Insurgent Spaces
From UANotebook
Google group that Jeff created with various documents there. You have to log into your Gmail account to use it.
LIT REVIEW
A. Space/place as a global commodity where the local identity is threatened
Irina
Castells, M. (1983). The City and the Grassroots. University of California Press: Berkeley.
In the world of global economies and multinational corporations, space and distance have become irrelevant with the help of communication technologies, mobile capital, transportation. "The world's corporate elite becomes placeless" (pg.210). For people who are displaced by urban development, which is typically driven by global markets, it is imperative to find new spaces. Securing space is key for the preservation of cultural identity, improving living conditions and participating in the political realm. This is particularly evident in many developing countries where urban populations are focused on spatially defined local communities. Castells describes "the dependent city," using an example of squatter communities in Latin America where squatters and the state have become dependent on one another to break the rules in a struggle to keep up with the global market forces. In a way, the state relies on the squatters being productive members of society via their informal economies but having no identity. "It is a city whose space is produced by its dwellers as if they were not the producers of such a space, but the temporary builders of their master's hacienda. The dependent city is the ecological form resulting from the residents' lack of social control over urban development because of their forced submission to the good will of the state and to the changing flows of foreign capital. The dependent city is a city without citizens" (pg. 212).
Giorgia
Escobar, Arturo (2001). Culture sits in places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization. Political Geography, 20 (2001), 139–174.
Escobar highlights the importance of studying place as a way to understand culture at large (i.e. all culture is emplaced and embodied)
“From an anthropological perspective, it is important to highlight the emplacement of all cultural practices, which stems from the fact that culture is carried into places by bodies — bodies are encultured and, conversely, enact cultural practices.” (p. 143)
He then goes on to advocate the study of place as a way to problematize the classic distinction between place (local) and space (global):
“It is important to keep in mind the power of place even in studies of placelessness (and vice versa). To make this assertion does not mean that place is “the other” of space — place as pure and local and in opposition to a dominating and global space — since place is certainly connected to, and to a significant extent produced by, spatial logics. It is to assert, on the contrary, that place-based dynamics might be equally important for the might be equally important for the production of space, or at least they are in the view of some place-based social actors.” (p. 147)
Ultimately, he argues for an approach the study/critique of globalization, and in particular globalism which starts from the affirmation of local place-making practices -- i.e. as scholars we should not always focus on the ways in which capitalism is erasing place, but rather on the existing local practices that may shape globalizing spatial logics (>>> UA collection contributes to documenting these practices):
“As Massey (1997) so lucidly showed, a “global sense of place” that recognizes both global constructedness and local specificity is neither an oxymoron nor needs to be reactionary. This is because if the experience of movement and non-place has become fundamental for modern identity and everyday life, the experience of place continues to be important for many people worldwide. Place and non-place are more than contrastive modalities. There are high cultural and political stakes in asserting one or the other. It might indeed be true that places and cultures have always lived with, and accepted, an inevitable hybridization. This does not make them necessarily less local, nor more global, only differently so; the point is to find out how people, as Jonathan Friedman put it, “practice the local in the global”, that is, of examining the practices through which people construct places even as they participate in translocal networks (1997: 276). In other words, what I am also suggesting is that it might be possible to approach the production of place and culture not only from the side of the global, but of the local; not from the perspective of its abandonment but of its critical affirmation; not only according to the flight from places, whether voluntary or forced, but of the attachment to them.” (pp. 147-148)
Chmielewska, Ella (2007). Framing [Con]text: Graffiti and Place. Space and Culture vol. 10 no. 2, May 2007, 145-169
In an article examining images of graffiti from Montréal (Canada) and Warsaw (Poland) Chmielewska problematizes the local/global dialectic by framing graffiti as a global yet site-specific form of language.
