and a tool that is dynamic and multi-faceted. I guess this explanation is similar to the one above (more revising!)

At AERI in 2011 I presented a poster called, Engaging Complexity. This is what my research is about. I have to be clear about what the complexity actually is.

Wikipedia calls it intricate, which I am not sure it is all the time.

Others have suggested that complexity is about being complicated, which I would disagree with.

This online paper about complexity seems to go in the right direction by explaining complexity as something where who or more components are required. There is also a theme in this paper that implies that complexity is about how it is viewed. I think about the remote control we have for the tv which has seems to be too much for me to learn. But if I talk about the intricacies of recordkeeping obligations, which can be quite complex and multi-layered, peoples eyes often glaze over. On second thought, maybe it is not the complexity, rather the subject that is boring.

Complexity theory is where this all started for me. Well that is not entirely true - it was Chaos theory. Both are maths related. I think I have written a blog post before about chaos and fractals, which I adore. I could write some more about it today, but I am tired and its hot and I have done some awesome work again today and I think I need a rest.

I think I am going to have to do some more reading to help me define this adequately for my thesis. Damn.

Writing a thesis and living life...do they mix?

2012-01-16T20:28:00.001+11:00

Last last year I had a plan to write 7000 words a week of my thesis, get the first draft done in 3 months and then re-write the entire thing over another 3 months. Needless to say, soon after I had this genius plan I went on intermission. The link between going on an extended holiday for 2 and a half months and coming up with a ridiculously outrageous goal for my thesis is not tenuous. I have calmed down somewhat and have realised this kind of pace would probably give me a heart attack, but I feel like the thesis is my life.

Today.

Today I got up at 7.30am to feed the demanding cats who had been trying to get me up since about 6.30am with the licking of the hair, the meowing and the other chirp like talking they do, as well as the regular growling when one cat gets too close to the other. I then checked my email and a few other things and started work on transcribing an interview (which I finished today - yeah!). I had breakfast at 10am and then started on writing at 10.30am. At 1pm I took a luxurious hour for lunch where I sat outside undercover and admired the magnificent 30 degree summer day and worried that my plants might wilt because I had not watered them the night before. At 2pm I started writing again and managed to write/edit about another 1000 words before getting ready and heading off to the gym at 4pm. I returned home and ate dinner till 7pm and then started again on the writing/editing. By the end of the day I had done 2,390 words. I started the day with about 1,200. I am now writing this blog and will be ready to relax in approximately 8 minutes from now. This happens four and a half days a week with one day with flexitime in case I need to go into uni for a meeting (which takes about 2 hours of travel time each way).

Am I complaining?

No, but when do I get to do anything else? Except on Saturday nights and Sunday?

It looks like enough time to have a life on paper, but factor in things like we are supposed to be started assisted fertility in April, which will suck up my time (and money) and I am also supposed to be a teaching assistant this semester for Archival Systems again. Students are very demanding.

I think I am complaining a little bit.

As soon as this thesis is over I will be a very happy person. I have been working on this 'thing' since mid 2008 and I want it finished. This must be what it feels like when giving birth - get that thing out of me.

I feel like I did some good work today. I am aware that I wanted to have two chapters written by the end of January and so far, 2,390 words in two weeks is not quite the pace I need. I do not need to be as hard core as 7000 words a week, but I need to focus on this thing.

Puuuuuuuuuuuuuuussssssssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Meta-narratives and the end of the world - Part 2

2012-01-14T15:15:00.001+11:00

Yesterday in this blog I raised the issue of metanarrative and what it actually is (can there be metanarratives?) and how it is related to my research. The reason for this exploration that I thought I knew what this term meant and how it is applied, but have come to realise, through some further staring at the Cultural Heritage Continuum model, that I have been somewhat confused about the difference between story and narrative. I am not sure it is helped that Frank Upward uses the term, 'small story' to describe the first dimension actions/attributes of the narrative scale.

I left off yesterday before I could attempt to define metanarrative and explore in more depth the two axis of the Continuum model, as well as their relationship with each other. I am 99.9% sure that the use of the term, 'metanarrative' in the model is a reference to Lacan, but there must be some sense of irony in doing this. I'll start with define and Wikipedia.

Wikipedia describe 'metanarrative' as being part of critical theory and postmodernism. There is no reference to what kind of critical theory, but I would assume that is is related to social critical theory - but have no reasons why I feel this way as yet. The basic idea behind metanarrative is that it is a story about a story, where the second story helps to explain the first story. This second story helps also to explain knowledge and experience (I expect that is gained as part of performing the first story?). I am not sure my explanations of first and second story is really right though - why should one come before the other?

The examples of metanarratives given are nationalisms, religion and science are given with the explanation that the metanarrative in postmodern philosophy (no reference bah!) is about totalisation, power and unification. This would help explain why metanarrative is in the fourth dimension of the Continuum model. The fourth dimension of pluralisation is about long reflections of time and space where contexts are crafted through interaction. If you think about an object, which I hate to do with Continuum theory, but it helps to explain it, pluralisation is the space where it is linked to other objects through contexts that have been created as part of many many many interactions with the object. A great, simple example is the Dead Sea Scrolls, whose meaning and contexts have changed over time and space. They are now linked with many different kinds of contexts, such as being an important part of (various) histories, being a symbol of mystery, being a tool for manipulation and so on. Information about these scrolls can be found on Wikipedia, some at least are digitised and can be found through the Israel Museum website, they are also mentioned in educational sites and religious sites as well as loads of other places. But the Dead Sea Scrolls stories of context are not just about their content or their existence, but also related to the technologies used to digitise them, the roles of the libraries and other institutions in collecting information about them as well as their place as being part of religious history. Let's not also forget their role in archaeology and research. These are all contexts.

Wikipedia also refers to the metanarrative as being agents of power - stories that are told to legitimise the truth. The metanarrative is also related to grand theory (and probably mass generalisations). I already knew about Lyotard's opinion's concerning metanarratives and that in essence, our (postmodern) eyes have been opened to the use of narrative as a tool of power. Metanarratives ignore the complexity and diversity of human existence/interactions. This idea is at the heart of my research - that there is a multiplicity and complexity of contexts in social interaction and trying to understand this is part of undertaking research. And is particularly relevant to Archival Science, who has long ignored the social aspects of recordkeeping. So, why then is metanarrative part of the Continuum model?

Frank Upward refers to the story as being the content of the continuum - the knowledge that starts the cultural heritage processes. One of the key phrases in Frank's draft paper about this model is one that has significantly impacted on my own thinking: "Even the most humble of files tells us a storyabout action" (pg 2). I think this sentence will form the title of another blog post about how I feel about organisational records being evidence of cultural heritage. Moving on, Upward identifies the tale as being a starting point of interaction. A tale is a story and a narrative. It can be ficticious or the truth (the subjective truth). The tale moves through spacetime by different cultures - being captured and made significant when they are repeated and becoming legitimate within communities, organisations or even in an individual's mind over time. Finally the tale becomes part of many tales which seek domination. The tale becomes attached to other tales in complementary and/or contradictory ways. It is really only part of a larger story now, rather than a tale on its own. Upward points out that control over these tales and where and how it might be placed in the dimensions can contribute to its power. And people can manipulate and wield this power. This axis is about the interactions of stories and their changes over time and space, including smaller and larger communities, or even how much power they wield over an individual.

But is the story of the tale and its changes over time and through space - is this storytelling? Storytelling to me is about the process of communicating information in a particular way - with a beginning middle and end. Even a story that is part of a bigger story has a beginning, middle and end. Storytelling is a process and I can see that 'a story' can change over time and across communities, but I would call this axis the narrative. This is about the role of the story itself as an agent of social change. This is what narrative is - the story told. Storytelling implies to me the story being told - the structure, the process, the person controlling the story. Not the actual tale itself. Storytelling is about skills in being heard, about telling the story that needs to be told at the time it needs to be heard.

And so Upward has put the narrative scale opposite the storytelling axis. He refers to this axis as being one of the who, the how and the extent. This axis is about structure to me - it is about how the story is or becomes part of the process of telling it. "How does it fit within the totality" (pg. 3). In the first dimension is the small story, which indicates that its relation to other stories already exists in its creation. Where does it fit in? In my research I have defined small story to mean the person who uploads video to YouTube and interacts in the website. They are one of many. Small means that there is an indication of space, in that it does not take up much space, and/or that it is a part of a larger whole. There is a line in the draft paper that explains the narrative scale and the small story:, "To what extent is it embraced by 'whole' entities". Now this is confusing. What or where is the whole entity? What exactly is the entity? I am assuming that the meaning for this is related to the idea of the metanarrative, as a potential goal or totality of narrative scale. Unfortunately, Upward does not really explain the rest of the narrative scale as well as I would have hoped.

In the capture dimension, the small story is group acceptance. This is comparable to the tale becoming significant through its telling - which is what the second dimension on the storytelling scale refers to. Considering Upward's emphasis as small being part of a larger whole, group acceptance of the small story perhaps refers to the role of the story, rather than the process of its telling. How is this different? I am not sure then where the term, group acceptance, fits into the idea of the role of the story. In my paper, I talked about the role of YouTube being legitimised through the actions of capture by institutions. This is about the story being told that is captured by being dis-embedded from its original context and placed into a new context. The YouTube video is the container of culture and the moving images of the video is the story being told (or the most important story as defined by the institutions). However, even though I referred to these actions of capturing being part of the legitimising of YouTube as media archive, there is also the story of how the video itself fits into the collections. In one example the collection was related to politics and social media, the other was related to a specific locality and social media, and the third was about moving images created in any form by Australians, or having Australian content (and perhaps also being online, but not related to social media). This, I think, is the axis of the narrative scale. The group acceptance is not just an action about the content of the story, but how it fits into the larger picture. This is particularly relevant to heritage and institutions.

I wonder if there is any place for this narrative scale in different contexts - what about YouTube itself? But before I jump into that discussion, what about the fourth dimension - the one I am writing this entire, multi-parted blog post about? The metanarrative. Upward explains this space as the place where the tale can 'pose' as a metanarrative, which firstly implies to me that there might be another step before it is accepted as a metanarrative, but also recognition that metanarratives, as a concept, are under review. Upward gives examples of other metanarrratives, such as Marxism, Structuration Theory (Giddens), various religions, archival provenance theory or spacetime continuum theory itself. These examples are those that hold a 'world view'. These are theories that encompass and explain in a total kind of way. The most interesting of course being the example of archival provenance theory. Provenance is about time and ordering or valuing records according to their interactions over and in time. Wikipedia refers to provenance as being a fundamental principle of archives. There is a great discussion to be had about provenance in the Continuum, but it might be for another time and place.

So, getting back to the metanarrative in the fourth dimension of totalities, where might YouTube videos fit in? I have explained somewhere along the line that YouTube videos themselves have been cultural narratives, through their acceptance and legitimation, but what part or role does this have in the meta? Perhaps this is what my research is trying to answer? In a place like YouTube, there might be multiple metas that the institution is missing because they are focussing on content? Is the YouTube meta really a story about small stories? I have been writing this post for far too long and my brain has gone sideways on this now. If there are any readers out there who might have some ideas about this, I encourage you to let me know in a comment!

There is a sidebar that is relevant to this discussion concerning the relationship of the opposing axis: the storytelling axis. I cannot recall entirely, but do remember Frank talking to me about transcendence. I will have to look up my notes and bring this into the discussion. Looks like there is going to be a Part 3.

Meta-narratives and the end of the world - Part 1

2012-01-13T23:13:00.001+11:00

Now, if there was ever a meta-narrative that existed it would be the mass panic over end of the world or catastrophe events. We, as a human race, love the drama of disaster. I was reading this morning this feature, written by a senior NASA research scientist published in 2009 about what is supposed to happen on the 21st December this year. You can find it here.

Metanarrative, or meta-narrative is a concept I have been grappling with these past few years as it relates to my research. In particular, the Cultural Heritage Continuum model. You can see and read about this model in this paper by Frank Upward, my paper about Youtube video collecting by heritage institutions and see a couple of 3D versions of it on Youtube that I experimented with a few years ago. I will have to write some extensive explanations about this model in my thesis, so it seems I need to grapple some more with the terms and activities involved in it.

The term, 'metanarrative', appears on the narrative axis, which progresses a small story, through group acceptance, organisational and community warrant to the meta. The narrative axis lies opposite to the storytelling axis, which contains activities related to the transformation of the tale through spacetime, where it ultimately becomes a story of domination whose influence is absolute.

The paper I wrote in 2009 about the this particular continuum model focussed on these two axes. In this paper I used the term, 'meta-narrative' to describe the story and the way it is understood. I said that YouTube was a phenomenon, meaning that it had reached that mythical place beyond a brand name and a presence, but had come to mean online video, regardless of what website it was located on. But I also was mistaken in my explanation, as I said that the meta-narrative is actually a story - the story of "online social communities and how mediated communications can create both offline and online friendships and social networks with varying degrees of intimacy." I was referring to Patricia Lange's work on YouTube with that explanation, who I met last year in L.A. and is a very lovely and supportive fellow researcher. However, I am not convinced now this is a meta-narrative for a few reasons:

I was telling the story of the outcome of Lange's work, not really describing a narrative.
I believe now that narrative is mostly about shared understanding of conventions of structure. i.e. introduction, body, conclusion.
The outcome of Lange's work is actually part of the story about YouTube, but not all.

The reason why I am harping on about metanarrative is because I see it as a gap in my understanding about the model and this particular aspect of continuum theory.

Synchronicity

2012-01-12T12:16:00.002+11:00

I thought I might go on a bit more of a personal journey today and share some thoughts I have been having recently about where I am in my life right now. I have actually been working on this research project since mid 2008 and to know that this year I will be submitting it already feels a relief. Over the years I have struggled with many aspects of this research. Most of this struggle is related to not being able to communicate what my research is actually about. Yes of course it is about Youtube: it is easy to pick a topic and point at it repeatedly and say over and over again that it is about that. But the question, "what about Youtube" has actually changed quite significantly over the years. I remember struggling for a year about how to start off explaining what my research was about. Was it about:

Archival practices in relation to Youtube?
Archival practices in relation to moving image?
the web and online records and archival practices in relation to those?
cultural heritage and the cult of the significant object?
how to understand what a record is in an online environment?
how Continuum theory can be used to help develop a greater understanding about cultural/online records?
the shortage of archival theory that could usefully address the kinds of records that were being created?

The short answer to all these questions (and actually a few more) is yes. It is about all of these things. So where is the research problem? There always seemed to be so many places to start with these questions: I could have started with the practice of collecting digital records. I wanted to start with this. I wrote a paper about this kind of thing that has been criticized (by practitioners) and praised (by researchers). I started off many papers with the line, "How to understand and capture born digital information is the most challenging issue in archival science today".

This statement is true, and actually has been for quite a while (true that is), but is it really the right starting point for my thesis? Is my research really about digital records at the most general and records of Youtube at the most specific? Feels like a linear line from large to small with no bumps along the way. But, also as the years have gone on I have realised my research is not really about digital records, but more about the way people use and understand recordkeeping. This is a slight, but significant shift from looking at outcomes of processes, to looking at the processes themselves. Who really cares what the records of Youtube are? They can be anything to anyone, from backend to the page to the comments, to the videos, to the blogs and websites and emails that videos are embedded in. The records can also be traces of something, where people use or do not use Youtube to generate activities, rather than video. Uploading video to Youtube and then sharing them on another platform which is more suited to live interaction and creation of other content is also quite a valid record of Youtube.

So, I guess what I am getting at is that the research started off looking at the content, the outcomes, the products of activity, but in fact was about the process and its complexity. Understanding the process and its complexity, including where to find out information about how to develop this understanding, is what my research is about. This means that the project is about three things, with three separate outcomes. Before I explain the three outcomes I want to talk about research outcomes and go back again to 2008.

In 2008 I created/developed a number of models to help me understand my research and in particular the methodology. In 2010 and 2011 I expanded on the methodology model to develop posters that helped to communicate the relationships in my methodological approach. I remember drawing or designing the 2010 poster and understanding how it all worked, but still not being able to communicate it. I lacked the words, the confidence and the coherence to know what it is that I just designed. It was a lovely poster and I had many compliments. I explained it quite a few times and through these explanations I began to know and understand more about what the poster meant. Finally, I was able to break down the abstract complexity in the poster into clear, practical applications. This process is an important one for my research and in fact, forms part of the major component of my research and also one of my greatest headaches.

I mean, who starts a research project and then in 6 months develops a theoretical model? This is an outcome of the research. How could I ever fit it into the official research project about Youtube? Did it come before or after the chapter on methodology? I wrestled with this issue throughout 2011 and have finally come to understand that my research is also about research design. Process and complexity.

The reason why I am writing and thinking about this recently is because I am writing my story of the research - not the research story - but also my story as a researcher - a vital viewpoint in the understanding process and complexity I would think and one of the major outcomes of the research. I have been thinking about process and in particular, the confidence I have with my ideas now. I remember when I presented the first version of my research design model to my supervisors back in 2008 I was completely terrified that I had stolen ideas and had made a fool of myself. And I think this is what gagged my communications. Fear. But I found other ways to communicate my ideas that made it easier for me and easier for others to accept them. Through visual and oral mediums.

This leads me into the theme of this blog post concerning synchronicity. The other day I found an old msn instant message conversation from 2006 that I had with my sister. I had just met my now husband and was talking about all the things I had been doing over the summer. I made quite a few comments about being in a relationship (I firmly believed I was not) and about my prospects of falling pregnant (I though I was barren and did not want children anyway). In addition to this, for years and years I have been very angry about being so overweight. I knew that this was a significant issue, but could not bring myself to talk about it or acknowledge it. This very public thing was my private shame. There are so many stories to tell about how this situation made me feel and how it influenced my life, but they are for another time and place. But now, in my second year of marriage, I am trying to have a baby and I need to lose weight to do that. Now, suddenly, I am open about wanting to have a baby (it took about 2 years for this to happen) and I am on a diet to lose weight and to change my bad habits of a lifetime. I talk about it with people. I acknowledge that this is a big thing I am going through in my life and that it is important to me. It makes me feel, well, grown up. I met my now husband when I started my coursework Masters at Monash. He has been with me the entire time I have been transitioning from a very very angry woman who worked as a waitress, to someone writing a PhD and contributing (and communicating) their ideas to an international audience.

I feel that the process I have undertaken in the last nearly four years with my research and the confidence I have built in being able to make sense of complex ideas and to communicate them confidently is paralleled with my ready acknowledgement and change in my lifestyle. This of course has happened in my 30s, the years that traditionally have been understood as a time for significant change and confidence. This year I will be 39 and although I feel that baby clock hammering, it is only part of the things that have changed for me. If I have a baby or not, there is no turning back from this process, which finally, FINALLY, feels worthwhile.

ps. I will talk about the three outcomes of my research in my thesis, so you will have to wait until it is written to get a better idea of what they are. :)

How an examiner examines a thesis...

2012-01-09T21:46:00.001+11:00

Firstly, I would like to apologise for my tardiness last week. Really, I am making excuses for myself. I, in fact, forgot to write the blog posts I intended to write. Everyday, it seems, is really a promise when I actually remember. But the intention is still there, so that must count?

I am not sure if I mentioned last week my new way of approaching the writing up of audio recorded interviews. I have Dragon Naturally Speaking on my home computer and it is a joy of a program - once you train it well. What I have been doing is sitting at my computer listening to the interview and then speaking it into my microphone so it appears on the screen. While this happens I correct any errors and fix up problems with voice recognition. So, this process ends up making me want to stab myself in the face with a fork. Must like how I felt when I did the first two transcripts in 2009 by hand. No, it was much worse in 2009. Anyway, the weather has been quite nice in Ballarat of late, except for today, but it did not stop me being enthusiastic for my new way of transcribing. The process is similar, but instead of sitting at my desk, I lie in a hammock (or on the lounge after the quite brisk coolness drove me inside this morning) and listen to the recording on my ipod and then 'read' it into the voice recorder. I then have been getting Dragon to auto transcribe so later I can check it for errors (and do that important second listening). Such a joy is lying in the hammock outside in the sun. I shall always have to work from home so I cannot miss out.

Today I managed to get some really good work done on my introduction - or at least this version of the introduction. I know it will not be the last version, but I liked the tone and was inspired to rant about complexity. I should have been working on my submission for ICA, but as that is a lot about what I am going to write in my introduction, I figure that I should work on the longer of the two. The ICA submission is only 10 pages long when finalised. Anyway, I wrote 1300 words today and was quite pleased. I also had another crack at the structure and wrote some notes on the system cards on each of the stories I intend to tell. The main story - the one about how to design research to address complexity - is now pretty much done and only needs polishing.

I have been feeling quite good about my work so far and realised that I am not as terrified of this thesis as I thought I was. The words seemed to have found their place - well their place for now - and are coming out in a way that makes sense. This also makes me feel less stressed about the whole thing.

Onto the thing that is relevant to the title of this blog post. I accidentally stumbled across this paper on the Monash website: http://infotech.monash.edu.au/resources/student/research/uow016364.pdf when I was submitting a request to IT for an updated Nvivo license. It seems like a timely find as I have been thinking a bit about who my examiners might be and what they might be looking for. Being the strategist that I am, I always look to cover all my bases and some of the information in the paper suggests that some of my assumptions about what to include were right. Specifically,

be a report of work which others would want to read;
tell a compelling story articulately whilst pre-empting inevitable critiques;
carry the reader into complex realms, and inform and educate him/her;
be suf ciently speculative or original to command respectful peer attention

This info came from another research paper written in 200 by Winter, Griffiths and Green. My strong feeling has always been that a thesis must be a story told and to engage your audience you must know how to tell stories. I kinda think I am quite a good storyteller, but have had to learn to give away most of the ending when it comes to academic work. Although, I have figured out how to do this and still have a punch line. I really feel that my writing skills have improved greatly since I undertook the film and TV writing course at RMIT in 2003 (which I finished with in 2006). Sometimes when my thesis supervisors check my work though I do not much feel like a writer. I guess I still have to get used to the process of receiving feedback.*

I have read only a little of this paper before I decided to write about it in tonight's blog and want to get back to it. I have have some more musings later. One of the other great things about this particular paper is that it is a research paper and is structured as such - which is always useful to read, so that I can learn more about how to write one myself - which should be on the cards for October.

* I wonder about my own issues with receiving feedback when I write extensive feedback for Masters and undergrad students on their work. Do they even care? Can they understand it? Am I being mean?

Professionals in information and records management

2012-01-05T21:11:00.001+11:00

Well today I eased back into it a little more with some mind numbing transcription of interviews, as well as started my submission for ICA Congress. I was a bit stuck on what my major point was that I should try and communicate in my 300 word abstract, so I asked one of my supervisors for help. In her reply she showed me that the ICA Congress website for the 2009 event has been hacked. Hacked. Really?

The thing about the hack is that it is so neat, so well done, so unobtrusive really. The three authors of the paper, "A Decade in Digital: New Directions for Managing and Preserving Digital Information", are the ones listed on the page - I know that for sure. However, I do not think that they wrote anything titled, "Dropping Pounds Using Dietary Supplements", or "Get Him Back Forever". No, I do not think, I know. What does this mean for a professional organisation concerned with records? I wonder also what benefit this has for the spammers. Yes, they get a bit of free webspace, but really, its only archivists who are going to come to this webpage, and then only those mad ones who are interested in digital records.

Check out the neat hacked page here.

The only other thing that is worth reporting today is that there was some nice, inspiring lounging in the hammock. I think I reported about that the other day as well. It is good. I worked out the new structure of my thesis today so that I can incorporate the three stories I need to tell:

1. Leisa's story and how reflective processes in interpretive research provide credibility. transferability and rigor

2. The story of how to design research to address (social) complexity

3. The story of the research outcomes that were designed to address (social) complexity

The ICA Congress paper is about the third story and the major feature of it: crossing the practice/research divide. One of the outcomes of the research focuses heavily on how to develop a framework that is inclusive for all who are part of a research project, including individuals, communities, practitioners, researchers and what are usually called, participants. This is what I think is my "big thing" to contribute to Archival Science. The outcome of story 2 is also important, but it cannot exist without story 3 (or story 1 for that matter).

See, the issue with the structure of the thesis writing is that it is a communication of process that has occurred, but is also in a state of occurance, i.e. becoming. It is becoming as I write about it, so it is not ever really not in process. This is part of the complexity that my brain thinks about ALL THE TIME. The research into social media as a complex (social) phenomenon is really a demonstration or a case study of how the acknowledgement and development of complexity in social research, particularly in Archival Science. Records are not just pieces of paper, or manuscripts, or newspapers, or data in a system or so on. Records are part of a social process and to me, Archival Science, particularly research in this discipline, is about understanding the social process of records. And so my research is a demonstration of that social process, as well as a research project about it. I think there are some triple hermeneutics going on there.

See why I need rests in the hammock in the sunshine?

Another day, another blog post

2012-01-04T21:30:00.001+11:00

You know what? The weather was so nice today, not too hot, not too cold. In my timetable I wrote up yesterday I put Wednesday's work as being optional and pencilled in a yoga class (which starts on the 18th January). Is it my fault that the say after I officially start back at uni it is a Wednesday? And the sun was shining? I should have done some transcription for sure, but did I mention the sun? Plus I had to take the car to the mechanic and then I have this new thing with pre-preparing all my dinners so I do not have to worry about it for 2 weeks. Took me about 5 hours of cooking today, but now I have meals for dinners far into the future. If I get rid of my husband I can make them last for at least a month.

I did do some more reading of the Henry Jenkins book I mentioned yesterday. I have also done some other reading in my intermission, which I thought I might share so as not to make this blog post all whingey and excusey. When I visited Boston in the middle of last year I bought a Kindle and it has been such a wonder. Soon after that purchase I spent nearly two weeks reading about 4 fantasy novels: the Game of Thrones books or they should really be called the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Yes, I was watching the TV show. Anyway, after my short holiday with fiction I read, "Living with Complexity" by Donald A. Norman and "Connected: the Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives" by Nicholas A. Christakis. I enjoyed both of them, although the Norman book was not quite what I expected as it was more about design. My friend Kate, who wrote a PhD on how to design IT systems through gathering information about user expectations (rather than just user requirements) would have loved this book and it reminded me of her quite a bit.

I do not really remember too much about these books as they are not fresh in my head (and it IS summer and I JUST got back from extended holidays), so I thought I would share a quote from each that I highlighted in my Kindle (did I mention I love my Kindle?).

Norman: "The most important part of life are qualitative, but still we persist in measuring and recording." pg 171 (MOST brilliant and I will be using this sentiment and quote in my thesis)

Christakis: "...the wave [talking about the Mexican wave at sports events] cannot be understood by studying the actions of a single individual standing up and sitting down." pg 25 (This exemplifies and complements what is being said by Norman and what I wrote about yesterday in relation to Jenkins' work on participatory culture.)

When flicking through my Kindle I noticed I had also started reading Bergson's "Matter and Memory" and so in the vein of this cheating kind of post filled with whining and quotes, I have one I highlighted from that text:

"...is a mistake to reduce matter to the perception which we have of it..."

And that folks, is goodnight.

Its 2012 and the thesis submission countdown has begun!

2012-01-03T21:00:00.001+11:00

Well, this blog has been in hiatus for quite a while. I have spent the last two and a half months on intermission from my PhD. This did not mean holidays from work though as I completed development of a thesaurus for a client of my Records Management business. The 2,400 term thesaurus is a goddam work of art. I love it. And of course, hate it.

Today is my first official day back as a PhD student and I thought I would take it a bit easy. I started off making a list. Lists are easy. I also wrote up a timetable for the next 9 months of my life (am I giving birth?). Its one of those hardcore timetables that allocates certain times for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I start at 8am and I finish my day at 9pm. The timetable was also easy. I also had to send my resumption form to the administrative people at Monash so that they know that I am actually back and working. (i.e. writing lists and creating timetables). Now I can resume getting paid a pittance.

I have some goals. The first is to write a blog post everyday. EVERYDAY. Part of the process of the research is about reflection of ideas. I have done this in other ways, but want to really focus on this, the business end of the PhD. I have also started a video blog, but that is unpublished. My goals for January are to write two chapters. This is 15-20 000 words. Not so easy. Although I have given myself a break and said one of the chapters can be the one I have already 3/4 written. Easy.

I have been trying to get back into the headspace for research over the last week or so by thinking about my thesis structure. How to write 100,000 words and not go insane. I think that might the title of the book! I have always kept a bit on track with the ideas, even though I have been away. I have been reading Henry Jenkins' book, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media education for the 21st century " It is quite inspiring and has made me think about curriculum and teaching. This of course are premature thoughts as I am only a sessional teaching assistant right now and am not sure of my chances of getting a job when I complete my PhD (what jobs in tertiary?). Oh, by the way, if you have a Kindle, this book is free.

Some of the interesting ideas Jenkins has is around the idea of collective intelligence and social production of knowledge - a concept he links to the term, distributed intelligence, a term more about processes using technology. Not a new term and not invented by Jenkins. I can see how relevant this term is to what I have been researching for my PhD, particularly in the areas of use of social media, but also in the other outcome of my research; continuum based (and inclusive) research design. I am very excited about this aspect of my research and will hopefully write about it some more on this blog and will be definitely writing some papers about it. In the next few days I am going to write up my submission for ICA Congress in Brisbane in August and it will be there that I will be presenting/launching my work on research design.

Well, I think that is enough for today. I have made some baby steps back into the swing of things and this makes me feel a bit more reassured. The last thing I need is to get overly stressed, otherwise there may never be a thesis.

Losing memory and making new ones...a real life story

2011-08-01T11:07:00.001+10:00

My research involves ideas and actions to do with memory. Part of the title of the research is, 'memory-making'. I have been thinking a lot recently about some of the concepts involved in my research, in particular, memory-making and community. At AERI 2011 I realised that the concept of community in my research is evolving and actually comes from the people I have interviewed. I again realised how rich the data is that I have collected from the interviews, particularly the You-sers. These were the first interviews I had ever done in research and I found them intimidating at first. I also thought I was not in enough control/controlling too much of the conversations that occurred. But I have also realised, particularly with these constantly evolving insights, that this tension in interviewing is part of the learning as well as part of the research outcomes. My life-long 'looking from the inside' analysis of self finally has a legitimate purpose, rather than a paranoid, introverted and somewhat narcissistic focus. The result is that I have stopped writing auto-biographies in my head and started to look more at the present as it occurs.

ANYWAY, the point of this blog post is that I have a story that has made me think about memory and the actions of memory-making more closely. Particularly in a constructed and plural sense. Last Friday night we had my husband's 92 year old nanna come over and have dinner with us. Alfio arranged with the nursing home and picked her up in the late afternoon. Dinner was a great success, although the cannelloni needed extra sauce as it had soaked up every last bit in the oven and some people thought the brownies were overcooked (although I love crunchy food - LOVE really darkly toasted bread). At the end of the night my brother came over and I was outside talking to him. Nanna and another family member were getting ready to leave and were standing at the door. My husband was unlocking the car and had gone to talk to my brother, who was close to the front door. What happened next was quite unpleasant. Ignoring all advice and pleas, nanna walked down the three front steps in the dark (we have a sensor light). But she missed the last step and fell face-first into the concrete. I vaguely remember seeing her walking down the steps and started to move towards her, but there was no time before she fell. Needless to say, nanna's face-plant into the concrete ended in blood. Quite a bit. And a broken pinkie finger.

While we were trying to clean her up in the house, nanna started to talk about going to the 'club'. That she needed to go to the 'club'. We thought she was raving, but have since found out this is her name for the nursing home. However, when she was taken back there that night, she did not recognise the place. However, what happened yesterday when we went to visit her at the home, was what was shocking to me. Yes, she had two black eyes - with the kind of black that only old old people have. She had not grazes on her hands and so did not use her limbs to protect her face when she fell - a reflex for the rest of us. So her face did bear the brunt of the injuries. But she was talkative and as happy as she has ever been. It was her memory and recall of the incident that was shocking.

I have been around old people with memory issues before. My uncle had dementia and when I came to Melbourne to live in 2000, he did not know who I was. However, he did remember me from visit to visit as Frank's daughter, but I was not ever sure if this was him remembering the words, or the facts. However, yesterday nanna told a story of how a doctor at the nursing home had hurt her and that he had pushed her into water. She was surprised that we knew about the incident and her injuries. My husband tried to tell her that she was at our house and he brought her to the nursing home with the injuries, but she would have nothing of it. To nanna, the hated doctor (not sure he had a name) at the nursing home was responsible. Alfio was never there, but the other family member who was also at our house that night, was. Nanna has previously complained about the nursing home to us - that she has been left there and so on. I have also heard stories of her beating up the other residents. We also heard last night that this is not the first time she has fallen outside of the nursing home and not the first time she has remembered something other that what actually happened.

There are a lot of things I think about this story. There is the made up story - the remembered story. Although I do not speak Italian, I watched nanna draw a picture of where and how she fell yesterday when we went to visit. The way she was communicating what had happened was quite clear and detailed. I think about how she hates the place and how she wanted to go down the stairs at our house because she believed she would be alright. I know she knows that she is 92, but I wonder if she realises how this impacts on her ability to do things. Nanna's remembering is a story with a clear protagonist and antagonist. It is also a repeated story. I wonder why this story exists and why it is repeated. It think about how we all repeat stories all the time, in telling and often in action. I wonder how this memory is actually remembered in her head - if it is a 'knowing' or a 'seeing' memory. I also wonder about the forgetting about the real story. I guess this might not be a deliberate action, but I wonder if this forgetting has any links to forgetting in her past. Many people forget things that are painful to them. It is not a deliberate thing perhaps, but it is still an activity that has been performed. I also think about what the 'real story' is - is it my story? Does it matter if the story is real? I think about the discussion that was had at AERI about the concept of authentic. How can this concept be applied to nanna's version of events? Hmmm..something new to ponder some more.

In relation to my research I think about the acts of remembering, but forgot about the acts of forgetting. Some of the data is revealing the practices and identity being created around remembering, deliberate remembering that is wrapped up in social communication. This remembering is about construction and observation of social acts by others that contribute to society. When a You-ser creates a video, they are performing a role of remembering. When they post the video and the Youtube community gets a chance to comment and post video as responses, these are acts of group remembering - in situated action. Youtube is then a performative space. The layers of remembering are built up over time and through different technologies. There are different ways to remember as well - such as the video that the You-ser keeps on their hard drives at home versus that which is on Youtube itself. The forgetting is also really interesting. I had thought about the forgetting in terms of disposal, but the disposal of a video is not necessarily about forgetting. When a You-ser takes down a video, it is not so that people or themselves can forget. The word forget is now challenging me - I will have to think about it more. It is an action, a process and also an outcome. I will come back to this in the near future I think. It will be part of the thesis chapter 3.

Digital Humanities for (research) Archivists

2011-08-01T09:51:00.001+10:00

Big Tent Digital Humanities, a View From the Edge, Part 1 | LinkedIn.

…digital historians should be transparent about their use of archival records, organizational frameworks, contextual information, and methods for users to navigate and repurpose their projects.

I find this very interesting as these ways of seeing can expose the 'ways of seeing' the records had in the first place. This is transparency and de-construction through action and interaction. Is this something Frank Upward envisioned when conceptualising the 'pluralist' dimensions?

I find the Digital Humanities a very interesting field, but as a research based Archivist, I have struggled to fit in. I have attended two THATCamps in Australia and have been following discussion about DH, with a view to attending the big Conference. But, it seems to me, without data to play with, there is little interest in the hows + whys, or the theoretical dimension, of the practical tools (toys?). This comment about the use of archival records is as close as I have seen to a discussion about theoretical dimensions.

Perhaps there is something I have missed?

Updates and developments

2011-07-26T09:48:00.001+10:00

I am in the throes of recovering from another adventure north of the planet. The recovery (unfortunately) involves snot, coughing, headaches and inexplicable extreme fatigue at 4pm. So, below are some thoughts about where I have been in the last couple of weeks – physically, emotionally and intellectually. Apologies in advance for incoherent ramblings and vague suppositions.

After attending my second AERI, I am really starting to consolidate, understand and degassed my corner of archival science universe. It is always interesting to me how I managed to reflect on the fly, as it were, as well. Some of the insights I have about the impact of attending an international event, such as the AERI, actually come all talking to people and interacting with the cohort during and after. I was speaking to Prof Anne Gilliland a few days after AERI and was explaining to her how much to the event had impacted on me. Little remains of those articulate and cohesive ideas. What does linger on is the wonder of how I managed to analyse, breakdown, reconfigure and summarise in three major points what I got out of AERI. I remember saying something about understanding and developing communication skills, something about being able to situate my research and my theoretical understandings in a time and place, as well as ahh... I also remember during the week-long event discussing with people the progression of my research and insight that I had into what my research was actually about. I remember being very confident in saying that my research was actually about two things, it is about how to develop a continuum–based design for research into complex phenomenon as well, as the outcomes of the research I am investigating to help develop the continuum-based research design principles and methodology. A year ago, at the same event, I could not have articulated that so confidently or so clearly. My inner self was surprised when I heard these things come out of my mouth.

I guess the other thing that I really wanted to put down in this blog posts was some of the ideas that I have been having around how to undertake this massive writing project that I am going to need to do, i.e. 100,000 word thesis. One of the first things I think about is the use of the technology I purchased during the last year, such as the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, which I am using to dictate this blog post. I find the Dragon software very effective , even though it does need to learn, but I find that lens reasonably quickly. The issue is the way that I think about what I write, and that my speaking voice is not the same as the voice inside my head while I am typing. The interesting thing to me is that my speaking voice on paper does not make little sense, but people have told me that I am very good at explaining things to them. This makes me think that perhaps there is a difference between comprehending verbally or aurally and comprehending from written work. Which of course is to, and why it is that these are considered two different types of skills. I had just never considered before. The other big technology software program that I am using, of course, is NVivo, which fortunately I do not have to buy as it is very very very expensive. I would be upset if I had to buy it anyway, as I do not even fully comprehend how to use it and I cannot afford to go on a course to learn how to use it. However, I do manage to get what I need act as, which is as much as anyone can ask from any kind of software or hardware.

While I was away I also bought a Kindle, for the purpose of helping me organise and annotate the material I need to write my thesis. I am yet to see any great value in the Kindle for this purpose, but I have enjoyed reading my first fiction book on it. I had thought when I bought it that it was time for me to read broadly about the social aspects of technology. Most of this reading I have done already, but I wanted to go back and be re-inspired. I think that part of the process of making sense of the work I am doing is serendipitous comprehension. I have never been a fan of writing lectures notes or writing notes on each article I have read. I have always relied on my abilities to make sense of things through experience of them and to consolidate my understandings through communication. It is only through communicating to other people (not just myself with notes), that clear and concise relevance appears. I now have to figure out how to communicate this process in my thesis. As reflective practice is part of the methodology and also taking into consideration the complexity of the research - where the outcomes are two fold and reflect upon each other, I need to understand how I undertake reflective practice. The process.

Understanding process is a big influence on my life and work. It does not surprise me that my research is based in understanding and documenting process. I am very passionate about accountability and transparency in processes - particularly in relation to recordkeeping. Where I work as a consultant at a social welfare organisation, my entire advocacy for records management structures is based on accountability and transparency. Two qualities surprisingly lacking in a social welfare organisation. That being said, this organisation is very aware of its obligations for accountable practices in a legal sense. My interpretation of accountability is usually more social and cultural - what obligations an employee has to other employees and to future employees in relation to information and records.

I hope to re-ingnite my passion for writing these blog posts, as it is a vital part of the process. I have already used blog posts from the past to help communicate ideas and the process of making sense for the reviews I have undertaken this year. I want to write a post on AERI and what it means to me to go, but this may have to wait until tomorrow or later in the week.

The process of reflection

2011-02-27T09:04:00.000+11:00

On Friday just gone I underwent my mid-candidature review for my PhD. The purpose of the review is to show the research school and the faculty that you are on track for completing on time. I decided the purpose of the review was to get the members of the panel help me figure out a structural issue I was having with my thesis chapters.

The way I see it, the review is an opportunity for me to be able to get some valuable feedback from a group of people are often far too busy to help you normally. So what I did, was manage expectations. I set up the presentation so that I asked a question of the panel at the end. The panel was then forced to focus on the question at hand before they could ask any questions about some of the concepts and details, or lack of, in the review presentation. This strategy was quite successful and I managed to get them very helpful advice related to the structural issue.

However, the most important thing from me coming out of the presentation, was the ability to reflect on in the past, nearly 2 years. The structural issue I was having revolved around a particular model that I have developed very early on in the research. This model was related to methodology in the development of the methodology, actually came out of an understanding of both what methodology is and what the information processes continuum means. So, the situation was that I was trying to find a place in the chapters of my research to talk about a piece of theory that was generated through undergoing the research but also helped inform. My supervisor, Sue McKemmish, calls this the double or triple hermeneutic. Her and I have been grappling with this for a little while.

After the presentation on Friday while I was driving home, I thought about what I is developed this model stop I remember sending its to sue and sending it also to Frank upward. I remember being terrified that this model was an inappropriate use of the continual models and that both fees esteemed academics in continue writing would shut down and laugh that the model, saying that it was no good. I remember thinking how could our interpret and represent continulum thinking for a situation, i.e. for research methodology.

I also thought back to starting as a Masters student in July 2008 and how I struggled and worked hard to upgrade to a Ph.D. and to get a scholarship to be able to fund my study. I also remember thinking only last year what I was asked to attend the archival education and research Inst in Ann Arbor, Michigan that perhaps I had nothing useful to tell these people held it at and tell the archival community. I was not sure of my own value, of how my research sat in the community, and whether or not what I would talk about anybody else would be interested in. As some of these issues are related to not being part of all grown up with anybody who has been educated to this level speaking with confidence for a woman in country Western Australia or even suburban Western Australia, never really worked out to me, and just made me more angry.

It pleases me and fills me with confidence that I can see my work, my thoughts, ideas, my creativity developing, broadening and deepening, particularly over the last five years, since I started studying archives and records at Monash University. After I gave a presentation on Friday and the feedback was amazing, I felt like all the hard work had somehow paid off stop now, if I could only this finish at 100,000 words.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

2011-01-18T14:20:00.000+11:00

Have you seen this yet?

Another day of research...

2011-01-17T17:43:00.002+11:00

After I finally figured out what Grounded Theory (GT) was and how I wanted to apply it to my research last week, I have been getting stuck into my research analysis. My struggles with GT came from trying to grasp the complexity of it as a method. To me this meant finding out the process and using it. I also struggled greatly with the idea of searching for something in the data. My thesis research is about a particular field and strand of inquiry. My interviews, literature research and all work I do is related to that line of inquiry - therefore, how can I let the data speak for itself? I felt like I was giving up control of my data. I worked hard to get it - through ethics committees and interviews (and transcribing - what a horror) - why should I let the data show me the direction? What I wanted to do was create categories and find the data to fit the category.

I developed the categories by really trying to understand the research questions I had devised. What did I mean when I say small stories and memory making? What is culture and the relationship with community and heritage? I wanted to express these ideas in nice neat boxes and then find the data to fit the boxes. Obviously, and painfully, this was not working. Why did it not work? Because I could not 'see' the relationship between the categories and data - I could not express it in words. I had lost my ability to reflect when I tried to be so controlling. So, I decided to let the data speak for itself.

I also read, very recently, an article that discusses GT and how researchers have used it in their projects. In this article, the idea about GT being used incorrectly is put forward.* I realised that I was not using GT properly when I created categories and then tried to fit the data to the categories. I also realised, through reading Charmaz (again) that I could be flexible about how I applied GT and that understanding how it was supposed to work was the key. So, I read some more articles and realised that letting the data speak for itself is the key tenent of GT work.

What else could I do but put all the data into Nvivo and start again? I also put into Nvivo all notes, drafts of transcripts that showed the process of questioning, as well as all database reports and descriptions I created as part of the content analysis. I began to code today. I have been developing ideas through the use of the coding tools in Nvivo. As I was coding I realised that my intent, my research questions, were not lost in the data at all and that I was developing a system of understanding the data with my research goal in mind. But it was inherently more flexible. I also enjoyed reflecting on each line. Previously I had been dreading the line by line analysis - unpacking detail ad nauseum. And yes, I did get a bit carried away in the detail today, but I think I have also been successful.

I realise however that I seem to want to categorise - to assign a single heading to each sentence. This is not necessarily identifying a process, which is what I thought GT was about - and the primary reason for choosing it as a method. However, I am assigning multiple headings and explaining their significance in memos with different headings. There is some interesting concepts being revealed that I would probably have never exposed if I had of continued down the category path I chose previously.

I have 16 nodes at this point in time. These range from concepts such as time, to storytelling, the function of Youtube and recordkeeping. I have 11 memos that contain notes and information related to the nodes. I have even started to code the memos. Unfortunately I am only up to paragraph 13 out of 49, but represents one day of work.

I have also loaded the articles to use for the discourse analysis. I will have to write up why I chose them. I can use the existing nodes I created today to analyse these texts, or can develop different ones. The analysis of the discourse will be different as I am definitely looking for something specific. I am looking for words and concepts used to describe Youtube. How is Youtube understood and secondly, what discipline is associated with each understanding? I want to see how Youtube might be understood as cultural heritage. In a way, I am looking at potential uses of Youtube in the future - for researchers to answer the question, what is important about Youtube? But I am also looking at small details such as how Youtube users, creators, viewers are important to understanding the phenomenon of Youtube?

As I have written previously, cultural institutions create their own stories about Youtube without even defining what it is. What makes a Youtube video a Youtube video? Is it the video itself? Or the website? Or combinations? How can records by individuals (or a group acting as a single entity) be understood as representative of a form or type? What is the Youtube form or type? All of these questions have been asked by cultural and media theorists and use of Youtube has been investigated by anthropologists. I want to know about how the phenomena of Youtube and any other social media technology is evidence of culture? What do you show? What is left out? Do you capture the entire Twitter feed to show what Twitter is? How does this explain the process of Twitter - the mobile technology, the use of APIs created. Who is interested in social media as cultural heritage and why?

*Just had a quick look for the article and could not find it - it might have been Charmaz's book instead.

Posted via email from The convergence of Leisa Gibbons

Contemplating the Continuum

2011-01-12T15:53:00.003+11:00

While journeying on the train today I noticed a man writing in the white spaces of a newspaper. He did not appear to be contemplating thought, just writing it down. The inner film maker in me saw this as a scene in a film and wondered what an audience would think if they witnessed this activity in a movie. Why would a man with nothing else in his possession except a newspaper need to write on it? Was he performing an action of remembering or of creativity? Was the scribblings text or images? Where did he get the pen from anyway?

My thoughts then wandered about and I began to reflect on how I used to love film writing and the convention of leaving as much white space as possible. Brevity and intrigue was my approach to writing the scene description and accompanying dialogue. Someone once called me a laconic writer. I wonder where I left that skill behind. I thought briefly that I would begin to write down these 'scenes' I see, as I did when I was a film writing student. I used to collect these 'scenes' like cards. A 'card scene' could be slotted into a narrative and it would provide meaning depending on what the other scenes were around it.# Film (and TV) audiences are very watchful of what you do however, so you have to make sure that each scene fitted contained relevant meaning. It could be that the card scene helped explain another scene, or later in the film an entirely different scene explained your card scene.

I suddenly realised that by watching and thinking, I had become (and was becoming) part of a continuum of action. I could see how the Records Continuum model could be understood by using this scene.% The man is writing on a newspaper. I am watching him. The newspaper is a record of the actions of a particular printing press and also of a series of decisions that were made about content and layout. Once the man has written on the newspaper, it becomes a place of recorded actions - his writing. This newspaper is transformed into something else - a personal object? a place to doodle? a tool to remember? Perhaps the man is doodling on a newspaper as he travels on a train as he does every day. But what about the content of the writing? This may give us some clues as to the purpose of writing, but is it important to know? When is it important to know?

Perhaps the action I am watching is part of a larger process that has meaning to this man. Perhaps he keeps these newspapers and he has several hundred at home? What other parts of the story cannot be easily seen? What if the newspaper has been found or borrowed from someone else? It might contain traces of the other people on it as well - a crossword filled out, a smudge of the ink. What if the man left it on the train and someone else found it? What if the man gives the newspaper to someone else? What would the newspaper be a record of then?

And what of my own participation? I have written this blog about this event I witnessed? Was I a simple witness or was I part of the event? Is the one who chronicles separate from the action or very much a part of it? The story of the man who wrote on the white spaces of a newspaper is now my story. The traces of the man are here in this blog post. So then, what of the others that might be linked to this paper and this action? Are they part of my story too? What role might they have to play? And now you, the reader - how do you participate in this story? As an Archivist, if you found a newspaper with writing on it in a box that you needed to describe and arrange, how would you think about it? What is your role as Archivist in giving meaning to the newspaper? What if in the box were other newspapers, some written on and some not?

Is the newspaper the only record? What is it record of? What gives you clues as to what it is a record of? What about the other spaces of knowing that I have described above? Are they relevant? Useful?

To me the newspaper is part of a process and contains a trace of that process - a recorded moment in time. Each object we call a record is a a piece of a larger puzzle, which may have multiple meanings to multiple people. Each person who interacts with the object leaves a trace of their actions. So the newspaper is a record of those actions. From deciding what is on the front page, to it ending up in a cat's litter tray. The newspaper of this story is not just a record of its documentary form (newspaper) nor a record of what is written on it. It has multiple past and future lives in different spaces, places and times.

# I used to write films on system cards - as many of us did. Each card contained a single scene. It was always entirely feasible to manipulate the timeline, the reveal and the plot points simply by moving one scene to another place in the film narrative.

% The Records Continuum model, if you are not familiar with it, is a space of connections, or at least that is how I see it. Please take a look at the following links

http://john.curtin.edu.au/society/australia/

http://infotech.monash.edu/research/groups/rcrg/publications/recordscontinuum-smckp2.html

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Reflections on reflections

2010-07-05T13:59:00.000+10:00

I am back at uni today and in the hot seat for moving on with my research. Strangely, I do not feel as lonely in this room by myself.

I am going to take up the advice of a colleague, who I seem to have the greatest conversations with at the oddest of times and places. There has been the expected lunch room gabble, the corridor blather and now, since AERI, the late night bathroom fibber flobber of ideas. This colleague has suggested that I should write 500 words a day. Just 500. Imagine how many words at the end of a month?

Of course my brain thinks more about the quality of the ideas and the words themselves than the action of writing. BUT I have come to realise that the action of the writing is part of the process to generate and write down the ideas and words themselves.

SO, today, before I go home, regardless of whatever else I do or do not do (have been spending some time today looking at holidays on the Gold Coast for January next year), I will write 500 words.

Travelling sense

2010-06-30T08:21:00.000+10:00

I wrote the following a couple of days ago, at an airport, en route to home.

I am now in Auckland, on my way home from Michigan. I have a 4 hour wait until my plane for Melbourne boards. I just checked my mobile phone time, which is on Ann Arbor time and it is now about 6am on Sunday 27th June. On the plane I watched the flight map with high anticipation as the International Date Line drew nearer and wondered, in my semi-lucid state, how it would feel to time travel. Here in Auckland right now it is about 9am on Monday 28th June. I think NZ is 16 hours ahead of Ann Arbor – so 14 hours ahead of LA, which I left approximately 15 hours ago. Time travel did not feel like anything special. In fact, it was just one hell of a long night.
I was thinking on the plane of how I have not slept properly this entire week away and how plane travel is deeply dehydrating and how I do not fit into the seat so comfortably. Then I wondered with excitement when I would get to go the northern hemisphere again. I am physically and mentally drained and I have no idea how long it is going to take to recover, but it was worth it. Completely.

Auckland looks great, although I can only see it through the airport windows. I see some mountains in the distance that look pretty cool. Of course I cannot leave the airport, as I would need to go through customs and migration. Most of my 10 day journey has been travel oriented. I saw LAX terminals 4, 7 and the Tom Bradley terminal. I experienced about 15 minutes of LA air last week when I rushed to terminal 7 to miss my plane to Chicago by 30 seconds. I walked about 3 square blocks of (nearly) downtown Chicago in both visits. I did catch the blue line train from the city to the airport which is a good 40 minute journey. I saw lots of ramshackle suburbia littered with scores of flags claiming (declaring?) nationalistic pride. On my way to the airport yesterday (or two days ago) I sat in front of this gorgeous African American boy who was talking on his cell phone for almost 30 minutes. Talking is not quite right – he was raving passionately about his band and then singing beautiful, almost whispered songs aka Lionel Richie styles down the phone. I was completely in love.

Another highlight was that yesterday as I flew from Chicago to LA, I saw a corner of the Grand Canyon. I think I will definitely be back to see that from the ground. It looked incredible. Another great story that happened yesterday was actually started by another Monash colleague the two days previous. Shannon, a recent PhD graduate and inspiration, caught a train or it might have been a bus from Ann Arbor to Washington on Thursday night. She sent a message to another Australian colleague that on the transport was a very large group of God botherers (my term, not hers). It made me giggle a little (probably from a lack of sleep) that yesterday when I caught my own train from Ann Arbor that most of the carriage was made up of God bothering children, who, to all intensive purposes, seemed like normal teenagers.

Last night’s 13 hours on the plane on which I time travelled was completely absurd in that way when you think with a fuzzy sleep deprived brain about how you are travelling 38 000 feet above the earth for over 10 000km and you have nothing else to do than watch a movie because time is going to go on and on and on forever. I have managed to keep my sanity by reminding myself that with each passing moment I will be closer to the end of the duration of travel. Sometimes I have lost control, not just on the long haul plane travel, but during a moment of reflection this last week. This loss of control wells up like a painful air bubble inside me and I feel myself start to get short of breath and my eyes start to water. It also comes with the sensation of knowing that I am completely alone. Exhaustion I think it is called.

The flip side to the pain is the looseness of the brain to problem solve. I have been struggling with paper writing for my thesis for longer than just this year. I have not been able to solve the problem of what my project is really about. On the plane from LA last night I did. Finally. And this is not just one of those times when I think I have and it turns out not to be true and I cannot write still. This is absolute.

During the week at Ann Arbor, as part of AERI, I have had the opportunity to talk about my research and express my ideas about sense-making, knowledge generation, research structure, Youtube and the Continuum. I watched a video last night on the plane about the internet and the www. I have been reading a book about Convergence Culture and the phenomenon of participation in online spaces. I realized that my research was about:
1. internet and virtual spaces,
2. community and collaboration and the pluralistic concepts of meaning, and
3. what culture is and how it is communicated and transformed over time, by individuals, groups and institutions.
The problem I am addressing is the connection between these three areas of interest. How simple is that? I can start with the transforming structures of the internet and discuss what this means over time.

Last night I was thinking about the Internet Archive and how it is not an archive of the internet, or the www. The internet is about the processes of communication and collaboration, not the content itself. When I saw on the video and was reminded that the major component of how the www works is the url. If I write any url, have any webpage, then that is a record of what the www is about. It does not show how it works. But neither does the static pages on the IA. The IA is trying to capture the content of the web to show process, but this is only showing content changes. Something like the IA cannot show how the www was used, what it meant for collective intelligence and participatory culture. Library web archives cannot do this either and particularly if they are organized via subject. So how do you capture process? How can archives retain web culture? Will the LOC’s retention and organization of Twitter show what Twitter was about? Do these collections accommodate pluralist ways of relating to the process and content of the web by each individual user who interacts with a particular page or site? How can an archive capture the meaning of my Facebook page to me, as well as the meaning it has for my friends? On Youtube, the pluralist ways of knowing concern not only the user-creators, but the audience that participates by writing comments, as well as those that participate by sharing via email, embedding or downloading and re-posting somewhere else. This pluralist multi-verse also includes Youtube and Google, as well as all those companies crying over copyright infringements and those who are not. Content of one video can have meaning to people as much as an entire channel of content, or an identity that creates it.

One of the greatest things that happened on my trip to the US was that I have been invigorated again by my research. I remember what was so intriguing about it in the first place and what it was that I was trying to say. I think I have been bogged down in trying to say too much and the perceived complexity of the task of trying to communicate it. My research is complex and I still have no idea of what I am going to find, but I have now been able to see the components and define the specific areas of interest. I am quite keen to get started with the writing. I have also figured out how to write my methods paper. I will write it about the model first, introducing the idea that us researchers in Archival Science are knowledge workers and need to be able to make sense of our research using tools and ideas from other fields. I would argue that we are and should aim for trans-disciplinary research – which is research that transforms understandings about what a discipline is, and who and what it applies to. As Sue pointed out at AERI, and as I wrote in the first failed paper on method, a discipline is not just an academic structure, but a community of interest, academic or otherwise. I would also use trans-disciplinary in preference to meta-discipline – thinking about Archival Science as a lens for generating deeper and broader understandings about other fields of study.

I have been sitting here for about an hour typing up this dissertation. I have also been thinking about the declaration or manifesto about the internet and the vision of the semantic web. I have had two coffees in the last 3 hours, but I am still slipping into semi-lucidity. I can feel my brain going. My vision is wavering and I am forgetting things at the same time as panicking about what time it is and whether I should buy some vodka or maybe chocolate. I have $5 NZ left. But I feel good as I remind myself that with each passing moment my duration of this travel is drawing closer to its end. My eye started twitching a few days ago now and my digestion is completely ruined, but it was all worth it. I am still completely unsure of my own identity as a researcher who can contribute to this field, but I feel invigorated again to try.

Lessons from AERI 2010 - part 1

2010-06-25T05:35:00.000+10:00

I just wanted to write down some thoughts about the AERI event I have been attending at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor while I am here to start the process of reflection.
* I experienced significant culture shock when travelling from Australia to the US. Universities construct education and in particular, PhD archival studies, in very different ways with much emphasis on 'core' archival concepts.
* There has been much discussion about multi-discipline, inter-discipline and other mash up ideas to situate Archival Science as a meta-discipline. These concepts are very interesting and I want to reflect on them more, particularly in relation to my own ideas about trans-disciplinary work and sense-making. As part of this discussion there also seems to be significant engagement and desire to understand how Archival Science researchers, such as myself, finds, conducts and incorporates other disciplines in our work. In particular, while presenting my poster at the poster event last night I was asked mostly about discourse analysis and how I found the research I needed from other disciplines. This interaction has made me pause for thought about what are the important elements of my research that can contribute to the discourse of Archival Science itself.
* There seems to be some conflict around what Archival Science and Archives means and what the lessons of the 'multiverse' are for research. This is not just a generational issue, although this is clearly an impact, but seems to come from the notion and ideological centralisation of 'core archival principles'. There has been some quite uncomfortable moments at the beginning of the week. This has made me think about my own ideas about 'core principles', particularly as I have experienced them in practice, as well as my ideology and research and my concepts of making sense of records through process.

Back in business...

2010-06-11T11:00:00.002+10:00

I have decided to call this post 'back in business' to acknowledge my absence and to declare that I finally feel like I am a PhD student again.

I have been studying this PhD full time since March after working full time and studying part time in 2009. It took me a good three months to realise that I cannot expect to accomplish work as fast as I do at work. The entire process is different. Being an advocate of the importance of process, I have (sort of) enjoyed the process of slipping back into the feeling of doing research all the time and it being OK to read for a day.

Today is actually my reading day and I plan to finish reading a fascinating article about confessional ethnography and start on Henry Jenkins' book, Convergence Culture.

Since becoming a full time PhD student I have been plagued with doubt about my ability to write. I have been trying to write the introduction to my research (as an article), as well as an article about method. I have struggled so much, been told my writing is too dense and have had to seek help. The other day I spoke to Henry Linger at Monash University who shared with me the confessional ethnography paper. He helped me immensely, especially in reminding me about process and that I need to determine the processes of the research itself (problems, outcomes and so on), with that of undertaking a project (method etc.).

I have also been thinking a lot about writing style. I have been lax in writing in the last few months (hence no blog posts - although I do write sometimes on my business blog and this makes me feel that I have lost my ability to sit down and simply write. I have addressed this by writing up my ideas for the two papers in different formats. The first paper I have started by writing it up as an interview. My intention is to help me keep focus on the problem I am presenting and not go off onto tangents about what the definition of Archival Science is. I am thinking now that my thoughts about definitions can be left until I have finished my PhD. For the paper on method I have been writing about it in the style of a journal entry. The problem with journal writing is that I often go off tangent as it the style is so personal and I do not expect that anyone else will read it. Unlike a blog post, which I anticipate no one reads - but is still published.

My other problem is that I have a really really really strong drive to be creative and interesting and innovative and a good storyteller. In most cases I can be, except for when I think it matters most- like when my reputation for being an authentic researcher is on the line.

Anyway, I hope to be writing more in this blog from now on. I have to think about what the tools are for my reflective practice are as method in my research. I have said that this blog is a tool, but not really written about why or how it is.

Next week I am heading to AERI in the US - Michigan. I am excited to meet other PhD students from across the other side of the world who might have similar problems! I love to share. ;)

Digital clutter - sharing personal records

2010-04-06T09:42:00.001+10:00

Over this Easter weekend I was given a DVD with some holidays photos on it from a friend. The comment that cam with the gift was that they "put it all on there".. Recalling when they arrived back from their trip that they took over 1500 photos, I can only assume that they are on the DVD. I have many other examples like this concerning photos, particularly those put up in social websites such as Facebook. I made a comment on my niece's Facebook page recently about the 200 odd photos she had uploaded into an album called School Camp. Perhaps someone wants to look through 200 or 1500 photos, but I don't and there are a few reasons why.

Firstly, using the DVD example, when I look at the collection of photos on the DVD, the only information I have about these photos is that I know they are of my friend and are related to her trip. I do not know exactly when or where the photos were taken. I will be able to gather some sense of time passing (from the tans they got), as well as from the groups of similar photos which indicate a particular event. The stories about these photos do not come with the DVD and the photos themselves are do not tell me enough of the story. I want to know what the context was for taking the photo - the stories that make the photos meaningful to my friend.

Secondly, I can say with fair certainty that those 1500 photos will contain multiples of the same event and some very similar photos, as well as some dud photos where someone's face is half cut off or something like that. It seems to be an increasing trend with the rise of digital photography to keep all photos, even the ones that did not turn out right. The reason for this may be that moving photos from a camera onto a computer is more easily done in bulk. It may be that once the photos are 'stored' on the computer, people see no need to get rid of them. Because storage is so simple, easy and cheap - there are no physical artefacts like albums, or even photos themselves - it is easier to just put them all into a folder and 'save' them. By performing this action, even the dud photos become part of the new, digital story being told with these photo collections. To me though, this new story is like listening to an old aunt's story at Christmas which goes on and on with intricate detail and has no real meaning for anyone else.

Thirdly, and this point is related to online hosting of these photos, it takes a significant amount of time and bandwidth to look at online collections of photos. I do not know if you have noticed, but on Facebook, when you are looking through someone's photo album, after you have viewed a few photos, the program and internet start to slow down and you get that round 'loading' icon. Slow down to me means boredom. Now my internet connection is not the greatest, but it is not as bad as many. However, the last thing I want to do in a site such as Facebook is watch the 'loading' symbol.

Facebook and other sites where photos can be shared have great tools which provide a user space to write stories and name the photos. I particularly love tagging of people and places in photos and having them link back to a profile - a tool which gives greater context and meaning to photos, collections and our 'digital selves'. However, I think that the art of storytelling and a critical eye is being lost in digital personal recordkeeping. When sharing photos I think it is critical to understand what you are trying to say with your photos. Not everyone is a born storyteller, but everyone, I think, has a sense of story and can construct meaning in useful ways.

Unfortunately, our computers generally do not have the right tools to help us organise our photos so that they have meaning over time. We can create useful folder and document titles and even add information into the properties fields if we want to - but seriously, who does? With the practice of dumping all photos into albums onto the computer, finding the right photo again years later can be a problem. There are programs out there that can be installed on home computers to help organise photos. Not everyone can afford them though and I would have concerns about adding any extra info - will the extra info transfer to other storage mediums without the program?

Personal recordkeeping is important. How many of the photos you have taken with your digital camera do you consider vitally important? How long do you think that you would need to hold onto these photos? 10 years? 20 years? Will you be able to find that funny photo with the monkey from your trip 20 years into the future? How would you search for it? You probably won't be using the same computer 20 years into the future, so where will the photos be stored? How will they stored? Will they be organised?

Some other things to remember about personal recordkeeping that I have not mentioned here and might consider writing another blog post about is disaster proofing those records you consider vital. It is great to back up and we all be doing this, but what if your house burns down, or the robber takes the laptop and the external back up drive attached to it? Personal recordkeeping in the cloud is something to very seriously consider, but the cloud is not entirely free, so there needs to be some consideration of what exactly needs to be stored and where.

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Government | 'Don't Be A Dickhead' campaign|

2010-03-30T11:30:00.001+11:00

via theage.drive.com.au

I wonder if people intentionally planned that these ads would have a backlash? I am not entirely sure if the creative team is clever enough to have created a video with lasting viral or social impact. I can see nothing with this add which will bring it into social consciousness for kids/teens or impact on vernacular - another big win for media. Although I could be wrong -certainly Gabrielle Leigh thinks I am.

However, as always, controversy in the press means that these ads will get more exposure. More people go to Youtube to find them, watch and share them and more people can talk about it. Advertising in social media is all about the conversation rather than the image, so perhaps this ad campaign will be quite successful.

I am also interested in the value of this ad as a social record - what does it tell us? I thought I had read that it was launched only for online - what does that tell us about expectations of online audiences? It is also directed at kids and although I have not seen the 'emo' version, it seems to have age groups on the ad which are not the target audience. The element of derision teamed with humour which seems to be the fashion in the vernacular - calling people and actions 'gay' for example meaning lame, or calling someone a 'bitch' as a term of affection. I suppose it is not a new fashion and every generation has it to some extent.

How will this social phenomenon be represented in our archival and cultural heritage institutions? Is it important to them or us? Who would want to know about it in the future? What does this phenomenon tell us about our society and where will online social advertising go to next? Such fascinating subjects and of particular interest to me and my PhD. This ad is TAC, so theoretically, the Public Records Office of Victoria will end up having custody of this ad - but will it come with all the rest of the information that will make it a social record? Or will there simply be a copy of the video itself, as is common in archives, isolated from its social context?

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rhizome definition

2010-03-24T11:53:00.001+11:00

Music, the music industry and the rhizome! A model of change.

http://www.musicneutral.com/discuss/2009/02/25/digital-music-becomes-more-rhizomatic/#

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rhizome definition

2010-03-24T11:51:00.001+11:00

Music, the music industry and the rhizome! A model of change.

http://www.musicneutral.com/discuss/2009/02/25/digital-music-becomes-more-rhizomatic/#

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The jigsaw puzzle revealing a picture of Germany's painful past | The Australian

2010-03-24T11:35:00.001+11:00

BERTRAM Nickolay does not like doing jigsaws. This is strange because for the past 15 years the German computer engineer has sweated over the most fiendish jigsaw puzzle imaginable, made up of 600 million scraps of paper.

via theaustralian.com.au

This article is fascinating and has many implications for the re-construction of a documentary history, as well as for organisational evidence and use of digital technologies.
When I first read this article my mind thought of the many stories that records tell us. It amazed me to read that these bags of torn paper have been lying around for decades and that years of work had been put into trying to 'piece together the puzzle'.
Each individual piece of ripped paper tells a story - a story about resources that ensured these papers were kept together for restoration, a story about the dedication of the Stasi in destroying records, a story about technology and how it was not efficient in destroying so many records, a story on resources that effected the disposal of these records and many more.
The digital transformation of these records tells more stories, re-inventing the records as they go. The new, digitally transformed records, where the content 'makes sense' are different records telling different stories.
The ‘original’ record no longer exists, but the digitised and re-constructed version can tell us what its purpose was. The ‘original’ record exists in the stories and the history of this digital version. But is the digital record merely a version? No. It is now a record in its own right - a digital record of the process of reconstructing torn pieces of paper. A record of the resources spent on finding a solution to the re-construction. A record of the skills of programmers and capacity of technology. A record which has content that makes ‘sense’ and communicates information.
And what of the digitised pieces themselves? I can think of how these pieces can be used to tell stories about the records, and their place in time and space, not just of the Stasi’s actions, but of technology and determination to find a solution. I can see this technology being used to provide a tool for interactive storytelling in archives and museums and on the web. And not just to make ‘sense’, but to make nonsense using the pieces – what else can they tell us, how else can they be used? What is the value of the record pieces?
Of course my mind wanders to organisational implications, particularly regarding evidence. Imagine if this technology became cheap enough for everyone to use? Recordkeeping disposal and destruction would have be exceptionally rigorous and effective. Furthermore, the technology that re-constructs shredded paper would be needed as evidence as much the re-constructed record itself in order to prove that the technology reconstructed it ‘the right way’. What types of stories would shredded organisational records tell, other than just their content?

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Activity theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2010-03-18T12:30:00.001+11:00

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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See also Social constructivism (learning theory) and Critical psychology.

Activity theory is a psychological meta-theory, paradigm, or framework, with its roots in Vygotsky's cultural-historical psychology. Its founders were Alexei N. Leont'ev (1903-1979), and Sergei Rubinshtein (1889-1960) who sought to understand human activities as complex, socially situated phenomena and go beyond paradigms of psychoanalysis and behaviorism. It became one of the major psychological approaches in the former USSR, being widely used in both theoretical and applied psychology, in areas such as education, training, ergonomics, and work psychology ^[1]. Activity theory theorizes that when individuals engage and interact with their environment, production of tools results. These tools are "exteriorized" forms of mental processes, and as these mental processes are manifested in tools, they become more readily accessible and communicable to other people, thereafter becoming useful for social interaction.^[2]

Contents
[hide]

1 The history of activity theory

1.1 Leont'ev

2 Developments in activity theory

2.1 Scandinavian activity theory

2.2 Systemic-structural activity theory (SSAT)

2.3 Applications to design

3 Sources

4 See also

5 References

[edit] The history of activity theory

The origins of activity theory can be traced to several sources, which have subsequently given rise to various complementary and intertwined strands of development. This account will focus on two of the most important of these strands. The first is associated with the Moscow Institute of Psychology and in particular the troika of young researchers, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896–1934), Alexander Romanovich Luria (1902–77) and Alexei Nikolaevich Leont'ev (1903–79). Vygotsky founded cultural-historical psychology, an important strand in the activity approach; Leont’ev, one of the principal founders of activity theory, both continued, and reacted against, Vygotsky's work. Leont'ev's formulation of general activity theory is currently the most influential in post-Soviet developments in AT, which have largely been in social-scientific and organizational, rather than psychological research.

The second major line of development within activity theory involves scientists, such as P. K. Anokhin (1898-1974) and N. A. Bernshtein (1896-1966), more directly concerned with the neurophysiological basis of activity; its foundation is associated with the Soviet philosopher of psychology S. L. Rubinshtein (1889-1960). This work was subsequently developed by researchers such as Pushkin, Zinchenko & Gordeeva, Ponomarenko, Zarakovsky and others, as is currently most well-known through the work on systemic-structural activity theory being carried out by G. Z. Bedny and his associates.

[edit] Leont'ev

After Vygotsky's early death, Leont'ev became the leader of the research group nowadays known as the Kharkov school of psychology and extended Vygotsky's research framework in significantly new ways. Leont'ev first examined the psychology of animals, looking at the different degrees to which animals can be said to have mental processes. He concluded that Pavlov's reflexionism was not a sufficient explanation of animal behaviour and that animals have an active relation to reality, which he called activity. In particular, the behaviour of higher primates such as chimpanzees could only be explained by the ape's formation of multi-phase plans using tools.

Leont'ev then progressed to humans and pointed out that people engage in "actions" that do not in themselves satisfy a need, but contribute towards the eventual satisfaction of a need. Often, these actions only make sense in a social context of a shared work activity. This lead him to a distinction between activities, which satisfy a need, and the actions that constitute the activities.

Leont'ev also argued that the activity in which a person is involved is reflected in their mental activity, that is (as he puts it) material reality is "presented" to consciousness, but only in its vital meaning or significance.

[edit] Developments in activity theory

Activity theory is dynamic. It can be used by a variety of disciplines to understand the way people act.^[3]

[edit] Scandinavian activity theory

This major school of thought seeks to integrate and develop concepts from Vygotsky's Cultural-Historical Psychology and Leont'ev's activity theory with Western intellectual developments such as Cognitive Science, American Pragmatism, Constructivism, and Actor-Network Theory. It is known as Scandinavian activity theory. Work in the systems-structural theory of activity is also being carried on by researchers in the US and UK.

[edit] Systemic-structural activity theory (SSAT)

At the end of the 1990s, a group of Russian and American activity theorists working in the systems-cybernetic tradition of Bernshtein and Anokhin began to publish English-language articles and books dealing with topics in human factors and ergonomics^[4] and, latterly, human-computer interaction.^[5] Under the rubric of systemic-structural activity theory (SSAT), this work represents a modern synthesis within activity theory which brings together the cultural-historical and systems-structural strands of the tradition (as well as other work within Soviet psychology such as the Psychology of Set) with findings and methods from Western human factors/ergonomics and cognitive psychology. The development of SSAT has been specifically oriented toward the analysis and design of the basic elements of human work activity: tasks, tools, methods, objects and results, and the skills, experience and abilities of involved subjects. SSAT has developed techniques for both the qualitative and quantitative description of work activity.^[6] Its design-oriented analyses specifically focus on the interrelationship between the structure and self-regulation of work activity and the configuration of its material components.

[edit] Applications to design

In the study of Human-Computer Interaction and cognitive science, activity theory can be used to provide a framework for informing (cf. interaction design) and evaluating design^[7].

In a framework derived from activity theory, any task, or activity, can be broken down into actions, which are further subdivided into operations. In a design context, using these categories can provide the designer with an understanding of the steps necessary for a user to carry out a task. ^[8]

[edit] Sources

Leont'ev, A. Problems of the development of mind. English translation, Progress Press, 1981, Moscow. (Russian original 1947).

Leont'ev, A. Activity, Consciousness, and Personality

Engeström, Y. Learning by expanding

[edit] See also

active learning

interaction design

[edit] References

^ [? "Bedny, G. Z. and D. Meister. (1997)"]. "The Russian Theory of Activity: Current Applications to Design and Learning.". ?.

^ M. Fjeld, K. Lauche, M. Bichsel, F. Voorhorst, H. Krueger & M. Rauterberg (2002): Physical and Virtual Tools: Activity Theory Applied to the Design of Groupware. In B. A. Nardi & D. F. Redmiles (eds.) A Special Issue of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Activity Theory and the Practice of Design, Volume 11 (1-2), pp. 153-180.

^ Nardi, Bonnie A. (1996). Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-computer Interaction. pp 1-20. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. ISBN 0262140586

^ Bedny, G. Z. & Meister, D. (1997). The Russian Theory of Activity: Current Applications to Design and Learning, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

^ Bedny, G. Z. & Karwowski, W. (2003b). A Systemic-Structural Activity Approach to the Design of Human-Computer Interaction Tasks. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 16, pp. 235-260.

^ Bedny, G. Z. & Karwowski, W. (2006) A Systemic-Structural Theory of Activity: Applications to Human Performance and Work Design. Boca Raton, CRC Press/Taylor & Francis.

^ Kaptelinin, V.; Nardi, Bonnie (2006). Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design. Cambridge: MIT Press.

^ Nardi, Bonnie A. (1996). Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-computer Interaction. pp 17-44. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. ISBN 0262140586

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Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_theory"

Categories: Educational psychology

via en.wikipedia.org

I have been attempting to write an article for Archival Science which introduces a particular model I developed on 2008. The model is based on the Information Continuum Processes model, developed by Frank Upward, Don Schauder and Barbara Reed in the late 1990s.
I used the ICM model to develop my own model which can be used in approaching research design, particularly choice of method and philosophical tradition. The model situates the research in time and place, performing the conceptual actions of provenance, a concept in archival science linked to context of a record in time and space. The purpose of the model is to promote and build transparency, and almost create inbuilt emulation, so that a better understanding of the research outcomes and research process can be made so that future research in the same and similar areas have a rich picture upon which to build the same or new methods.
However, in doing the research for this paper I have come across 'activity theory'. Now, the ICM is described as being an activity based model, but my questions are, what is the relationship, if any, between the ICM and in particular the continuum, and activity theory? Are they complementary, or the same or what?
Of course I turned to wikipedia first to suss out a general overview of activity theory and find where the actual information is that will be helpful and I have found some alarming things.

Posted via web from The convergence of Leisa Gibbons

Rhizome Digital

2010-03-15T14:09:00.001+11:00

It is vital to keep accurate historical records of digital events as they occur.

via Archiving Britain’s web: The legal nightmare explored.

I am interested in this article primarily because it talks about archiving the web for cultural heritage, which is a topic close to my heart as my PhD research is somewhat related.

I find it fascinating that people want to archive the web. What does ‘archive the web’ actually mean? From this article, and the general consensus, archiving the web means taking snapshots of websites using software programs according to rules that determine their significance, and then storing them on computers in closed networks and then usually organising them. If a library is the archivist, then websites are generally organised by subject.

I want to know how a subject arrangement of images that are sometimes linked to each other have to do with the actual web. To me, this is taking the traditional concept of archiving and storing documents and making it try to fit something infinitely more complex and dynamic. To me the web is not just the content, nor is it links to other pages. So what is the web?

I am not entirely sure, to be honest. According to Wikipedia, the web (as in the www) is: ”a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet“. After reading this definition I now understand where this notion of snapshots as archives comes from – the use of the word ‘document’. Trying not to go too deeply into the semantics, I turned back to Wikipedia and asked it what a document was: “a bounded physical or digital representation of a body of information designed with the capacity (and usually intent) to communicate“. I wonder what bounded means? I dilly dally – the lie that is contained in this definition is found in the use of the term, “digital representation”.

When I create a word document, or indeed as I type this blog post, I am not creating a digital representation of anything. I am communicating, that is for sure…just the same as my friend who writes in the air is communicating, but is not a representation – a likeness – it is a digital entity. Of what, I am not sure. We usually call them documents, but obviously that gets us into trouble.

So this brings me back to why I found this article so interesting. Not because of the article itself, but because of the comment. I have quoted it above. The comment communicates that “digital events” must be captured. Hmmmm. How do you capture an event? What is an event exactly, particularly if it is digital? I am suspicious that the use of the word ‘event’ is being used to cover up the real intention of wanting to say, ’subjects’.

The National Library of Australia captures and stores webpages, very poorly in my opinion, however, it performs these actions according to what might be called, ‘digital events’. An example I used recently in a paper on web archiving of video, is one where the NLA captured web material on the 2007 Australian Federal Election. Its in the PANDORA archive here under the subject of Politics – Election Campaigns. If you check it out you will see that they have further broken the content down into six separate headings. I want to direct you to this particular archived website - content from The Chaser – here. Looked? um…where is the web in that?

I am sliding over this topic like a slippery slope, not offering any real answers, but only asking questions and leaving my points out there in the open. I apologise, but as is the quality of the rhizome, this topic has multiple dimensions in which there is much to be said, so I will probably have more to say about it at another time. However, I would like to point out a website that perhaps ‘archives’ the web in a much more useful way, although not as long lasting. You will find it here.

But that is not archiving I hear you say!? Well, you might say you know what archiving is, but I bet you are thinking about the definition in terms of an “archive” – the place or the space that holds ’stuff’. What does archiving mean to you? I’ll put forward some words to help you…retention, filing, saving, retrieving, removing, old, later, reference, collect…

via rhizomedigital.wordpress.com

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archive: Definition, Synonyms from Answers.com

2010-03-09T10:28:00.001+11:00

via answers.com

Answers.com defines Archival Science as: The study and practice of organizing, preserving, and providing access to information and materials in archives.
*shudder*

I am trying to figure out the definition of Archival Science for a paper I am writing to be submitted to one of the big journals. Me being me I am not happy simply to appropriate someone else's definition, but I feel I need to include some explanation of what I think personally. I need to put forward an argument.
Anyway, the more I read into what people think Archival Science means, the more the term itself upsets me. I have been finding myself more and more turning to the word 'Archivistics' to define what I consider is my profession.
I have been struggling with Archival Science primarily because of that word Science in the title - what exactly does it mean? When I think i science I think of people conducting experiments and having loads of data that streams out of a computer and looks like nonsense. I keep thinking that Anthropology is a discipline without science in its name - although some might suggest that it is without science at all. And there is the problem - the idea that social science is as valuable as any other science. And who determines values then?

Psychology conducts experiments but does not have to have 'science' in its name. Psychology, I would suggest, sits a fence in which one leg loosely hangs in the positivist realm with repeatable experiments, quantifiable data and so on and the other leg kicks out into the interpretive like a reflex, almost unknowingly. I have not read a lot of psychology research, so I am making this judgement up, but it does highlight to me the ideal or importance of science-y kinds of research - as if it is more valid. I think hiding the subjective nature of research is damaging, but that is just me.

So, back again to Archival Science. When writing this definition I am looking at the Records Continuum model and Frank's explanation in the text, Archives: Recordkeeping in Society - "Recordkeeping objects are marked out by their processes of formation and continuing formations, not by their intrinsic nature." (page 206).

Another definition of Archival Science:
A systematic body of theory that supports the practice of appraising, acquiring, authenticating, preserving, and providing access to recorded materials.http://www.archivists.org/glossary/term_details.asp?DefinitionKey=1814

This one is interesting to me. I like the use of the word 'recorded', but not sure about materials as it sounds very physical world to me. I also raise an eyebrow at the word 'systematic' and its use with 'body of theory'. Is the theory systematic or the organisation of it? Why use systematic at all? Does it have a special significance to Archival Science because it implies that all Archival Scientists are well organised? I like the inclusion of all those good verbs in there - this also strikes me as something that is creating an identity myth as well. I am not entirely convinced that Archival Science is really just about the theory and practice of appraising, acquiring, authenticating, preserving, and providing access. Why not the creation, capture, organisation and pluralisation of records? I guess the final issue I have with this definition is that I am not entirely sure what 'study' actually means. Studying records (or recorded materials) or the processes behind the verbs mentioned above, or both?

Can study mean philosophy, paradigm, principles? I like to use the word assumptions. The identity the SAA has wrapped up about Archival Science in this definition is an assumption. The use of those particular verbs are through assumption.

My other favourite word of the minute is, 'expectation'. I have been talking about it in relation to email management and business requirements, but I think it is also relevant to a definition of Archival Science. The expectations and assumptions of Archival Science are what makes it Archival Science. Perhaps I am really trying to define Archival Science research?

Anyway, I came up with a definition of Archival Science (with a caveat) which I have used in my paper. This is the second draft of the definition and I have borrowed concepts from Eric Ketelaar...
Archival Science is:
a field of study concerned with recorded information that includes the practitioners in the field, as well as the assumptions that drive the practice.

Posted via web from The convergence of Leisa Gibbons

convergence

2010-01-15T18:14:00.003+11:00

It is January and again I am struggling with writing an academic paper again. This time I had a clear idea of what I wanted to talk about – the use of sense-making in a research methodology. However, I seem to have gone off onto a convergence tangent, referring to the action of sense-making by the researcher a reason for moving beyond transdisciplinary – this takes research methodology to new heights(?). But perhaps I am the one stretching too far with my need to speak academic-ese with a bit of pop culture thrown in. I probably just want to be more like Henry Jenkins, but just don’t have the right snappy focus. Or it could be that I have overextended myself in the way I usually do – by thinking that everything is more complex than it really is. I see layers of meaning, heaped, mixed and moving – I wish I just only saw dead people.

Posted via email from The convergence of Leisa Gibbons

One Year Summary of Computer Image Analysis, Computer Vision Conferences

2010-01-15T17:15:00.001+11:00

Check out this website I found at conferences.visionbib.com

Info related conference hub - very useful for planning.

Posted via web from The convergence of Leisa Gibbons

upgrade toPhD

2009-09-14T09:52:00.001+10:00

Today is the day I upgrade to PhD. The presentation is in about 8 minutes. I am nervous, but think I will be OK. I have no idea of the types of questions I might be asked, so this makes my brain shut down. I am sure I will be able to make stuff up - that is what I am good at.

I also aim to use this blog more often than I have been - I am reporting today that I use it, so I had better...

Archiving Online Networks

2009-05-13T20:16:00.004+10:00

In two entirely different conversations today I discussed my research project and mentioned that I was interested in what qualities were required to call a Youtube video a Youtube video. Both times I was given almost the exact same response - a response I had not been given previously. I wonder if it was because I was explaining my concept in a way that did not make it clear what I meant, or I over simplified what I was explaining. The first conversation was with someone who I have discussed my project with before in a general way. The second person was an old acquaintance who I have not seen in about 5 years who I know has a PhD in a scientific field. The response was: isn't Youtube just a carrier of information? [my words] An example given was that when television shows are archived, the television network itself and the programming is not archived, so why should anything to do with the online network be considered important? I have been thinking about this all day - inbetween listening to scintillating information on copyright law for websites. Firstly, I wonder if the assumption in the first place, made by the archivists who selected the information, that tv programming was not a necessary part of the archival information. How is a moving image archive going to show people what TV is in 500 years? Do we expect TV to be explained in books? If it is, then why keep a programme on video? Isn't explaining enough? Does explaining combined with a moving image example tell enough information? How does the explaining and the example find each other? Is it the responsibility of the archive to make sure there is explaining in order to understand the example? What kind of explaining might that be? Do words truly reflect the nature of television when watched? Is explaining with examples really just an outdated way of creating an encyclopedia entry?

My follow up explanation in both instances was that my research was to ask the questions, not provide answers. Both people, although creative, made me also realise, akin to what my supervisor said recently, that I will need to show the purpose of what I am doing - make it real somehow - for archivists. Quantifiable in some way. In some of the literature i have found, researchers have written about the idea of researchers using digital moving image in the future and what they might be interested in. Perhaps this is a avenue for further exploration. I also said this morning then if the network does not matter, then should these videos (if selected) be archived in an archival quality standard - not the flash videos found online. All of my interviewees keep their uncompressed data for storage, sometimes in unedited footage as well as in a final cut for posting online. What part is the most useful and to whom?

This is part of the reason why I want to formalise the use of the term, 'digital form' as an explanation of different productions of digital data. Format is not really a useful description of what is being created. I am going to go back to McCluhan and have a re-look at his writings to see if I can get some answers. Perhaps Castells might have something to say as well. More info when it is written about...

2009-05-09T18:57:00.002+10:00

Is the Semantic Web about the power of indexing? Does the agent index?

The Semantic Web, hubs and discovering archives

2009-05-09T18:43:00.004+10:00

What role might the Semantic Web play in discovering Archives and those records that people consider part of themselves? What information might be needed in order to discover something useful?

I think ultimately that my research thesis is heading in this direction. From the analysis I have already undertaken I can see that there is two strong elements underlying each interviewee - that of being able to store shared narratives online and a deeper understanding of discovery and archival processes.

The Semantic Web will provide the cohesion between personal recordkeeping and archives - showing us, dynamically, where information is, how it is authoritative and who holds it. There needs to be more thinking about this and how it fits in with Complexity Theory as well as the time space Continuum.

The Semantic Web article

What happened to March and April?

2009-05-09T10:39:00.004+10:00

There have been many things afoot in the last two months, least of all the change in my current employment status. I am now full time employed as the Records Manager at the Brotherhood of St Laurence based in Fitzroy, Melbourne. I started at the beginning of March and have been going full throttle since then, which has of course taken up most of my time. The BSL has never had a Records Manager before, so I have had to develop everything from scratch. The projects I am currently working on are:
1. Developing a disposal schedule for entire organisation (21 sites, 600+ people).
2. Conducting a hard copy records audit.
3. Writing policies in the guise of guidelines. Only one finalised so far.
4. Interviewing key people to find out the major functions and activities.
5. Developing a Records Awareness training program.
I am also working with people on other projects:
1.Cleaning up the Research & Policy records and to look at implementing policy and procedures for contract research staff.
2. Working on an application to the NLA for developing our archive through reconigition of its significance.
3. Workforce planning.

On the research project I also hit a major goal - the completion of a good rough draft of the methodology chapter. It is 14 000 words long and requires extensive re-working, but it is done. I have also been working on my analysis of the interviews of Youtube users. Some interesting things have been coming out of it - in particular the familiarity users have with archival issues, without even recognising that they are archival in origin. I have had a paper accepted to the 2009 Australian Society of Archivists Conference in October of this year in Brisbane. I now just have to write it. I also applied for the ICHORA 5 Conference in June of next year in London and will hear back in June about acceptance. I am working on my journal article introducing both the research issue/questions and the Cultural Heritage Continuum model. I have not sent in an abstract for the paper yet as I am working on the key point of the article which is the impetus to get this blog back up and running. I have decided that the use of the term, "digital form', should have a meaning that is uniform and useful. I will blog about that in the next post. In both the journal article and the ICHORA paper I introduce the term and why I think it is needed as well as what it encompasses.

So it has been pretty busy. I have had some minimal feedback from one supervisor who suggests that I am heading into Complexity Theory territory. I find this fascinating as I thought, in a way, I was already there, but I did not know that it already had a name. This also proves a problem as now I will have to look into Complexity Theory so I can discuss it somewhere in my PhD.

In conjunction with my primary supervisor, it has been decided that I can apply to move my Masters up to a PhD, continuing it part time. Monash have scholarships to complete the writing of a PhD in a six month period and I think I will apply for one later down the track. In the meantime, in July I will apply to upgrade the Masters to a PhD and then I can get stuck into the analysis in a more detailed way. I have been told that I need to scale back the amount of detail I am trying to draw out through the analysis in order to 'fit' my thesis into a Masters. A good reason to upgrade. I will discuss the analysis a bit more again in another blog post.

2009-02-25T14:44:00.001+11:00

Click Here to take survey

2009-02-25T14:11:00.001+11:00

Poll about using online video

IMDB and reiterative television

2009-02-03T08:58:00.002+11:00

I just got on IMBD.com to check out the stats of the movie in production, Terminator 4. The reason why I did this is cos on Twitter right now Christian Bale is a hot topic and I wondered why. I found that a tirade of abuse he unleashed at a colleague has been released online. So I went to IMDB to see if who he mentions in the tirade has a corresponding position in the crew. Anyway, that is by-the-by as then I decided to check out how old Christian was and how young he was when he first started, as well as what else he had been in. I was also thinking about the publicity over the Batman movie and the thing about him hitting his mother or something last year? Anyway, I thought I could get some context from the movies he has been in - some glint of a personality. What I did find was a little more interesting that Christian's long career - that TV award shows, being that they are on TV are considered a TV show and can go on your credits. These credits of course are in a section titled, Self, so they are really a special category made up my IMDB - see below:
# The 35th Annual People's Choice Awards (2009) (TV) .... Himself
Other mentions in the 'self' category are the Entertainment tonight appearances and various other shows such as that. I find it interesting for many reasons that I am sure I will find difficult to explain, but I am going to go ahead and do my best.
1. IMDB have decided that context is about being seen - either on TV or film, whether it is what we would normally call a 'show' as well as those shows that are not fictional.
2. TV shows are TV shows regardless of content - the medium defines it. This makes me think of McLuhan's, "medium is the message". The fictional TV shows are produced the same as the talk shows, the TV awards presentations etc.
3. People are interested in the appearance of an actor where ever it might be. This makes me think of the rise of the clip as is evident in Youtube. The theme of the clip can reference a particular character. Yesterday I searched Youtube for clips showing Mickey Rouke. I did this cos I wanted to see what his face looked like not altered with surgery and remember what he looked like when he was hot. People show their interest in a particular theme -ie: Mickey Rouke, by taking clips out of movies where they think he is good and then tag it with his name and it becomes part of the evidence of Mickey - as actor, as celebrity, as someone with value. I wonder if something like these clips on Youtube, which also act as an archive to the value he has within a community, are thought of as having any value for Mickey Rouke as context of his life. This is where I think places like Youtube are very interesting for social informatics. What kind of information is being presented here? How is being presented? We should ask how it is relevant, more than we should ask why, or whether it has value. Value is a mis-understood and misappropriated terms in archival science - according to me. Like the term preservation - which has ideas of value caught up in it.
4. The value of celebrity.
5. IMDB making up context through its service of information provider.
5.

Research smesearch

2009-02-02T08:43:00.002+11:00

I have been feeling a little down about the whole research thing lately. Everything seems to take so much time. However, after seeing my supervisor last week, I have started to feel a bit better about the whole thing. My supervisor also seems to be a bit more keen on helping me get my stuff done - in a strategic way, which I appreciate. I will be studying till I am 40 at this rate. Meh...

Today I have started an emailed interview which be interesting. I get quite concerned that people misunderstand text based information and I think i often over qualify what I say. I wonder if this will have an impact on my study or analysis? Anyway, after the first interview, which I found to be quite awkward, I realised that I was thinking about it a bit skew-if. The findings of the interviews will provide the information for the analysis. Awkwardness is part of those findings. I am sure this will be the case when i finally get some actual reading done about the art of case study research in social sciences. The context of what is said is broader than I realised. Furthermore, I think i was trying to get the conversation to be what I wanted it to be. I tried to explain things rather because of this phobia of people not understanding me and thus I am paranoid that I directed the interview in ways that I should not have.

It will be interesting to make note that my interviews are taking place in different mediums - such as IM, email and face to face. I think that communication is not the same across these different mediums and i should probably take note of that in my methodology chapter. Talking about methodology chapter, i did not get enough done for my supervisor meeting. I simply could not find the work within myself. However, i am feeling a little better now - perhaps the pressure of the immanent meeting has passed - and I think I can get some more out of it. I was surprised to hear my supervisor say that she still wanted to see me every 3 weeks as well. I thought it would be longer considering I am part time. I might have to do phone calls and emails in the future if I am working. I have a job interview lined up for this Friday - full time archival work for 3-6 months. I will also be a tutor for first semester! i am quite excited about tutoring. I have always wanted to do some kind of teaching - tutoring will be the first step.

Blackouts and slow speeds

2009-02-02T08:38:00.002+11:00

My first bit of dedicated study at home and my internet allowance goes over and I am suddenly on dial up speed for more than a week. Then there was the extreme heat and blackouts. Talk about mercury retrograde. Anyway, below is a blog post I wrote while off line...

23/1/2009
Today I conducted my first interview. I knew it would be difficult to put my concepts into questions and to take part in an open ended and unstructured interview. However, I did manage to get an interview that lasted almost an hour and it gave me some good information that I will be able to take away and analyse. I am not entirely sure of my success as an interviewer however, but I can only get better I suppose. The problem is trying to ask the right questions, or steer the conversation into topics that I am interested in. When I speak about memory of records, no one really knows what I am talking about unless I qualify it with a story about archives etc. I sort of tried to do this today, but was not entirely successful. Perhaps a film student was not the best subject, but I will find out more information from other users. Another thought about the use of Youtube and how people interact with the technology. This guy was setting himself up in networks to feel it out and to have it there when he needs it. It is integral to his idea of an online presence, however he uses Youtube as a tool, rather than for remembering or holding onto information. The purpose of his use is to facilitate avenues for communication rather than to hold onto information.

Moving out

2009-01-16T10:51:00.002+11:00

I am now officially a part time student and with that means not having a dedicated office. As of today I have moved out of my office and am now homeless. I get to share the Knowledge Management lab with anyone else who happens along and cannot leave my stuff at uni. So today I will change around my study at home and tidy it up and make it my new office. I assume I will be working from home mostly now.

I am still quite frustrated with the interview situation and feel like I am not succeeding in this research project at all. I have still yet to start the proper writing for my methodology chapter, but as I don't see myself getting a job to start next week, I assume I will have all that time to get a good chunk of it done. I have re-organised the structure of it so that it works from and references the methodology model I have developed. I feel this better suits the project outcomes and also gives weight to the use of the model.

Of other interest is my application for a full time job in policy development. I know I won't get the job, but have been working on the application anyway. It is a dream job, but I am probably a couple of years away from the right experience for the job. It makes me wonder though whether I should concentrate on getting experience in policy work, or research assistant work. The first helps me with my ultimate goals and then second helps me get into a PhD, which may also help me with my ultimate goal. Why do I always have two choices?

2009-01-09T17:02:00.004+11:00

Why is it so hard for people to set up an interview time? Is it because it is voluntary? Is it because people are lazy? Is it because there is no apparent value to the interviewees? I have 8 people who say they want to talk, but not one person has committed to an interview. How can I make them commit? Maybe it is because they have to give consent and consent can be seen as giving something away?

Qualitative Health Research, Vol. 15, No. 5, 698-706 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1049732304273903

The Problems With Interviews

Karl Nunkoosing

Back in business

2009-01-08T09:57:00.002+11:00

I am here at uni attempting to rework the headings of the methodology chapter. I have to go back over my notes and blog posts to remember what my supervisor said about methods. From what I remember, this chapter is a massive overview of the entire project which describes what tools I have used in order to create and participate in this research project. I should think about re-structuring my chapter with titles that describe methods. I also need to incorporate into the chapter my literature review. How I came about using those methods and what I hope/hoped to achieve with their use would also be relevant. This contributes to the rigor of the research.

Methods:

Interpretivist tradition
Qualitiative research
Methodology model
Content analysis
Case study (studies)
Deep thought and reflection
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Discourse review
Discourse review model - the Bubble model
Electronic communication?

Happy New Year!

2009-01-05T09:00:00.001+11:00

I was not going to have a holiday, but my bf was on holiday and although he often slept in until midday or later, I would sleep in as well and when I got up the last thing i wanted to do was read or write for this project. However, I am back in business today and have brought forward to the screaming front of my brain that I have been asked to provide a draft methodology chapter by end of January. END OF JANUARY? I am sure I can do it, but it is, like, 20 000 words!!! I guess it is like all those baby steps you sometimes needed to do to get through a task: one word at a time.

I have got to go back and review what was said about my methods and what I need to include as I have to redo the chapter structure again. Will post about this again later.

Last meeting for the year

2008-12-19T09:26:00.002+11:00

I had my final supervisor meeting for the year yesterday. I really enjoy these meetings as there are things brought forward by my supervisor that really get me thinking. I assume that meetings with supervisors are supposed to keep you on track, help you define what it is that you want to achieve, give you some ideas in which to delve into and feed your enthusiasm. I get this from both my supervisors, but in completely different ways. I feel challenged by both of them as well as the research itself. How can life be any better?

Today I intend to flesh out my article. I am not going to approach this one as I normally do with structure and order, but let it flow out of my fingertips on the keyboard. It is already there, it always was, but now I have my title and my beginning and I know what the thrust of it will be. I wrote on my twitter site that I am going to start with a riddle and end with two questions in this article. My supervisor yesterday helped me call the riddle, "the mystery", which I love very much. This topic, which is essentially looking at online cultural content from an archival perspective, is a mystery that no one has really looked at. It really is a mystery and a puzzle to be worked out. I like the theme of that as well.

I have to also email all of my potential participants - those people who have professed an interest in my project and might come on board as interviewees. I feel as though the time of year has really impacted on my ability to get their attention and hold it. The ethics amendment, which took three weeks to come through, has really upset the bandwagon as well, BUT, now that I am about to be part time, I can take my time with the interviewing (somewhat). I am quite excited about it all, and nervous about how I will go as an interviewer. Rigour of the research relies on my interviewing skills. I am part of the research now, but also cannot direct the people into saying things I want to here, but also need to steer them onto topics that are relevant. I have been thinking about this a little bit. I think I will probably be fine.

Renewed vigour!

2008-12-18T10:06:00.002+11:00

I was trying to go to sleep the other night when I realised how to approach my first article, the one where I am introducing my topic and my research. All of a sudden I was writing it in my head and I thought I would try and remember it in the morning, but I knew that was stupid because I often forget what I thought five minutes ago*, so I grumpily got out of bed and got one of the new branded notebooks I got from work and wrote stuff down, groaning and moaning the whole way through and the man in the bed laughing at me whilst telling me to shush as he was sleeping.

Anyway, my idea about the article is essentially the same as it was before - introducing the topic, but I approach the subject from the point of view of multiplicity rather than from an archival paradigm such as av or digital records. I can then bring in ideas about archival thought and weave them through it, rather than outline what it is in blocks etc. I start with the idea of multiplicity, define it, bring in the Continuum models, explain them, then go. In the other article idea these ideas of multiplicity and Continuum models was going to be my 'punchline', but I realise that the punch line is the research topic itself, not the way I am researching.

Better get on with it. #

* this happened yesterday when I was excitedly typing about something, and near finishing, realised I should do some banking. I finsihed typing, which took about a minute, then shut down the window and looked at the computer screen for ages, trying to figure out what I had decided I was going to do.

# Incidentally, now that I know I did not get a scholarship again for the second time, I feel a bit freer and less stressed. It is probably because circumstances have taken control off me for a bit. I feel more confident in getting a job because I dont need to restrict my hours now. All helpful. Finishing at the end of the year will be the most helpful though. I get longer to work on what I am doing - which is important for a thinker like me - and I can extend out my research to February, which is good for people who are very slack at replying.

Choosing people - intuition

2008-12-12T12:20:00.003+11:00

It is an interesting process, this choosing of people to ask to participate. In the first place I chose a variety of people in order to understand what was going on on Youtube and to see what types of videos were out there. This contributed to my content analysis and being able to create and apply a subject style of categorisation. I put most of these people as subscriptions on my Youtube page. I also found other people on the way through browsing, the featured page, other people's pages and included them in my subscriptions. My subscription list is 70 Youtube channels big. However, my database of potential participants is only 63 users big. Why? Because not eveyone I subscribed to and used for my content analysis could be a potential participant as they did not fit the criteria, which was designed as a result of the content analysis. However, I have another database, which is called, Study Subjects and these are the people I have actually contacted - it has currently got 25 users in it. I am being discerning, applying the criteria, but also working with a sense of what the interview might be like. I have noticed that I am choosing people who are similar to me or have similar interests or ones that I find interesting (the train guy is a classic example of this last one - videoing trains or even knowing what they are is not one of my ideas of fun, but I am fascinated by him doing it). An example of when I have avoided contact with a person is with the monster truck user who posts vides of and anything about monster trucks. No real difference to the train man, but I have decided that he might not be the best person to talk to. If i asked myself honestly I would say that I might have enough reparte with the user to be able to conduct a useful interview - the fascination is missing. I firmly believe that this is not a judgemental thing and it is not so black and white as it seems in my writing here, but I think there is some elements of all of these things mixed in with some intuition. I will be pondering this a bit more.

Aborignal/Ingidenous content on Youtube

2008-12-12T11:51:00.002+11:00

As far as I am aware and now that I have done an ethics application, if I were to choose a study subject that also happened to be an Indigenous Australian, I would have to apply for a different ethics clearance. I guess part of this involves declaring that the study subjects are Indigenous. I wonder if it is like declaring in a form that being Indigenous is part of your identity. It really irks me in a way, because these forms are asking you to acknowledge the difference of that identity. If the form said that you would like identify yourself as a white lesbian, then it would be offensive. I also think that these identification tick boxes are used for statistical purposes. Which I understand, but only if the statistics help and not nurture a identity that is not favourable or useful to the person. Anyway, there are a few people on Youtube who identify themselves as Aboriginal and I would like to contact them, but I fear that I might have to apply again to ethics and I really cannot afford the time. However, what interests me is that if they did not identify themselves as Abboriginal on Youtube I would have had no idea and contacted them merrily ignorant. The point in this study is to contact Youtube users, and where they are from or how they identify themselves other than being a Youtube identity really is not of my concern. However, this is also not really true, as any identity, whether it be being a researcher, or collector of giant umbrellas or anything that you believe contributes to who you are, will come up in discussion about what you capture, record, keep, share and understand about yourself on youtube. So I cannot get away with saying that it is about "the Youtube identity" because that is really not taking into consideration what and how identity is made and exits. Levels. levels. Levels. and tea.

Meeting notes

2008-12-11T13:36:00.002+11:00

I had a meeting with my primary supervisor today. I had submitted to her some workings of the outline of the thesis. This outline [which should be forever now known as the 'thesis that never was'] is now defunct in a way, as I had forgotten some areas that needed to be included, as well as not indicated very clearly where connections were to be made between chapters or information presented.

I find sometimes that one of the greatest challenges and difficulties I have is to do with being able to think objectively and what I would consider intuitively or you could call it abstractly. I often only do one or the other, not combining the both. For this thesis, and in particular the methods used to approach the thesis, I need to do both of these things simultaneously. The way I see it is that I have to get right in there and think about the effects, consequences and concerns about dealing with people, understanding information, not knowing what might be going on, how I might achieve results through thinking about it through tools such as this blog and in particular, at this time, this blog post. But at the same time I have to understand that what I am doing is creating instruments in order to understand and develop my thesis and answer my research questions. To me this feels like stepping outside and objectively looking in. Is this blog a tool? What method is it part of? How can I fit it into my methodological approach? Where?

Another area that this is concerned with is how I approach the interviewing. What kind of model or tool have I chosen to do this? I have created a model - the one based on the Continuum model and I will need to explain how it works, but at the same time I need to know where it fits into the methodological approach - what part of the research does it provide a tool for - what method? I have to use the language of research in order to write about this.

I see this type of viewing the research as a higher level in the hierarchy that I did not see before. I am looking at the project as a project rather than ALSO situating it in the field of research itself. This is not merely a project, but my introduction and development of understanding into the research approach. I must be critical of my involvement to the project, as well as understanding the content or subject of the project itself.

I think that perhaps I did understand this already, but have not written it down explicitly in the outlines. I think it would have come up anyway, as I am a very reflective person by nature. Sometimes I feel sometimes that the waxing and the waning of time in this thesis building is not helping me build - what I mean is that I seem to do really well at something for a short period and then move onto something else and then sometimes I come back to that part and then maybe move onto something else. I wish that I could just finish one bit and it be over!

I have to have my almost completed methodology done before end January 2009.

Plodding along

2008-12-10T13:29:00.002+11:00

It seems to me that I am up to a stage with my research where I need to pull everything together. I have started to do this - particularly with the methodology and literature review (of which I have pretty much done nothing - well this year at least). It is quite boring having to write, but it is also a great opportunity to think and express myself. I kinda keep forgetting that as writing is SO BORING. I find it very difficult to go back to things I have started and finish them. I have struggled with this my whole life and have overcome it to some extent. I know I can finish things at least - so that makes it easier to consider it a possibility.

Regarding the interviews - I have not heard back from the ethics committee concerning my amendments. I am pretty certain the amendments were send on a Thursday two weeks ago, so I should be hearing back from them either today or tomorrow.

I am getting quite worked up at the moment about the scholarship application and its success. I find out on Monday of next week. I sincerely hope that everything goes the way I want because I don't really want to get a full time job and I would rather spend my time concentrating on my study. Just thinking about not getting a scholarship is making me quite anxious.

Theoretical principles are what?

2008-12-05T12:24:00.005+11:00

I have posted before regarding the theoretical principles. Above is the last draft or version I did and I am still pretty happy about it. However, I have some issues. Right now I am trying to draw up a 'map' of the thesis, word by word, in useful headings, so that I have small goals to reach. For example, I have started writing the background which forms part of the introduction to my research topic. I have decided that this is worth 1500 words. So now I know how to organise my time, organise my writing and know how much to blather on. I have also included in this introduction a 500 word overview of Youtube which includes my experiences of Youtube as a researcher.

However, this is not exactly easy when considering the theoretical principles and concepts chapter, especially concerning the bubble. The bubble draws out and shows key areas, but it is NOT a subject classification. I am now wondering how it is that I can write out the theoretical principles in order to present it for a thesis. I suppose I can write one big essay, without headings, but i fear that may landslide into a colossal mess of writing and rambling for which I will not be able to come out of.

I am now attempting to put my ideas into some format, some structure, some sense relating to this thesis. Another problem I face is that everything is so exciting that I cannot keep within my boundaries. I have already been warned about this twice this research project and once in the last and related research project. FUCK!

test

2008-12-04T10:58:00.001+11:00

test post for email sending. the program i downloaded to save and back up my blog did not work.

Blog saving

2008-12-04T10:20:00.001+11:00

I am now saving my blog via a program I have found: http://asprise.com/product/blogcollector/download.php

Duration

2008-12-04T09:51:00.003+11:00

The duration my train takes in the morning to get to uni is also, fortunately, the exact amount of reading I want to do on the train.

Disappointed

2008-12-01T14:24:00.002+11:00

Today is the first of december and i asked people to get their consent forms in by the 30th of november. Now either I have a load of them waiting for me at uni in my mailbox or.... There is nothing in my email. I am so sad that people have said they were interested, but cannot fill out the consent form so I can do an actual interview!

I emailed 16 out of about 50 people and I got only one consent form that I know about. I know that it is a difficult time of year, but I would have thought that people could be a bit keen. I asked for contact and response, espically return of the consent form, by 30th November and this lack of input is sad. I only need three people for fuck's sake. How hard is it?

Sparkling ideas

2008-11-30T13:53:00.001+11:00

Last night I drank sparkling because i was out at a Christmas function. Then I talked about my research project. I had some brilliant things to say and some of it I had not said nor thought of before. Now I am cannot remember any of them.

Space & Time, Foucault and Deleuze

2008-11-29T14:08:00.003+11:00

Today while drinking lattes at my most favourite cafe in the world right now I had some kind of realisation about the two areas of philosophical thought I have been delving into.

I was thinking about heterotopias and ideas of space and culture. In particular I was thinking about how heterotopias are the reflection and that sometimes, and in particular with Youtube, the reality is not quite known. Or at least I have not figured it out yet. This ties in with how I feel about the internet, that it is seems to be something we think we know, that is sometimes even looks that way, but it is in fact nothing like we have ever experienced before and that we are making it up as we go along. I think this is happening in a way that does not exist in 'reality', in a culture of power and Giddens structures. But again, the internet is not separate from our world, it is most definitely born from it and intrinsically wound up with the structures and the systems. The space the internet is is not a reflection of real world at all, but it might be something else altogether.

However, if you think about the concepts of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation then this idea of what the internet might be or how it exists in space is clearer and in particular, Youtube. I would argue that the internet is a deterritorialisation of 'real world'. The concepts of the virtual vs the real world expose assumptions of the real world. Constantly we interact and develop ideas of the internet from how we interact with it from the physical world as well as what we know of the physical world. There can be no virtual without physical. Our assumptions show us what we appropriate and what we do not - as if the internet is a space of cherry picked social actions and [systems] created by its users. I would fit here into the argument all those things I say about Youtube and how it appropriates form and genre that we know and understand in the physical world - and that of material format in a physical carrier such as a video tape or roll of motion film.

It is the reterritorialisation that I think has not really occurred yet that is the most exciting part of the internet. To my mind the internet is such a new creature, an everchanging interface that speeds along changing our perceptions of howit can be used all the time and in true Giddens style we change along with it, adding to the cycle of change and building of structures. So a reterritorialisation has not occurred because the internet lacks a sense of identity. However, if we think about duration and what exists in time and space, bringing in some other areas of Deleuzian thought, it might be that we are STILL looking at the internet from what we understand of the physical world, the grounded world. I would call the physical world ever changing but taht our knowingness of being in that world as people, in society, creates understandings and allows for observations over time. The internet identity (or mutliple identities) of one person in the physical world is so fluid and changeable that it cannot be understood using the same tools.

However, I would suggest that attempts to reterritorialise have occurred and in fact are occurring right now. Have you heard of what the Australian Government intends to do with ISPs and the internet? A big fat power hungry filter. This is a definite attempt to reterritorialise the virtual world. I would also consider those marketing companies that use new technologies to keep up with their lucrative teen market and in particular those that do viral videos such as subservient chicken (by Burger King I think) as attempting to reterritorialise the internet.

I probably have loads more to say about this, but i have to do some other work. I am working on my methodology and have decided to use Deleuzian ideas to help support my model - along with the Continuum models from where it is inspired.

Today is the 3rd December and I still only got one consent form returned. hmmmmm....

Immanence and becoming-woman

2008-11-29T14:03:00.002+11:00

The above two concepts are very interesting, but I know so little about them at the moment I cannot really say much. I have nearly finished the beginning book and will start going into the Deleuze and Guttari theory more soon with Claire Colebrook.

Some observations:

Immanence sound shimmery - I love this.
To 'become' or the act of becoming sounds exactly like how I feel about and describe process. In particular it is very much like how I talk about my methodology model for this research project.

More about these later. I need to read more.

Deleuze and massages

2008-11-28T10:05:00.004+11:00

Today I am getting a massage. The last one I had was earlier in the year, probably March and it was not to my liking. Today I am determined to have the greatest massage ever and it will release all this energy and then I will concentrate properly on my very important research work.

So I have started reading about Deleuze and for my beginning I chose a small handbook of sorts, one that says it is for Arts students. Its new, so I thought it might have a good history of thought and how it has changed concerning Deleuze and where he is used in theory. It does. Tick. I also thought it might tell me the major original texts I need to look at in order to decide what I will take from his work (not from what other people say about his work). It does. Tick. The unexpected pleasure I have gotten from reading this small volume is that I disagree with what some people say about the internet. Woohoo! Double tick.

Ok, so far I know this about Deleuzian theory (with some help from Guttari) which is very similar to what I have written in my methodological model, but not quite. What appears to be the grandest concept, upon which everything else hangs, is rhizomes. I do love a bit of analogy and metaphor, so I appreciate that a rhizome is a type of plant. My Google 'define:' search came up with:

A horizontal underground stem different from the roots because it has nodes from which new leaves or stems branch. Rhizomes often store food for the plants.
aquaplant.tamu.edu/contents/glossary.htm

In philosophy, the term rhizome has been used by Carl Jung as a metaphor, and by Gilles Deleuze as a concept, and refers to the botanical rhizome.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome (philosophy)

Now I am excited that Jung used it as well. Back to the Deleuzian rhizome.

So, early on after reading this, in conjuction with reading about this rhizome as being a part of the tradition model of philiosophy which is often referred to as a tree, I immediately think these thoughts.

What is the central structure in this concept - the underground vine, the part of the plant that carries the nutrients?
What significance is that the central structure is underground and hidden?
And related to this, what signifcance does the parts we can see have? As well as the parts we cannot see?
What is the plural of this concept? Or does the concept exist in plurality already?

In the writing it was suggested that the tree structure failed as a metaphor because it was so upright and built and branching and very linear and very much about the one - the one in society: the one tree in a forest of trees. According to what I understand, the concept of the rhizome contrasts this by suggesting that there can be one tree, but it is within a system of trees (a forest I suppose) and that many things influence that one tree, but in particular, its being-ness of being within a system. (This system thinking reminds me of Giddens - many things remind me of Giddens - and I will mention them as I go.) However, if you think about the structure of the rhizome, the tree would be but one shoot - so it is the connections between the trees, the underground vine, the links, that make this concept literally bent sideways.

So this brings me to space. My new favourite subject. The only thing I need to think at this time, is where are these systems? What space do they occupy? How is time involved?

Moving on. Next I read about the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, which I enjoyed very very much. These concepts really helped me understand what I think the rhizome is supposed to be. I really love that it is about the individual in the group in the environment and a weaving of identity through all this. It made me think of my roles, my identity, epsecially as a woman - a social issue I have been made well aware of again recently. Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself. Deterritorialisation to me is where the network, the links, the central vine of the rhizome under the surface is revealed through what I would call space shifting. There is an element of what i think re-contextualisation means as well - this would be reterritorialisation. However, it is dificult to understand and know exactly what these concepts relate to, so i will have to do some more research and reading. However, I really like they have the word territorial in them - this makes the space concepts and heterotopias of Foucault's great to talk about in comparison.

backing up

2008-11-27T11:12:00.003+11:00

I have now found a free syncing software program that works much better than the original one I used. The first was not specifically a syncing program, so this is why it was so convoluted and hard to understand...for me. It was also a pay for program and I did not want to pay. So now I have found a free program and have got my syncing under control. I have my research files backed up in 4 locations at this time and will back it up onto my uni computer today sometime. I am backed up for sure.

I have sent the application for an amendment to the ethics form so that people can use IM for interviews. It would make my life a lot easier as well. Emailing back and forth is hard work. And it is quite formal - which I find kind of funny being that I am from the tradition of letter writing. IM can be recorded as a transcript and will be much easier to use. However, my only concern is that sometimes tone, humour and meaning can be lost in text. It will help that my participants are Australian, but this cannot be relied upon - my own friends, with whom I have constant real life contact with often misunderstand each other in sms or IM.

The other thing I had thought of previously but have done nothgin about it as yet is backing up my blog and now my Google docs. The Google docs can be downloaded into a word doc - although formatting etc is lost and it is a pain, but at least i can get the content. This blog is a bit different however. I might need to do some research to find out how I can capture the blog. It might be that I have to use the webpage capturing program I have downloaded and used already.

Back into the study timetable now - right now is methodology writing. :)

Databases

2008-11-26T15:51:00.003+11:00

I have just downloaded an open source software database to help me with my qualitative research and coding analysis. The program is here: http://www.pressure.to/qda/ andI am hoping that it will help me analyse the interviews I am about to start conducting.

I had a little panic actually thinking that i might have to create my own database for this aspect of the research. I cannot imagine having to do anything more dreary. The study subjects database has been hard enough work already.

Incidentally, I have been a little concerned to see that I got about 4 replies to my call out for participants for this research project and these were in the first couple of days. I was worried that I would not be able to gather enough people together to get my three case studies. I had another response today, so hopefully people are getting around to looking at these things. I have not heard back from my primary person - the one who said they would do it in the very beginning and this has got me worried as well. I know he has been travelling OS but I hope he will be back in time for me to interview him.

New lease on research

2008-11-26T12:48:00.002+11:00

Today is the beginning of my new research regime/plan. I have been under a lot of stress recently concerning scholarships and job hunting and other personal stuff and what not and have been slacking off with my reading and methodology parts of my research. I decided last week that I needed some more structure in my work so have created a timetable. Of course I had a morning tea this morning on my first day of the timetable and now am all out of sync.

I have been mentioning a lot recently, and in fact from the beginning that I need to write more. Well the time has come to actually do that. I have to focus evenly on all the areas of my research project, which includes the methodology, literature review, conceptual theory or theoretical principles, and the research itself. I think I have done enough work to be able to start on all of these things, but have only actually started the methodology and that was right at the beginning of the project. Recently I have been spending a lot of time on the conceptual theory part and thinking rather than writing writing writing.

My time table divides the times into morning, afternoon and evening blocks. Actual times can vary. For examples, right now I am still in the morning block as I had the social event. My mornings from now on must contain a blog post and methodology writing which can include model work, research design etc. The afternoon are for theory investigating and writing. The evenings, in which I rarely do anything anymore, are for admin work such as updating endnote and I must now read an article. If the article is relevant to any of the theory I am pursing then I will note that and come back to it when it is appropriate. Saturday, all day, is for special investigations, such as when I did all that work on analysing and describing Youtube styles. Monday and Tuesdays are of course full with work, but the evenings I have given myself the taks of doing very basic administration work as well as the beginnings of research work, such as trying to figure out how to present and ask questions via email. It is thinking time as well as small project time, so I should be able to progress slowly slowly. I have also to write a list of what I would like to achieve as part of the research - mini projects such as the investigation of youtube and the continuum models that I have down for Saturday.

So that is my new plan. I also realised after the meeting today that I should be adding metadata to endnote to show which articles I have printed, so as not to lose track of what is in my boxes. I will endaevour to update endnote in the evenings - when my brain is on go slow slow slow.

What a slacker!

2008-11-21T10:52:00.006+11:00

I have no idea of why I have not posted recently. I am feeling like I am plodding along at this time, so maybe that is it. I have been having some thoughts about how painful this whole research thing is when you do not have money and I think that has effected my will, ambition, performance and desire to contribute anything to anything. My house is a mess, I rarely do any work. I need incentive, but I am very stressed about the scholarship and/or lack of it and the strong desire my fiance has for a property and for me to get a full time job. I wonder whether I would be better off getting a full time career job or continue doing temp work in various roles - so I can wear different hats. I think about all of this and how much I enjoy making up stuff (conceptual research I heard it called yesterday) and thinking about stuff in ways that people have not thought of yet. I guess there is a struggle with anything and even if I wanted the full time career job, which I really really do not, I would probably come up with some other kind of struggle because that is how we humans do stuff in life.

Anyway, let me do a quick update of what has been going on. My ethics application took up a great deal of my time and effort and stress and last week I was rewarded with a quick affirming response with no need for fixing anything up. So I had to quickly catch up on my Youtube work and the part of the process where I scouted for talent. I had to go back and do some random searching according to my selection criteria (which is the flow chart that I handed into the ethics committee) to find some other people. I had asked Alfio to do it, but he refused, saying that he did not understand and was scared that he might stuff it up. I laughed, he was not amused.

So this process of applying the selection rules and choosing some more people is still infused with acts of random. I could spend forever searching and come up with loads of people. The selection was more intuitive than I realised - and especially when I got to choosing people from my 69 subscriptions. Yestrerday Sue asked me to explain how I chose the final 16 I contacted. This stumped me for a second but i realised two things - that all of what I do is research process, so that I do not need to be a positivist about things, as much as I feel like I should be (I am so indoctrinated into rules and regulations) and that I was able to articulate and say that it was really intuition. I chose people who explemplified their style or contributed more to their community through either posting videos or having subscribers. (Incidentally, I need to think about the presence of subscribers as a group as opposed to being Youtube users, even though they are most definitely are as well - maybe this needs to be explored in another blog post.)

So after completing the new searches and finding some new people to subscribe to, some of whom I am their only subscriber, which is another element that needs to be discussed, I had to add them to my database. Sheesh database work is hard. I really do need an assistant for this stuff. I updated the database with the new people and then when I had chosen the 16 potential participants, I updated the further details database, which will be my primary database from now on - all links will come out of this, rather than the original database.

Incidentally, I found some aboriginal users on Youtube, although it was not always clear if the person was an actual aboriginal or not. This also brings up some interesting issues about identity. The presence or non presence of their aboriginality should not really impact on the study as it is about Youtube users - so everyone who has a channel is a Youtube user. Yet sometimes intrinsic to the identity or content of the channel is the identity of the user. However, there is also the other element of a avatar or different identity online. How can a Youtube user ever be identified as anything other than a Youtube user - they have a user name they have chosen for Youtube (whether it is used in other places or not) and a channel name. They are the user and not the person. Maybe I should research this a bit more.

Anyway, i am waiting for people to send back consent forms or tell me that they are interested so I can send the consent forms out. I am supposed to be working on other things in the meantime, such as hetertopias. I had a meeting with my other supervisor last week and we talked about hubs and heterotopias. It is good my meetings with him because I feel completely inarticulate when I have to simply talk - but what we do is that I send him either blog posts or other things and he responds in person and I listen and develop new ideas and then write about it in a blog or create another model. I love it, it is working for me and we are developing a rapport, which is also good.

I am using google docs to work on the heterotopias information and other work for the thesis. When I have published parts of it, I will put the links in the blog. It makes me a little sad that I cannot submit my thesis as a blog with embedded video. I would have loved to have created a video or more for my Youtube channel which then formed part of my thesis. Doesn't matter really, cos I am also quite into the rules and rigidity of the formal writing format anyway. It sometimes upsets me that I have to talk in formal language, but I might see how I can get away with that.

Ethics application

2008-11-14T09:26:00.002+11:00

So remember how I did all that work on the ethics application and I moaned about it all the time? Well it got approved in less than 24 hours, with no request for amendments. I am now ahead of schedule, which is good because I have been falling behind in my literature review and conceptual chapters. You know, the world would simply be a better place if I could get a scholarship. I am quite happy about not having to do any revisions. I am about to do some new searching on Youtube and finalise my group of potential participants and send out the initial email. Its on its way! how very exciting!

It seems apparent to me that the world is about to end...

2008-11-12T11:05:00.002+11:00

Yes, I have library books overdue. I set up a complex reminder system on my Google calendar which reminds me the night before and sends me an email PLUS the library reminds you. So I forget last week - what on earth was going ON last week? I did not uni work as far as I can gather, and had some mini meltdowns about pretty much everything. This week it is like I have woken up from a daze. It helps to actually come into uni as well - and hopefully all the staying home for this and that to be installed and delivered is now over. I am quite ambivalent about my uni contributions right now - this is quite distinctly different from my research, which I am still quite keen on, but the whole rigmarole of having to fit into a structure is making me angry and annoyed. I am trying to chill out about it and focus on the fact that I can change the structure whenever and however I like and in fact I am about to apply to drop down to part time for 2009. I am trying to remain calm and understand that this Masters is not the be all and end all, and if I want to do a PhD some time in the future, whether that is at the end of 2009 or later, I can do so. I think the chances of me getting less than a H1 honours for this Masters is remote as well, so all I have to do is keep plodding away. The problem is - partly - that I am not a plodder. I am in fact a whirlwind and the wind has gone right now.

Youtube is an Archive

2008-11-06T11:07:00.003+11:00

See, that is where I am stuck: an enacted utopia. An archive is many things, but I would argue that it is not an enacted utopia. It is not a mirror, nor a representation. In what sense am I thinking? An Archive 'holds' memory - it is a carefully constructed repository - not a space of ideals. Hang on, it really is a space of ideals and the construction is a representation - of a society, of a group, of a field of study - it is their ideal, their 'space' for memory.

Youtube is an Archive. And it is a heterotopia. But it is a heterotopia for the same and different reasons an Archive is an heterotopia. So how can there be different reasons? Maybe I should revisit the principles.

Back later.

Heterotopias. Heterotopologies. Archives.

2008-11-04T15:57:00.004+11:00

Heterotopia = an enacted utopia; a counter-site; a representation; a mirror of something unreal that exists in reality. It is not the reflection that is the heterotopia, but the mirror and its surroundings holding the fiction. When is the mirror placed in a moment and where in space decides that heterotopia. Who places the mirror? That is the most interesting part of all...

Heterotopology = the systematic description, analysis, knowledge, 'science' and understanding of heterotopias. This understanding must encompass both the reality and unreality of the space occupied of the heteropia.

My archives are 'evidence of me', my recorded transactions. Is the archive a mirror? How does the archive become unreality? When my archive is disembedded from its context and put into an(other) archive? The (archive as) heterotopia is where "time never stops building up and topping its own summit....the accumulation of time". The archive is a space where time accumulation happens. It is an artificial space, an unreality. I would argue that it is not a place where a mirror is reflecting - not a heterotopia - as the presence of the archive is not a real reflection, or counter-site in the same way that a circus is - wherein a circus is an event, a phase, a sudden filling of space that is not quite real. An archive is all these things as well - if we view it over time. I could say that an archive is a reflection of memory. And to me the concept of memory is unstable, unreal - even though archives try to make it stable. Perhaps this attempt to change time, to collect memory into an unreal space is why the archive is a heterotopia. But is it my archives or the archives in which my archives might belong? Who is placing the mirror? The actors or the institution? Are they the same?

More later...am feeling ill right now.

2008-11-04T12:14:00.002+11:00

Google enters the Deep web (again) and comes out with searchable content

Literature review

2008-10-30T09:07:00.006+11:00

I have been trying to write a concise yet vague bibliography and am going OK, but realised that perhaps my map of theoretical fields to apply to this project needs updating. Above is the current version. I am thinking that perhaps information systems is far too broad a topic, but I remember I wanted it in there to encompass all those writings about Youtube as an information system that can be made better through this or that IT related thing. But this can also be a technology function. If I think about Castells and his contribution to this thesis as networks and identidy etc, then it really is a network function, rather than a IS function. Network related writing can fit into sociology and I think Castells is called a sociologist, but does it fit into technology?

I realise upon looking at the model again that the networks is part of something that overlaps and has been put together with community. I realise now that this works as a simple flow in this layer. The networks and community 'space' is not really one, it is a mark of attention rather than something that can fit into a bubble - I guess this means that my work is in the lines. But then the other bubbles outside the lines are not seen to relate to networks and communities as strongly but through touching, i figured they could be implied and be drawn into.

Information system is also the web.

I think I may need to re-size some of the bubbles. I also do not think that cultural analysis should be there - an idea of culture is already present - we are not analysing culture - i am thinking it implies value. I also think that IS and media studies are too big. I shall play with it a bit more and write some more here.

I have issues with the Continuum models being a bubble as they are not contained within a bubble and are a tool that can spread out on top of the others that it applies to. If I use the frame of the Continuum models then I also think that the ideas of dimensions spreading out is also implied. I shall see how it works.

Below is the re-worked model. I like it quite a bit more now, however, it also seems a bit busy, but not too much. I have decided I like the layering as well, because that fits in with my methodological model and principles.

Archives 2.0

2008-10-29T12:53:00.002+11:00

I have been thinking a lot more about this topic, particularly in relation to why there is little if no academic writing out there on it. People and archivists are talking about it - the blogs are going wild - but I wonder if the type of people who talk about it using the technology under discussion are those that do not make the rules. This kinda brings me around to the world of archiving - and what I understand a heterotopology to be. I have been looking into this because of the construct of the virtual and to be quite frank, I think I have bitten off more than I can chew. Not concerning heterotopologies, but in discussing networks in the first place. The idea of networks, after watching a documentary last night on ABC1 has made me realise the depth of knowledge there is (and isnt) in this field and its applications. I wonder if it would be OK to touch upon network theory in my thesis and then leave it? The mathematcial aspects of network theory would be of great interest to my methodological approach concerning the knot. I have gotten off subject.

Rules is what I am thinking of. Rules and history. At my Archive, which I work at, we make up the 'guidelines' in which to sentence records, but we call them rules and we insist that the administrative departments use them, but call it strongly recommending, and then when the time is up and destruction comes along, we then go back to the administrative department and ask them if the rules they applied needed to be reviewed in order to destroy the files. We then wait for approval, which may or may not even come, and then keep files because they are old anyway. I realise that this process is a good one (and it works to a point), but my question is, why is the role of the Archivist as authority always superceded by the administrating department? Why can't the Archivist make a ruling on desctruction? How can we be considered 'hands off' when we are gathering all the rules/guidelines together in the first place? We tell you how to select, but won't take responsibility for it.

Secondly, in relation to access of business archives. One of the greatest impediments for any researcher in my archive is that they need to know what they are looking for - first. The archivist will do the searching in the database because no one else is allowed full access to everything (except the Legal department), but you have to know your keywords and really know how to construct a search before the Archivist conducts it for you. We have a 30 year sentencing period for restricted access. Anything that is available to search is still completely unavailable due to the way the database and the collection was created. Look, sometimes people get what they want, and there have been some books published, but material is not just found at our Archive and the researchers probably knew what they were looking for. But we get all kinds of people asking for information.

Finally, I have been thinking about my business archives and why we would the Archives let just anyone have a look in there?The business i work for requires you to fill out a trillion access and permission forms and also need to vett the publication before it is printed. Allowing anyone access to historical documents would be a marketing disaster and complete nightmare, even if they showed regular business decisions. It is because of the nature of the organisation. So why would my organisation and my archives need Web 2.0? Only the creating agency can look at their own records in our databases. How many other archives are like this? If we were a research archive as well, where the Archivists, in conjunction with the orgnisation, realised the potential of a researching and publishing Archival team, different types of access tools would be very useful.

I think the difference here is that that Archives that are being talked about in relation to Web 2.0 tools, or Archives 2.0 are those collecting Archives of 'cultural materials'. In Australia those Archives number very few and those outside of the University world are even less.

Something else I have seen as well is that our National Library is an Archive. So how can we talk of Archives when Archives are in Libraries? There seems to be some sense of wanting Archives and Archivists to be separate from Libraries and they are, but often they share the same building, the same digital repository, the same Information Policy. So if the Library is talking Web 2.0, the Archive probably is on its band wagon.

Of course all I am saying here is conjecture and there would be quite a few research projects involved in trying to find answers for this.

However, all this thinking and discussions on these issues is refining my ideas concerning my own research project. I think I might have to go off and do another model. Oh yes.

Getting the floaties out of the cup

2008-10-27T21:28:00.004+11:00

The issues of digital documents and the archives that care about them spans a wide complexity involving preservation, authenticity and reliability. These issues came from the use and fast evolution of computers in the workplace: records being made and stored in entirely different ways. The "digital issue" has caused a crisis in recordkeeping and archival practices and has provided the impetus for a paradigm shift in thinking with the evolution of the Recordkeeping Continuum model, creating by the Recordkeeping Research Group at Monash University. This new way of thinking has in turned influenced Australian Standards and then global Standards in the approach to record keeping for businesses and the ability of digital documents to stand up as evidence.

The problem with digital archiving, as I see it, is that every 'thing', document, video, photo, text that is digital shares the common denominator of being digital. Because all things digital face the same impending doom as mentioned above, I think there is developing a common understanding of everything digital having the same issues and being approached by the same way of thinking. There are articles and workgroups and seminars about digital documents, digitisation and digital curation.
_________________________________________________

Camping and Archives 2.0

2008-10-26T17:50:00.004+11:00

Camping does strange things to your brain. I always find it slows mine down. No more flicking through my half a dozen websites up to check for updates, no looking up something that suddenly comes into my brain. This weekend it was me and the award winning thesis writer Mary. I did get distracted by the fire and bugs, but the distraction never really took me away from Mary.

I have mentioned Mary's thesis paper a few blog posts ago, in between recording for memory the Smithsonian internships I WANT and other half finished blogs. It is here. Mary's award winning Master's thesis is here in case the jump back is too much. First thing I need to say about Mary's thesis is that it is 50 pages long - so not a biggie. I am guessing the 50 pager is also probably a 30 000 thesis. The reason why I am providing this information is to remind myself that I am doing a thesis that is a bit bigger than that - 50-60 thousand words I believe. Because after reading Mary's thesis I believed that anyone could write one. I wondered why i have been stressing about mine and how hard it was and how the theory was taxing. Then I read Mary's and realised I aim too high. But I am fine with that. As a sidebar, I am both pleased that blogs allow for a little gratuitous whinging. My purpose here is not to trash the thesis, but merely explore my own reactions to it in relation to my own thesis writing - which of course is the game of this blog anyway.

Mary's thesis, titled, "Embracing Web 2.0: Archives and the Newest Generation of Web Applications", addresses the issue of social networking tools, such as blogging, tagging, bookmarking, plus sites such as Flickr etc in Archival use as part of processes and policies. Mary tells us that there is not much in the literature about Web 2.0 tools and at the time Mary wrote this thesis - last year - there probably was not. As I have found, insitutions are using tools, but are not talking about them. One of the interesting things that Mary pointed out that is related to this is that libraries are raving and writing about social software all over the place. Why aren't Archives writing about this stuff or the use of this stuff. I think I can guess, or at least put out a guess and it can be found in Mary's paper, as something that to me, seems blanantly and obviously missing.

This major flaws is something Mary actually touches on more than once in the write up, but not overtly. Let me pull the threads together on this one. Mary decided to do a 'random' sample of insitutions that identified themselves as having 'special collections' or 'archives', but this sample had to be from University institutions. Stop right there. University insitutions? Filled with policy, laws and power universities? Now I do not know how universities are run in the U.S., but I worked for two universities last year and know of another this applies to in Australia, but any 'special collections' that might be in any archive, such as the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library at Curtin University, come under LIS rule and policy. I also know that sometimes it is difficult to put the Library further up into the heirarchy of policy and funding and at Edith Cowan University in WA, the LIS function comes under IT (and boy do they suffer from it). My point here is that Mary did not figure out if Archives were being 'pushed' by LIS policy into a direction. Some of her results and comments suggest this might be the case. Mary did not investigate the relationship between LIS and Archives in the insitution - the university - and the assumptions made through this relationship - and this is why I think the method taken in this thesis fails. At least acknolwedging it might have been useful.

I know that the JCPML used to be quite independent and went on their merry way with creating their collection, but I also know that the university restructured things, and now they have to report to someone within the LIS heirarchy, essentially downgrading their power, autonomy, authority and independence over their policy. They might not have instituted LIS policy, but there would definitely be some kind of 'push' in that direction.

Maybe I am completely wrong.

Anyway the thesis is interesting. I do wonder why Archivists are not writing about their adoption of web 2.0 tools and think that it cannot always be the fault of the librarians. There does seem to be some kind of strange relationship between the fields however, as noted in the posting in the blog, "the Digital Archive" in which two scripts for a satirical(?) ad featuring librarians vs archivists have been posted - they are in the same vein as the cool mac dude vs the nobby microsoft guy ads that were out a few years back. The latest post is here. I reckon there is some vesitages of power structures going on here and it would be worth looking at, but not right now.

Anyway, reading Mary's thesis also helped me think about my own topic. I explained it to my long suffering boyfriend, who gets affronted whenever I tell him about selection in archives (we should be keeping everything). Mary's might be on web 2.0 tools used by archives, but mine is about web 2.0 tools being archived by whoever. One of the interesting things I think about is a scenerio such as this: The very special archives of blab blah land have been collecting movies for only about 20 years. They had a digitisation program and now present clips of these movies online. Its almost like choosing from a scene selection in a DVD menu. Anyway, there are lots of these clips, and although they are digitised and online, it is too much work for the archivists, who are poorly funded anyway, to thoroughly describe each and every clip. So each clip gets very basic information. HOWEVER, one of the things they have done is let the users tag and link clips to ephemeral material that is also digitised and online. The network of links creates the context as well as the tags themselves. BUT, the social software sits on top of the archival program and the metadata created, included the links to other objects, are not integrated into the archival database, nor are they captured. Every changing and moving, this metadata is seen as something ephemeral and 'outside' of the collection. Mostly because this metadata is created by everyday users (who are often historians or other quite knowledgeable people, but this is overlooked as they are not considered authoritative), but also because it is changing too fast. Who is capturing the information that is creating that archive?

Ok so my thesis is not really about that, but it can be in the future. I was thinking that if I was to progress to PhD and on, the timeline could be:

Masters

Brief investigation of personal recordkeeping strategies of Youtube users
4-5 case studies
The deconstruction of the site Youtube and moving image genre.
Implications for archival strategy are found in conclusions.

PhD

Thorough investigation of how personal recordkeeping strategies of Youtube users relate to archival institutional policy, particularly in Australia.
Case studies of Youtube users = 3. More depth, more detail.
Theory building about approach to moving image and web archiving - appraisal and selection.
The role of the archive in capturing memory
Case studies of archival institutions = 2. Australian.
How memory and power influence document genre.
Theory building about metadata building for complex and changing collections, both in institutions and within social software
Implications of how flexible metadata can be captured.

After this

Research into flexible metadata and how it can be technically captured, as well as when it should be captured. Look at examples such as Picture Australia etc.

2008-10-23T21:09:00.001+11:00

Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA)

The Smithsonian Institution Archives offers internships to students interested in gaining experience in archival methods, institutional history, oral history, history of science, documentary editing and collections management.

The Archives Division serves as a repository for documents of historic value about the Smithsonian, as the official memory of the Smithsonian and as a resource for scholars. Internships are provided for arrangement and description of institutional records, personal papers, and photographic and other collections in special media; encoding of finding aids for its website; and conducting records surveys and developing records disposition schedules. These internships are considered apprenticeships under the tutelage of an archivist.

The Institutional History Division conducts research on the history of the Smithsonian, prepares scholarly and popular publications, exhibits, lectures, electronic and paper guides to specialized research areas, and records oral history and video history interviews. Internships provide an overview of the research and dissemination activities of an institutional history program, with a focus on specific topics. The Joseph Henry Papers project is preparing a selective edition of the papers of Joseph Henry (1797-1878), a distinguished 19th-century physicist, and the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The project offers research internships to undergraduate and graduate students interested in American history, the history of science and technology, and the editing of historical documents. Prior course work in American history or the sciences is desirable, though not a prerequisite.

The Technical Services Division carries out preservation of collections in all formats and provides guidance to Smithsonian offices for the handling of electronic records. Preservation internships provide hands-on experience in preservation techniques, working with nineteenth and twentieth century Smithsonian records and personal papers of prominent administrators and scientists. The internships emphasize integrated preservation management, considering issues such as proper environment, housing, handling, and preservation reproduction of records. Electronic records internships provide the opportunity for practical research in issues associated with managing electronic records, especially large databases, e-mail, and distributed network based systems.

The National Collections Program supports and monitors the development of effective collections management policy throughout the Smithsonian and in the museum community at large. Internships provide opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students as well as museum professionals interested in studying collections management in its many aspects from theory to practice: collections management policies and procedures, registration methods, legal and ethical issues, object care and handling, collection storage methods and collections information systems relating to accountability and accessibility. Interns, in consultation with NCP staff, develop a program of independent study and on-site experience relative to the background, skills and interest of the applicant.

Term: Varies
Stipend: May be offered if funds are available.
Deadline: Summer -March 15th; Fall -July 1st, Spring -November 1st

Contact:

Mary Markey, Internship Coordinator
Smithsonian Institution Archives
PO Box 37012, MRC 507
Washington, D.C. 20013-7012
Phone: (202) 633-5914, M-F
Fax: (202) 633-5927
Email: markeym@si.edu

2008-10-23T21:07:00.001+11:00

Lemelson Internships Archival Internship, Summer 2009

The Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, offers full time, ten week, archival internship opportunity for graduate students each summer. The internship stipend is $4,000 plus a travel allowance. Housing and benefits are not provided. The internship will:

• Enable new professionals to understand, identify, and manage the historical records of American invention and innovation;
• Expose interns to the Museum's rich historical collections in the history of technology and twentieth century material culture.
• Provide hands-on experience with archival collections that document invention and innovation.
• Create finding aids to collections documenting invention and innovation.
• Engage interns in discussion of archival issues and practices and provide a wide range of professional experiences within the Museum.

Internships are located in the Museum's Archives Center, a manuscripts and special collections repository with more than 14,000 feet of holdings in a wide range of subject areas and a full time staff of nine. Interns must be enrolled in a graduate degree program and have completed graduate course work in archival, library, or information management, and/or graduate course work in American history, American Studies, Museum Studies, Public History, or another area that relates to the history of invention and innovation in American society. Recent graduates may also apply.

Applicants should submit one copy of the application form, available from the Archives Center or online; two letters of recommendation; official academic transcripts (undergraduate and graduate); and an essay discussing their interest in the archival profession and how this internship will benefit them. Applicants are strongly encouraged to consult the faq at: http://invention.smithsonian.org/resources/research_intern_faq.aspx

Mail or email completed application form and all materials requested to Alison L. Oswald. All materials must be postmarked by March 2, 2009 for consideration. Offers will be made by April 6, 2009. Internships begin on or after June 1, 2009.

Contact:

Alison L. Oswald, Archivist
National Museum of American History
Smithsonian Institution
Archives Center
P.O. Box 37012
Room 1110/MRC 601
Washington, DC 20013-7012
Phone: (202) 633-3726
Fax: (202) 786.2453
Email: oswalda@si.edu
http://www.si.edu/lemelson/lemelson/internships.html

archivematica

2008-10-23T13:02:00.002+11:00

I am most impressed with the name given to the blog - it is so cool that I feel a like overwhelmed by it. Regardless, I wanted to write a little about the presentation I mentioned of Peter's in the last blog post. I watched it and I took notes. Note taking is not a favoured task, but I thought, I can press pause while watching this presentation, why not.

Let's move past the nonsense of my behaviour and onto the interesting things said in Peter's presentation. The link is here: http://archivemati.ca/wp-content/shockwave-flash/SAA2006.html
Also, being that this presentation was 2 years ago, I am looking forward to seeing and reading what Peter has been up to since. This is found on his blog: http://archivemati.ca/

One of the things I find interesting about any reference to web 2.0 in either library or archival literature is the neat bypassing of any issues to do with holding and describing digital 'documents'. I say documents because they document something, I do not say objects because they currently are not - in the sense that a digital object should be able to be understood without software or even hardware prerequisites. This is not a good choice of word, but I guess what I am trying to say is that digital is an object when I can understand what it is without it having to be read by a particular reader, or on a computer etc. I guess that you could say that XML has created digital documents, but for various reasons, including the fact that digital is still machine reliant, I disagree with the use of this term.

Back to bypassing. It seems to me that everyone knows how hard it is to capture and describe and assign metadata to digital documents and that they are software and hardware (read: machine) reliant and that there are many elements that make up a multimedia document and some of them need permissions etc etc etc. So when we see new information about digital archiving, all of this is basically implied in the background - it has become its own context and history. However, I disagree that the reading of a digital document is done and that web 2.0 will help us use those documents in our repositories and we will mash them up and everyone will describe them using funny terms and archivists will get upset with all those unauthoritative things floating around in virtual reading rooms.

I am going to have to pause here for a bit as life beckons. Will add more later.

** I listened in to this extraordinary conversation yesterday between my boss and a record keeper from one of the businesses in the company about digital records and scanning. My boss seemed to be saying that the 'original' word document (maybe from office 2000 or something else dated) is an original digital document and that a printed version of it is certainly not original and to digitise a printed version of it is stupid because legally, the original document is the electronic document (which can be edited and changed both automatically and manually). This to me indicates that there is still some way to go concerning what is a digital document and how it can be evidence. Incidentally, I do believe that even if this digital document was held in a controlled state and then needed to provide evidence, you would have to print it out to submit it. They were talking about certified copies - I guess that someone would have to be there to check that the printed version what the same as the digital version (at that time) and certify it. Perhaps I should go and re-read the legislation about this stuff.

Open blog and Archives 2.0

2008-10-22T19:49:00.005+11:00

I subscribe to a number of blogs written by Archivists about Archives. Upon reading the latest post by one today I realise that I too am a Archivist writing a blog about Archives, as well research into the field. It is for this reason that I decided to go un-invisible again and let anyone stumble upon this blog. In my previous blogging history, this will mean one stumble and at least 5 spams.

What inspired me was a blog post on Archives Next titled Archives 2.0? This thought provoking post made me realise that my research project is about Archives 2.0 in at least two of the ways that are suggested in the blog post - in that I am an Archivist, working in the field and talking about the use of web 2.0 tools (Youtube), PLUS I am researching the potential of openness and user-centred work in Archives creation. My research is about how users create collections and archives and what 'proper' archives can and should do about it. I guess I am also using web 2.0 tools to promote and 'discuss' my ideas, so am really using Archives 2.0 in three ways.

I have some opinions about why I think Libraries have grabbed a hold of web 2.0, re-branded it Library 2.0 and run away with it like cat and a spoon. Firstly and the most importantly I think it has to do with teaching and literacy. Library is about learning and using tools for learning and understanding new tools for learning and being able to teach people new tools for learning. So web 2.0 tools seem like the most perfect thing for librarians to learn and teach using them. Podcasts make life easier to teach literacy programs. etc etc. I guess it is like learning the lingo of the new world. I am pretty sure university libraries in particular would become fast tracked into nothing if they did not embrace digital tools to help with their teaching. I remember collating some data last year at Curtin Uni about downloads of podcasts and the amount of podcasts downloaded to actual numbers of people attending the class was incredible. Of course no one could say who was downloading podcasts or if one person downloaded most of them because they did not know where they were saving their files (sprung!), but it seemed like the take up of new technologies was successful.

The second thing about libraries is that they are all about people - everything to do with the people and the public and the students and the clients and every person who needs information. Libraries love it and so do librarians. Web 2.0 tools are used by people - again it is the new lingo of people. Go with the people and their trends and they will continue to understand what you have to say. And the difference between Archives and Library?

Archives are definitely not about the people. Archives is about the information or the paper or whatever it is that is in it. Even digital archives are selective in who they let in and of course there is a good reason for this in copyright law etc., but it really seems to me that things like restrictions on information, the withholding period, really is there to protect somebody. People would say that it is the privacy of the people in the records, and this is true to a point. I would say it is the creator agency that is being protected more than anything else. However, that is beside the point I think I am trying to make. Archives are more about power and memory than Libraries are. Archives might feel like they can use web 2.0 tools to provide access (with loads of restrictions) and undertake digital curation activities, but why call it Archives 2.0?

That brings me to the second point. Archives 2.0? Archives have been deconstructing their 'nature' for a little while now and greater understandings and humility of the power that archives have has finally been accepted by the majority (I say this broadly as I am not entirely sure that is has been accepted, but at least people are talking about it). Archives already has an identity crisis and guilty conscience that a Library can never have (unless they behave a bit like an Archive - I am thinking about the National Library of Australia here and in particular the Pandora Project). Archives 2.0 implies to me a great change, a fundamental shift in understanding, in engagement, in power, in creation. Archives is already going through this and it has something to do with digital tools, but also not really, but you cannot separate the two ideas. It is not about digital tools in the sense of web 2.0 but digital as phenomenon; digital as a record. Without that, we would not have had to think hard about what it is that we do and how we do it. Without digital I wonder if there would have been a Continuum model?

So back to my research topic. Is it Archives 2.0? I would not like to call it that because it implies what the usage of the term in archival circles has come to mean - using blogs and wikis and social software to make collections more accessible. I have not read this yet, but saw that this Master's thesis won an award recently - the Pease Award by the SAA for a thesis about Archives using web 2.0 tools. You can find the thesis here: http://etd.ils.unc.edu/dspace/bitstream/1901/470/1/marysamouelian.pdf Is this really Archives 2.0? As the writer of the Archives Next blog says, "To me it appears that the heart of Library 2.0 is a simple acknowledgment that we live in a time of change on many levels, and that the right response is to try to understand our environment and adapt as best we can while continuing to carry out our missions....But from what I can tell, it [Archives 2.0] has always been used to refer to the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies in archives, not to the kind of change in perspective that Meredith describes."

I think there is a fundamental change going on, but to equate it to the 'sameness' of Library 2.0 and web 2.0 tools is to somehow not see the whole picture - the shift in Archives Self.

Here is another resource, one I have not taken in either. This one is a lecture I believe, done in 2006. http://archivemati.ca/wp-content/shockwave-flash/SAA2006.html

500_word_proposal_edit

2008-10-21T21:21:00.002+11:00

Title: Culture in the Continuum: Youtube, small stories and memory making

This project investigates issues concerning the creation of individual and community memory in the use of moving-image in online social network, Youtube. The aim is to build theory addressing the role of the archive in new and evolving forms of digital moving-image, whose complexity and identity is not fully understood. Implications concern the breadth of cultural heritage curation and practice in the digital arena.

The literature concerning the impact of digital technologies on archival science can be considered somewhat organisational and evidentially focused. Non-textual records, such as moving-image, have often been ‘left behind’. In moving-image archiving digital issues have been somewhat overlooked in favour of the urgency of conservation and obsolescence of analogue material: digital often means digitisation for preservation. Moving-image archives are generally custodial archives with an identity entangled in concepts of ‘original’ & ‘artifact’. Digital moving-image negates these concepts, as well as any linear reading of medium, shifting the “conceptual framework to [the] disembodied”. (Besser, 2001 pg. 10)

Videos were able to be shared more easily online with the introduction of social networking website Youtube in 2005. This combined with a proliferation of digital tools which help amateurs make content as easily as professionals, meant that Youtube presented video and an interactive website unlike anything ever seen. However, Youtube presents more than just a digital tool and exhibition platform; its users build collections for their community. These collections are built using their creator's values and a sense of curatorial authorship. (Gracy, 2007 pg. 184) Archives are adding Youtube videos to their collections, but are treating digital as artifact and overlooking the context of Youtube as multimedia social network and collection created by its users.

This project aims to broaden the application of Continuum thinking in archival science, using all the models developed by Frank Upward, into constantly evolving cultural material and its 'value'. Giddens' Structuration theory provides the theoretical background for an investigation into the recursive use of technology in social networks under the authoritative gaze of a commercial entity. Postmodernists Foucault and Lyotard, as well as Deleuze provide a framework to dismantle the history of moving-image genre. Work being done at QUT and University of Amsterdam by culture and media researchers on mediation of cultural memory through the use of digital tools and personal storytelling, provides background and model work concerning the act of creation and embedding of personal memory.

The in-depth case studies of selected Youtube users, influenced by Yin's methodological approach, will examine how they consider their actions contributing to memory making for a private and public audience, within a community. This project sits within the interpretivist tradition and uses Strauss & Corbin's qualitative method and grounded theory design to code and analyse the interviews in order develop new theory.

This project is already underway, and being part of COSI, the aim is to develop new ideas on how personal and community recordkeeping contributes to societal memory, enriching academic and institutional understandings of digital cultural heritage. More in depth investigations to understand how these issues impact on current archival theory, identity and practice including institutional policy and paradigms will be developed in the future as part of a PhD thesis.

References

Besser, H. (2001). Digital preservtion of moving image material? Moving Image, Fall. Retrieved September 3, 2008, from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Papers/amia-longevity.html

Gracy, K. F. (2007). Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital. Library Trends, 56(1), 183-197. Retrieved July 24, 2008, from Project Muse database.

[word count: 523]

Ethics and more...again

2008-10-21T21:12:00.003+11:00

I am back on the ethics application. Another revision - this time I am looking at examples from another project. It is both easier and more painful.

I am also pretty much finished with the scholarship application, although have absolutely no faith in actually getting one. Am currently having a quiet crisis about this situation.

Scholarship application in above post - I can post it straight to my blog from Google docs. I know they are going to take over the world, but at least they give us some really handy tools. Anyway, I really enjoyed working on this actually because it really helped me put down what it was that I am interested in. 500 words is not much at all. It also has helped me with understanding what my article will be about. Actually reading the other day that you can submit a thesis via publication made me realise what my article was about as well.

I attended a seminar on Monday about writing abstracts. It was OK, but not particularly helpful. I guess I am looking for the magical formula, like I did with the scholarship application, so it would only take 30 mins to write it. Perhaps if I understand that both my nature, and that fact that the world does not exist like that might help me realise that it aint gonna happen.

I am getting there...

2008-10-16T18:39:00.002+11:00

My very lucky friend today got a bit of a rant about the article, but she did help me understand what it is that I want to write now. She also helped me understand that I am trying to thread some things together which are really parallel yet related concepts, rather than those whose links have already been made.

The threads are:

The sense and concept of the object is strong across the board in digital archival practice * but very much so in moving image archiving
Concept and practice are not meeting eye to eye - digital issues, particularly concerning context and provenance are known, but have not been resolved or investigated thoroughly.
When is born digital born? What makes born digital so different?
Why does online mean multimedia? What relationship does multimedia have with born digital online moving image?
When is archiving of moving image online not web archiving? How can provenance play a role in determining what the document genre is?
Why is Youtube so special? What are social networks? Who is talking about Youtube and in what context?
The actual question: What makes a Youtube video a Youtube video and how can that question be answered in an Archival collection?

I think that is all. It hurts me, it really does. I think this is probably be my entire thesis right there. I think I might need some help.

* I have an issue with digital preservation - it implies top heavy, high level concept strategy. Perhaps I am wrong about this, but the use of preservation in the literature is often dissimilar and it seems to me more about jargon than any actual practice, so instead I have used practice. Not the same kind of snappy, but says what it means.

Article 2

2008-10-15T20:45:00.003+11:00

I am determined to write this article. I heard a great tip from a post-doctoral fellow today concerning how articles can be used for thesis writing. Of course you cannot directly pull an article into your thesis - it is plagiarism - but you can put in the stuff you did not submit in your article. Such a great idea. The advice was to always keep all drafts/versions (I do anyway) for this purpose.

I think one of the problems in not being able to start this article is that I have my classic pre-writing jitters, where I think I know absolutely nothing about what I am going to write about and have the overwhelming urge to find more sources. There are two things I have to remember about this: if there was something significant, I think I would have found it by now & I am using the sources to support my argument. This article is not really a literature review - I know I have been thinking in that way. I need to figure out my question and answer it logically and smartly, with appropriate references. In the meantime, I need to give myself meaningless pep talks via this blog.

Incidentally, I have been taking a look at Howard Besser's work in this field - moving image and digital preservation. Howard was heavily involved in InterPARES2 I think. His article, which Karen Gracy cites (she probably studied under him at UCLA) from 2001, called Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material forecasts the invention and use of Youtube with striking accuracy. However, his ideas concerning 'digital' and 'moving image' are stuck in their history (does digital have a history yet?##), in their knowingness and familiarity of tradition. Digital moving image is what we have seen in cinemas and on television - it is just another format. That video or clip or moving image we see on our computer screens in our home on a webpage which we can contribute our own thoughts to in text or moving image, is the same. Is it? Perhaps my problem is that I have not de-constructed what Youtube pages with moving image 'embedded' actually is yet. One of the tasks on my yet to be written list of things to do before conducting interviews is to analyse the website using Continuum models and what I know of Structuration etc. Is the model the map, the chart? We shall see where it takes me.

## I find this interesting as digital is a medium. Paper is a medium. Many papers make a book. Many ???? makes a digital????? Is digital a medium? People treat it as such. Analogue materials are digitised, as if they have simply changed format. Moving image can be digital, as if it were the same as a moving image on a video. How can it be? Has someone else asked these questions before? Surely. I need to find that information.

Signifance of the project

2008-10-15T12:09:00.002+11:00

Ownership of the videos:

I wonder if those who make them for Youtube feel as if they own them? Is copyright protection the same as ownership? What rights does Youtube have in ownership? How does this work in the sense of Youtube being thought of as a collection or an archive?

I am tired

2008-10-14T20:45:00.001+11:00

The complexity of new media

2008-10-12T21:44:00.001+11:00

Is new media different from old media? When did media become old? Or is it traditional media? What was traditional media 200 years ago? Was it new then?

Youtube really wants to be an archive? Or is it something more?

2008-10-12T21:36:00.003+11:00

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/11/2388300.htm?section=justin

This is an interesting development. Think about how Google's thing about wanting to have all the world's information. Is this yet another of their attempts to commercialise information? I think of the Google books project. What I mean is - this stuff is now ONE THEIR SERVERS. Is it? Like all those books that have been digitised for Google books, and protected by copyright so you cant read them all - BUT THEY ARE ON THEIR SERVERS. Interesting

Introducing...Michel Foucault via me....

2008-10-11T20:31:00.007+11:00

Here I go...

I am reading Archaeology of Knowledge at the moment and y'know, it seems like I have never read anything to do with Foucault before. I recall that Foucault was someone I studied in my undergraduate degree and probably made mention of in essays, but I do not recall anything that I ever said or heard about him. So, I feel like I am stumbling a little through this book, unaided, without history, and the irony of that in relation to this read, makes me smile.

So Foucault is talking about history and what we understand of history and in doing so, in the very first place he asks what is those things we think about - how do we "isolate the unities". So at first read he seems to be telling me that everything that we understand about history, about the overarching story that goes through time **, is really about smaller stories and the idea that all these smaller stories make this big one, is not really true, because they are not the same, but how are they not the same?

I like that he calls history the reconstitution of the document, which in effect puts history in its place, a place we often forget about - the place of creation. History creates, it makes. Foucault says that a document has a trace - the document's quality of being in time and space - of action. I believe this must be the trace in the centre of Continuum models - it lies within the act of creation, it is the impetus - does it belong in the centre? The trace is everywhere. ++ The document is what makes history and the document is everywhere.

I must have mis-read or misunderstood, because I have flagged a passage that has a reference to time. This i find to be a very interesting and thought provoking passage and I will type it out here:

"Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought. In this system, time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments of consciousness." p12 1995 re-print of Archaelology of Knowledge.

In essence I think he is saying simply that humans see things from their own viewpoint only. I wonder about the revolutions being moments of consciousness though - is there a french translation thing I am not understanding? Does he mean revolutions regardless of the fact that they 'provoke' change - that even a revolution is something that is considered as the same type of history - it comes from this "same system of thought". Is this system what we consider the purpose of history? That is not clear. Is the system that which we construct in order to make history a subject that aids in defining us and our actions over time? This would be my reading. This would make sense as he seems to be reinforcing the idea that we create these constructs - through the trace, the document and we live within them and do not even realise that they are false, or constructed.

"Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at leat similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for the origin; tradition enables us to isolate the new against a background of permanence, and to tarnsfer its merit to originality, to genius, to the decisions proper to individuals."

Immediately upon reading the above passage I think of how videos and clips on Yotube are considered a continuation of film and tv. Clearly these are audiovisual or moving image, whatever term is more fashionable ( i think moving image is). My question is, are they really? Because we have constructed an idea of what these are, a tradition (?) does this make them unquestionably part of that story. I remember reading Elessesser, who says that undoubtably new media has elements of those media before it, but it is undoubtably something different and that it is not useful or possible to say that what we see on the internet is the same as what we see in movie theatres - it is just not the same. I think then of an article I read the other say that said that each new media gives way to the last - but that is not true either, because we still have radio and we still have newspapers and we still have phone lines. This is what I think Foucault is referring to as the concept of "pursue without discontinuity". These links, the lines we see as weaving through history, through time to come to something we see now - to give it understanding. He is telling us that we have assumptions about this - constructs - and that language and the document helps us create those constructs - but it does not have to be that way. I see the trace here as something that cannot exist without construct. I think that perhaps Giddens' Structuration relies on this sense of construct. Hmmmm -more thought needed here.

OK, that is enough for tonight, I have some sleep thinking to do.

** I recall something now - reading something about how Foucault does not believe the modernist idea of metanarrative.@ No such story - just diversity. Also, Foucault, in the parts I have read at least, does not specifically mention time - which I find interesting. He talks of history as if it were time, but also only a description, a title that means nothing, a false sense of continuity - no, not false, made up.
++ Now I am remembering stuff about Frank's writings about the RK model in particular. I will have to go back and read after this.
@This is incorrect - it was Lyotard and that devilish book, The Postmodern Condition, which I have grumblingly ordered into the library for me to pick up.

Post meeting thoughts

2008-10-09T13:28:00.003+11:00

My second supervisor meeting over and done with again. Good. I still have this sense of not doing enough work, but apparently I am blistering. Good. I might be moving the blog to a university location, but this is something that has to be investigated. Hmmmm.

I found an article about "the new screen" and digital archiving which I found a bit challenging. The very first sense uses the word, 'media' three times in three different contexts. Sheesh. Also, there seems to be a lot of blaming archivists and not a lot of explaining of concepts, such as "the new screen", which is according to the article, something that allows production of artifacts and is also not rectangular. Tsk. I am being mean, but this dude has so many assumptions that are unexplained and not even recognised that it makes my head hurt. One of the keywords he uses to 'tag' his authoriship is 'preservation', but I do not believe I read any to do with actual preservation or what it might mean or how it achieved or by who anywhere in the paper, but I did read how archivists have to do something. Meh, enough of that.

I am now doing my revision of the ethics application. As much as it is paining me, I am happy that there is revisions now. I have done all the hard work.

More about everything later.

Tyring to do an article

2008-10-08T15:22:00.002+11:00

Why is writing an article so hard? I am mostly just wasting my time, organising the usb keys and what information is on what and where, reviewing ALL the sources again to see if I missed something, then including way more than I actually need. I have moaned about this article writing thing before. I think perhaps I should approach it thinking that I am writing to someone - explaining to someone, then academicize it. Maybe I could - at least I would then be writing something. I have to do this as now I will be waiting for my ethics application to come back and I have to do readings and more readings and more readings and keep working on my scholarship application and think about the emails I am going to send out with the questions on them and write more about my methodology and possibly do some more modelling! Its all a bit too much really and after yesterday's realisation about probably not even making the criteria to be considered for a scholarship, I am finding the enthusiasm waning. Plus I feel strange today - tired and hot and achy. I hope I am not coming down with something.

Incidentally, I have been reading some work by a group of researchers at QUT. I think they are in a Cultural Studies faculty of some kind. The work is quite interesting - it deals with cultural citizenship and new media, with no particular reference to the new media being online. Often everything is online -centric - which my research is. Anyway, it is a group of them, but one of the participants, who appears to be the lead researcher, and who just finished her PhD last year, is called Jean Burgess. Jean has created an interesting term to do with the phenomenon of creative practice. Her official meaning for it is: the ordinary practices of creativity that already embedded in everyday life. pg. 1 of Re-mediating Vernacular Creativity: Digital Storytelling. She says that Vernacular Creativity is a "productive articulation of consumer practices and knowledge" married to 'older' ( interesting use of term) traditions such as scrapbooking and photos - personal recordkeeping. The things I find interesting about her writing is that she is talking about language and communcation, of course this is referenced immediately with her use of the word, "vernacular". Language of the everyday, or of a community. The second thing I find interesting is that she is dealing with personal recordkeeping and memory making. She is essentially talking about personal recordkeeping using norms and genres from popular culture. 'Old' practices such as photographing (not so old really) and scrapbooking (not sure of the history of this odd practice) are re-imagined by people thinking about and having access to tools that can help them create in ways that remind them and are similar to those used by marketing people, graphic designers, tv producers, film makers etc. There is something to be said about this in reference to Giddens. But I am too tired to type it today. I will just print out some more articles, go get food and go home. I have not been called about my car yet - which is not broken, but is being fixed by some didgy mechanics who did not fix it properly in the first place. Mechanics. grrrrr.

Back again later.

ps. I often get a bit anxious about how I am going to remember all this information so I can write my thesis.

pps. I wonder also that because this is a blog and is published publically, does it mean that I have to quote from it in my thesis, if I use the ideas I have written in here?

Ethics and H1 equivalence

2008-10-07T22:18:00.002+11:00

I have now finished my ethics application and it is ready for my supervisor to review. It is 36 pages long, with requested additions - ie: consent letter etc. I am fairly certain that I have wracked my brain STUPID trying to figure out all possibly ethical issues. Is moaning about it an ethical issue? Probably.

Something else happened though. Something that makes me a bit sad. Not the flat cat i saw being shoveled off the road today by council workers, stiff as a board, although this was a sad sight. Last year I applied for a scholarship plus admission to Monash to do a Masters - this very Masters I am doing now. I did not get the scholarship, but I did get in. In order to qualify for a scholarship you must have a H1 record or equivalent. This means honours first class. Or a Reseach Masters, or a prelim Masters with research content - oh and they have to be first class honours as well. If you dont have these things, they will judge your academic record and other working records to see if you have an equivalent. I just found a list on the Monash site about an hour ago which details every person who was awarded a H1 equivalent for 2008 and 2007 scholarship rounds. I was not one of them. So, this means, that last year i did not even have the minimum requirement to get a scholarship, let alone be considered for one. This makes me sad as I wonder if this year in applying for a scholarship, I might just be wasting my time. If I am wasting my time, it means that I will either have to support myself and continue the path I want to take - which is 18months Masters, then 18 months PhD. Or, I drop down to part time and work almost full time and kill myself. Or, I complete this Masters with a first class honours and then try and get a scholarship for a PhD after that. Another 3 years of study on top of this two years. You have to be fucking kidding me. I guess if I finish this Masters as a Masters, I can travel and then come back and do the PhD, or even travel and do a PhD overseas. Still, it made me a bit sad.

Sunny Sunday

2008-10-05T13:15:00.003+11:00

Although I am not officially working on study today, I feel compelled to complete my ethics application and being that it runs to 30 pages and has at least 4 supporting documents that need to be filled out (I think -privacy, consent, intention letter, plus another one I cannot remember).

I am also trying to get on board with the scholarship application as it is due at the end of this month. I really really need that scholarship so am asking everyone to put out the scholarship vibes for me.

Thinking and thinking

2008-10-04T16:12:00.003+10:00

I have been spending a bit on time this afternoon in my place to think and so have had the opportunity to mull over the knot theory. I wonder about it, and yes, because Lacan introduced his own knot theory (that was both not very well received, as well as unfinished as far as I am aware) which was supposed to recognise and draw on trans-disciplinary doctrines of thought. My knot theory had no intentions of doing this.

I chose the knot because it sat well in the model visually and because it appeared to be an end. The knot I picked is one of those ones that has no end - there are various representations of them and it is similar to the Lacanian choice. However, I feel have mis-represented the knot by describing it as thus - as visualising it to be this actual structure. My original and always ever visual structure in thread theory is of a braid, where the threads have been knotted in places to make braids here and there. The knot was supposed to be one locus of the braid. Sounds a bit like DNA huh? So I guess that the braid is the meta-theory attached to the knot analogy. Sounds like boating with fashion accessories.

The braid certainly fits in with mutliplicity, possibly in the most effective way yet. However, its limitations are the same. It has the feel of a linear path, and of grabbing at whole and solid ideas. How can I represent that which is unstable, everywhere and no where? The Continuum model does it by impling a 3 dimensional structure. This is why I used that in the first place.

My supervisor said that my use of the Continuum model was sophisticated. I called it clumsy. It really needs developing more - more thought about the mutliplicity of all the models, including those that are subject specifc , such as the legal ones. I have put it here again to record this incarnation.

Saturday afternoon philosophy

2008-10-04T14:27:00.005+10:00

Some references for further study in response to and inspired by meeting with supervisor yesterday:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_foucault

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicity_(philosophy)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theory

"The Borromean Knot became for Lacan simultaneously a symbol, an instrument of research and an eternal interrogation".

http://www.answers.com/topic/jacques-lacan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics

Multiplicity and disembedding

2008-10-04T10:28:00.007+10:00

Yesterday's meeting was very good and quite productive. I feel like when I meet with that particular supervisor that I am in a secret society with special handshakes. We talk about theory and applications of theory. I presented my models, we talked about other people's theories and models and used lots of words that would make my sister cry with anger. Two of the most important things I took away from the meeting were of critical importance to both my thesis and to my understanding of archival process and purpose.

Firstly, when we talk of capturing and keeping records we are referring to a 'disembedding' of that record (in whatever form it might take) and moving it into a place where it is then kept over time. This action of disembedding provides a distancing from the moment of creation - we are talking about putting a record away for future use - with the potential to be used, in Giddens' and Continuum theory, as the 'spark' of creativity. The memory trace and the spark of creativity are one in the same: and this is the knot that I have spoken on earlier (which my supervisor really liked).# Getting back to disembedding - this is what makes a record a record in a sense - because a record never exists until it is given that function*. Let me explain. On my computer is quite a few hundred emails to various people, friends, family, businesses etc. They are merely emails - information, documents, captured data. They already exist as a record in the sense that I have kept them to show me in some future time what I have written and sent. However, they only become a record when they are needed to be used for this type of validation. If my mum rings me and says, "you have not sent me an email in 2 weeks!", I can check my sent box in my email and see that she is right (or wrong). If she is wrong, then the email that I sent within the last two weeks is a record - evidence - that proves her wrong - in a sense, as I have no way to know that she recieved this email, only that I sent it. If she is right, what is my record? The email program that shows I have not sent an email or the last email I sent that was prior to two weeks? If I had decided that some of my emails needed to be kept for a long period of time because I thought the information they contained might be useful in the future, I would try and figure out the best way to store them. There would be many things taken into consideration in making the choice for storage, but lets say I decided to print it and put it in my filing cabinet. That is disembedding. Now think of archival institutions such as the National Archives or the National Film and Sound Archive. Disembedding is the required function of an archive.

Now lets think about the National Library and Picture Australia for a second. http://www.pictureaustralia.org/ They have got themselves into the new web (or web 2.0 or social web or whatever the fuck you want to label or maybe tag it) and have a presence on Flickr, calling it, Re-Picture. http://www.flickr.com/groups/re-pictureaustralia/ The special thing about this AWESOME idea is that it means that the Library is IN with the embedded document, showing it to us through its own contextual medium. There are many other cool things about re-picture, including the public domain of the stuff that is put up on there and the ability for anyone to download and mash it. But the major point is that the Library is in the collection where it exists, rather than taking it away and putting it "on a shelf". **

Its this kind of thinking - this shift - that I am searching for in my thesis.

OK, moving on.

Multiplicity. The mammoth blog post I wrote the other day about Giddens has some additions to add to it courtesay of my supervisor. It is kind of like what I was talking about when I was questions Buddhist principles and individual moments of creation. Its about Giddens' duality and how it is really much more complex than that. Remember I said that? Well the answer, kinda, is that it that the duality is really a multiplicity. Let's recap. Duality of structure is the action and the outcome both acting together to create the action and the outcome time and time again. One cannot be untied from the other. A good example is my use of the mobile phone. Having it has changed the way I communicate with people and the way I think about communicating with people, which then changes the way I communicate with people and then the way I communicate with people etc. What impacts on that change is not just the presence of the phone, but me and my ideas about phone use as well as loads of other things hidden under the surface. This complexity is not really well described by saying it is a duality, because the what I have said above about my phone use is really only an example of one way my mobile phone behaviour has been created: by simply having it. There really is many things that have impacted on how I use a mobile phone (which is often not very well I might add - currently it has run out of battery and I do not know where the charger is, so no one can contact me, unless they know Alfio's phone number, but then it really means that you REALLY want to contact me and not just for a social chit chat). Do you see?

Ok, so those were the two things that were most important about yesterday's meeting, but I have another thing to add that is not quite a sidebar, but is something of interest that needs to be noted.

Context. I told my supervisor that I wanted to write a paper about context and capturing context in archival collections and he nearly had a fit. I love that people have issues over words and their usage - it makes me feel like I really fit in. Anyway, I will have to find out exactly where he wrote his stuff on why context is a dirty word. It made me acutely aware of the way that people use words to their own end and made me a bit more optimistic about my preservation article that has still not been written. I cannot really be bothered going into the details of what the conniptions are about, but will leave you with a definition or 5 trillion.

The situation including the creators, their purposes, activites and circumstances that caused events to occur and records documenting them to be created and maintained.
http://john.curtin.edu.au/society/glossary/index.html
The organizational, functional, and operational circumstances surrounding materials' creation, receipt, storage, or use, and its relationship to other materials. Along with content and structure, context is one of the three fundamental aspects of a record.http://secint33.un.org/unarms/en/unrecordsmgmt/unrecordsresources/glossaryofrecordkp.html#c
the relationship of artifacts and other cultural remains to each other and the situation in which they are found.http://www.saa.org/publications/sampler/terms.html
In the most general sense, the entire situation, background, or environment relevant to an event, action, statement, work, etc. In a literary sense, the parts of a sentence, paragraph, or text that occur just before and after a specific word, phrase, or passage and determine its precise meaning. Quoting out of context may give a misleading impression of the intentions of the original speaker or author. Context is included in certain types of keyword indexing. http://lu.com/odlis/odlis_c.cfm

# My thesis is about the 'spark' and the trace, which my supervisor calls collectively (I assume it is collectively - at least it seems so to me), the 'flicker'. This flicker is embodied and disembodied in the knot. I keep using the word embodied for embedded - which is bad because they have different meanings. However, in this case they are complementary. The knot is both embedded and disembedded in various ways, as well as can be embodied and disembodied. The knot is a creation as well as impetus for creation. The knot is personal and impersonal; history and not yet made, and idea as well as a thing. The use or reading of the knot as embedded and disembedded will be influenced by its condition as well I think.

*Sue McKemmish wrote a paper called, "Are records ever actual?"

** It has to be noted however that the principle functions of a library differ somewhat from an archive. Even though archival practices were born in the library, they have quite different outlooks. I am trying to find a good explanation of this and know it is in Upward's Continuum mechanics and memory banks:(1) multipolarity, but cannot find it right now.

P.S.

2008-10-03T10:33:00.002+10:00

I realised this morning when I was using my fingers to count (I have decided that because I am so into my research that something has to give in my brain, so I have given up being smart in other areas, such as counting), that I have only been doing this research project for LESS than three months, not four. So my wild pace is probably a bit stupid, being that on December 31st when most people are working or trying to find a party or getting drunk already, I will be studying because it is a study day for me. Shizzen.

After yesterday's mammoth effort...

2008-10-03T10:26:00.006+10:00

I realised yesterday that the ideas I was talking about re: rules and resources are actually quite fundamental to the Continuum models and one of the things I intend to do in my research is test the models, so I thought I had better add in this niche qualification into my theoretical dimensions model.

ps. if you click on the models it will open them up into a new window and show them at their real size, so you can read all the writing.

Headache and panic

2008-10-02T14:52:00.000+10:00

I have a supervisor meeting tomorrow and another one next Thursday. In case I have not mentioned this before.

Ok, rules and resources, Mr Giddens style

2008-10-02T10:10:00.011+10:00

I have been doing more of the reading I was supposed to - last night waiting for a train after having dinner with a friend and on the train going home. Train journeys are quite good for all that stuff. Although I have this tendency to think of train journeys as the only time reading is appropriate and when i am here in my office, I should be typing and creating and making up new and ingenious ideas. There are two things I have reminded myself about today:

I started this research degree nearly 4 months ago and have more than 2 and a half years to go.
I have not done any of the actual research yet. So how can I make up theory when i have not interviewed anyone?

So, back to rules and resources, which, upon reading, blew my mind a bit. I really enjoy reading something that you think you know about already, or may have already read a while ago and seeing it with new eyes - it is theory at work - Structuration in process. The rules enacted. Anyway, briefly I have been thinking about the ideas of rules and resources, which I will explain more of further down, and the Buddhist ideas of each moment being completely different from the last. Does Structuration have the ability to involve this kind of complexity? The second thing I am going to write about today is I now think that my research methodology model is more about process than action. I will also (hopefully) explain the difference in this scintillating blog post. Also, I note that I even structure my blog posts like essays now. Seriously.

Rules and resources (rule resource sets)

Some key points:

Rules and resources cannot be isolated from the structures they are embedded in and influence.
And hence, it is not the 'rule' itself which contributes to structures, but the underlying assumptions that make the rule.
Rules are a rule by which a rule is made and can be repeated.
Rules and resources are the same - they both mean transformation, can enact transformation, as well as sanction these actions.
Rules and resources do mean domination and power.

Some background.

Giddens is a sociologist who has written the big text books outlining what sociology is and the history of it etc etc. Actually I did sociology at uni - it is a minor of mine - I don't remember Giddens, but then again, I was in the tavern drinking beer most of the time. Anyway, in writing and teaching these histories and theories, Giddens realised that he had his own theory to contribute, called Structuration. However, Structuration sounds worryingly like the Structuralists, who like to think of society as a frame that helps construct, transform and provide the foundation for behaviour (I think). A good example of this is a house frame - including foundation - this analogy will be used throughout this little blurb of me explaining what I think I know. Giddens realised that this kind of structure was kind of right, but the framing-ness of it - where frame is absolute structure, was not quite right. I am pretty sure he liked Marxist theories to do with class and rules etc, so he brought some ideas about that on board as well. What Giddens came up with he called Structuration and the simpliest way i can think to describe it is to say that the structure of Structuralists, the house, is now not visible and not strong and rigid but flexible and dynamic, not outside supporting, but also the foundation, the walls, the weather, the winds, the crumble as well as the destruction. The house frame can now been seen as a part of the process - an instant in time - and the what the house might look like depends on how its frame was conceptualised, but might change even then. To keep the analogy, whole systems of structures in a particular society, such as the suburbs, means that all the houses will probably be the same time and time again, but not in the exact same instant of time. They will be constantly changing and evolving. Sometimes, they may not even turn out to be houses: just because it is a house frame does not mean it will be a house. But the way it was built has come from a common understanding or perhaps a set of rules - to provide shelter, to boast about money spent, to be able to live in a certain place etc etc. These rules are Structuration, not the house itself. Which is why it makes it a difficult theory to apply - in particular to complexity - because in my mind, it reeks of complexity already.

A quote:
"To say that structure is a 'virtual order' of transformative relations means that social systems, as reproduced social practices, do not have 'structures' but rather exhibit 'structural properties' and that structure exists, as time-space presence, only in its instantiations in such practices and as memory traces orienting the conduct of knowleadgable human agents." pg 17 Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

This means to me, and using the house analogy again, that the action of building the house creates and enforces the rules of house building and that every house built holds the trace of those rules in action. If you think about why we actually have houses in society you can see the rules underpinning it - don't forget also they are the rules as you see them: through your individual lens - as a knowledgeable human agent. But most often or not, people in a society together 'see' the rules the same way. Hence, I live in a house in suburbia and feel safe knowing that I have shelter and a type of security for my belongings.

Another quote:
"Sturcture thus refers, in social analysis, to the structuring properties allowing the 'binding' of time-space in social systems, the properties which make it possible for discernable similar social practices to exist across carying spans of time and space which lend them 'systemic' form." Same ref as above.

When we think about organisations, including Governments, and how they feel about housing and all that, we come across more structures and systems. This is where I think ideas of resources plus domination and power come in. Plus ideas of systems and 'systemic' form. Giddens breaks up resources into two areas: allocative and authoritative. Allocative resources is really talking about those physical materials used - the ones that we humans have power over - such as forests in which to chop down wood, the tools we use to chop it down and the actual houses that are built. Authoritative resources are not material but also are involved in power - the power we have over other people. These would be the organisation of time and people to chop down the trees (think effective and efficient). Two examples I think about regarding this is 1. the way big business goes into densely forested developing countries and makes a deal with small communities and logs heavily, devastating the environment and the lives of the small community, who thought they needed to have tvs when what they really needed was those trees that provided them shelter and land to use etc. Another example, which is quite similar, is that of mining companies doing deals with governing bodies of countries to mine the land - for example how BHPB is going into the Congo - with no third party to ensure everything is fair and helpful to the country for the long term (think Papua New Guniea and OK Tedi). The relationship between the two resources is kind of apparent above - in that you cannot have one without the other and manipulation of both is fundamental to weilding power. Power changes structures (think Russian/Chinese revolutions) or my favourite - the free range eggs - people demanded free range eggs because of publicity and awareness of alternatives - two simple tools (resources) used were material (media) and non-matieral (information & people) - and what happened? Awareness rose and people demanded to buy free range eggs. Now cafes are expected to tell you if they use free range eggs or not - it is a 'norm'.

Ok, I hope it makes sense so far, my imaginary reader plus Spesh, because I have not come to the punch line yet. BTW I am quite happy that there is a punch line in social theory. Anyway, what I have talked about already is quite generalised of course, but I meant to explain where the complexity of it can be. Of course it was not only two things that changed our demand for free range eggs - the rules and resources needed to enact that forcible change are conplex and multilayered. So here we come to the punch line. The 'duality' of Structuration as Giddens puts it. Duality of Structuration means that the rules and resources (being properties of social systems) , which are used to create systems, are both the way it is done and the outcome of what is done. What he means is that rules and resources cannot be separate to the structures of social systems - they do not exist in isolation. SO i guess that I have already given the punch line away above in my key points. Oh well. I will give you Giddens' definition:

Duality of structure: Structure as the medium and outcome of the conduct it recursively organizes; the structural properties of social systems do not exist outside of action but are chronically implicated in its production and reproduction. pg 374 (glossary) same ref as above.

Phew this blog post is taking all day!!!

So I think about all this kind of stuff and I wonder about the thread theory and in particular, the Buddhist ideas of each moment being different from the next. This theory/philosophy has profoundly influenced me. What I take from it is that regardless of how much you think things are the same, that in each moment - moment to moment - you are a different person. Change has gone on - inside and outside. This world is not the same as it was a moment ago and i am not the same as I was a moment ago - or even a thousand moments ago. Everything I do builds up to this moment, but is also part of the moment being what it is - this is kind of like the duality of structure huh? So, one of the things I think about in regard to Structuration is that it is very good with a big fat wide lens firmly squared at an organisational level - and of course it is designed this way because it is sociology - the study of society. So what gets me thinking is that the act of creation - that which sits at the centre of the continuum and is the knot in thread theory - that is an individual act. How does that idea fit into Structuration? The reason why this is interesting to me is that I see the creative act as something highly individual. I remember back to my screenwriting days and how each person created something that no one else could, even if it was an adaptation of a fairy tale. How does this fit into Structuration? This is something I am pondering - brewing away in the back of my mind all the time. I think it will come out once I have done my interviews and started analysing my research.

Back now to thread theory and Structuration. Thread theory has always been about laying down different strands or threads - they could be my ideas, your ideas, a theory, an insult, a remark, an action, an event - anything that has meaning to me. These threads are then used to create something - I draw the threads together to formulate an opinion, a thing, a thought, a conversation etc. The threads are experience - mine, yours, someone elses, but they come together for one person and are 'transformed' into an act of creation - a coalesence of meaning. I see now that I think of threads as being outside of myself and as clear paths of meaning. And i guess they are, but they are also a framing, as well as the tools to frame - and I have begun to think about it as the individual's Structuration. Wrongly or rightly. I think this is why i created the Continuum of methodology. The existence of the weaving of threads relies on time and space to create an instance where a thread can be born. But the thread is both creating and fullfilling its purpose constantly - wherein each instant turns the thread into something else. Hmmmm. I shall stop there. There is more to think about regarding this topic.

However, there is something that can be said about all of what I have written above and how it applies to Youtube. A couple of things (or more) spring to mind immediately about rules and resources. Firstly, that Youtube is a commercial enterprise and its directors have their own commercial agenda (whatever that might be - Google's intentions are becoming suspcious to me). Plus there is all those ideas we have about what commercial enterprises might be. Secondly, there is the culture of the internet (an interesting idea in itself) which gave birth to file sharing and open source software and changed what we mean when we say 'fair use' in copyright (well in fact nothing in the copyrights was really changed, it was the appearance of the way the internet was being used that changed its interpretations). These two ideas kind of cover a lot about the tensions of the internet anyway - which is played out in copyright lawsuits over music downloading. What about Youtube as a website? Is it? What about Youtube as using both the language of film and the language of the internet at the same time? What about Youtube being treated as a way to market productions - like the BBC does? What about online communities? What about watching the screen all alone in your study or bedroom or whereever people use the internet these days? What about digital technologies? What about use of digital text? What about the use of digital text with digital film? Is digital film the same as movies or tv? In what ways can it be different? All these questions are born from thinking about rules and resources. More about this later.

Ok last thing, which is actually related, is the idea that my methodology is about process. I had the thought earlier today, after re-reading "Continuum mechanics...",** that I am trying to describe process, which is pretty much linear, at the same time as trying to show the complexity of the action of making, or coming to that process. Is it necessary to show the process? How does the model show process - by layering. There is more to think about this one.

As a final thought, I noticed when re-reading "Continuum mechanics..."** that the publishing Continuum model has something interesting on it that challenges what it is that I might be trying to say in this thesis. The publication containers exist now in the form of the library - but will they always? Is the internet challenging this notion? Same with the Cultural heritage model and museum/museums. Will the meaning of libraries and museums change or will those words become completely different? More about that later as well.

Upward, F. (2005). Continuum mechanics and memory banks [Series of parts]: Part 1: Multi-polarity. [An earlier version of this article was presented at the Archives and Collective Memory: Challenges and Issues in a Pluralised Archival Role seminar (2004: Melbourne).]. Archives and Manuscripts, 33(1), 84-109.
Upward, F. (2005). Continuum mechanics and memory banks [Series of two parts] Part 2: The making of culture. Archives and Manuscripts, 33(2)

What is going on?

2008-10-01T16:46:00.005+10:00

Today I appear at uni armed with a truck load of ready material - which made me walk funny and huff and puff all the way here - ready to do some work on Mr Giddens' rule-resource sets, ready for my meeting on Friday, plus some work on my ethics application which is now a complete pain in the bum as I need to think about potential ethics issues (who knew), but instead I decided to do another model. I think I have a growing addiction to model making.

This model is something I have been crafting in my brain for a while, but today found out the reasons why it is good to write stuff down - or in this case, make it look like real things in digital world. I wanted to map the theoretical fields of study I will be using for this research in order to help me realise where I am weak in information and where other possibilities might lie in searching for information. It was a successful idea and I (also) spent most of the afternoon on Google Scholar finding articles that relate to specific area I identified as lacking or needing more in depth literature.

The reason why it was great to start manipulating the digital pixels is that i worked through ideas about how they were related, either already in the literature or possibly, as well as figured out major themes and areas of research in addition to those I have been focusing on this last week or two.

In do this and thinking about this in this way I realised that communication has it's hand in every piece of the pie, essentially becoming the foundation for the research. So I went off and did some keyword searching using communication and other aspects of the study such as internet, user generated content, online communities etc. I found some great stuff. I have put up the progression of the models - i think it shows this 'working out' of concepts.

I have another growing problem however. There is a lot of material on the internet which I am bookmarking in delicious, but I need to go back and reference it. I wonder if it will be easier to reference it when i need it or put it into endnote now? The reason why stuff is in endnote is because that is also where I keep my brief overview and research notes on articles and books etc. Something I need to think about. What first comes to mind is that all this organising is taking up a a lot of time. When will all this preparation work end? Ha! I am also dreading this because then i will have to actually say something.

I have not yet started the damn article either. A lack of deadline imposed by someone else makes it hard. I should have at least an abstract summary so I can send it off to potenital publishers and then make them give me a deadline.

I also realise that I need to complete my scholarship application as well. So many things to do! In three weeks all I have managed to do is write a lot of blog posts, develop an obsession for modelling, borrow a lot of books from the library, add a trillion new articles to endnote. Meh. I have done quite a bit, but I still need more time. I wish the damn ethics clearance could be done by someone else - I have even been looking up ethics issues in research in order to help me brainstorm what issues there might be.

Just a quickie

2008-09-26T12:50:00.002+10:00

I am trying to get organised to leave for the weekend. This of course includes all kinds of packing and tidying of the house and I have a time limit. I cannot even remember where we are going actually.

Anyway, a bit about community informatics and social informatics today. Most of today was spent writing an email to one of my supervisors who is the theory guy. I worked on my models a bit more and talked to him about how communities of practice is too narrow a description for use in analysing Youtube. Communities of interest, the partner in crime, is also a ridiculous concept - I find it only useful when talking about organisations and indeed they are mostly used in this context. Community informatics on the other hand seems to have a wider spread and deeper reach in its meaning. Read wikipedia entries - the CI one is done by Larry Stiller and I assume the I one is done by an academic as well.

I will have to leave it there for now cos I have to dash out and get cat litter and batteries. For the love of GOD why am I the one stressing?