“Both cities have a significant tradition of political wall writing, and both are now grappling with asserting their identities under the tremendous pressure and ubiquitous presence of the global visual language and sameness of urban imagery” (p. 148)
“Graffiti is an important cultural site for negotiating local identity. And hip-hop graffiti is a particularly potent scene for exploration, if only because ofthe omnipresence of its idiom in the contemporary sensory field. We encounter graffiti not only in physical urban spaces, but in the images (and sounds) that saturate everyday culture: in fashion, music, advertising, newspapers and magazines, visual arts, and even in and around scholarship if we consider the number of book covers, for example, that (sometimes entirely gratuitously) use graffiti images to indicate the hip-ness of their subject. Signature graffiti has become a powerful figure of mainstream visual language, and as such it foregrounds the problematical relationship of language and graphic mark.” (p. 148)
“Hip-hop graffiti is a significant force shaping the contemporary visual landscape and inflecting the cultural identities of places with its potent visual language. As such it has become an important agent of cultural globalization, of colonizing the visual sphere by writing over the local detail.” (p. 162)
Graffiti as “topo-sensitive language sign that points to itself while designating the local surface and referencing the discourse that surrounds it” (p. 163)
“Considering jointly the expressive gesture of writing and the semiotic dimensions of its trace necessitates probing the way each mark relates to its locale. An inscription—whether a slogan, stylized signature or an icon—is connected with the specific history of protest, contestation, and subversion framed by the locality” (p. 163)
Tom
Drucker, S. & Gumpert, G. (1996) The regulation of public social life: Communication law revisited. Communication Quarterly, Summer, v.44, n.3, p.280-296.
The authors examine and classify legal regulations which govern public space as well as shape the opportunities and nature of social interactions.
"Communication does not occur in a vacuum bint in an environment. Relationships are either delineated by the circumstances of place or the conditions of time." (p.280) The ephemeral nature of graffiti often frames it within very specific ranges of time, making it an excellent marker of temporal context.
"The qualitative and quantitative dimensions of communication are, to a degree, determined by context. It is essential to grasp the symbiotic link between space and soical instituions, between space, individual and social perspective. (p.280)" If we define place as the social context(s) attached to spaces, then its study allows us to glimpse into the communication present in spaces.
D&G expand on the idea that the regulation of communication and communication activities, at the municipal level, occur through regulation of space (p.281).
Space as medium: link between space and communication. "Communication with others has traditionally taken place in locations wherein public space functions as a medium of communication. (p.281)"
Behavior: "The visual landscape communicates using architectural language as a medium to convey information about a place while shaping behavior in that place. (p.285)"
Anderson, S.J. & Verplanck, W.S. (1983) When walls speak, what do they say? The Psychological Record, v.33, p.341-359.
Report of a study (content analysis) of graffiti in nine buildings at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The authors found not only that graffiti accurately reflected the important social issues of the day but also that the content varied from building to building depending on different student populations. This tends to support the idea that although mainstream media and market forces have a homogenizing effect on place, the vernacular language of individuals, as expressed through graffiti, reflects a sensitivity to local issues, thus ameliorating the effects of globalization. (e.g. Anti-Nickels graffiti in Seattle).
"The study shows that graffiti are a more sensitive barometer of social events that had been thought. (p.341)"
As far as methodology: "Graffiti provide exemplary unobtrusive measures of behaviors privately produced for public observation an response. (p.341)"
- as an extreme example, Las Vegas as the ultimate chameleon: it changes in order to make money rather than having its own unique identity.
- the notion of experience, rather than goods, as the ultimate currency in post-industrial times (and place, after all, is all about experience)
Venturi, Scott-Brown, and Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas
- lots of good stuff about signage and communication, landscape as text
Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City
Borne out of utopian novels at the turn of the 19-20th century, the garden city movement was somewhat of a reaction the industrial revolution. It proposed an ideal balance of town and country, typified by residential and industrial cities surrounded by greenbelts and agriculture. Although its aims were grand, the movement threatened to result in over-planning and homogenization of local identity by reducing urban planning to a universal formula.
Jacobs, J. The Death and Life of Great American Cities
pg. 21: Jacobs critiques (lambastes) Le Corbusier and his Radiant City, which was, in Jacobs' opinion, an outgrowth of the older Garden City concept adapted for high densities.
B. Archives and Collective Memory -- the way that materiality in everyday places relates to the construction of identity and history/heritage -- both institutional and vernacular.
Irina
Randall C Jimerson (2003). Archives and memory. OCLC Systems and Services, 19(3), 89-95. Retrieved January 27, 2008, from Research Library database. (Document ID: 443404291). abstract: "Archives are repositories of memory, providing reliable evidence for examining the past. The four types of memory – personal, collective, historical, and archival – interact in complex and sometimes baffling ways to enable one to understand the past and to draw lessons from it. Archival memory is a social construct reflecting power relationships in society. Archivists and manuscripts curators play the important role of mediator in selecting records for preservation and providing research access to such collections. By recognizing and overcoming the bias toward records of powerful groups in society, archivists can provide a more balanced perspective on the past, and enable future generations to examine and evaluate the activities and contributions of all voices in one’s culture. Archives thus serve an important role in identifying and preserving the documentation that forms one’s historical memory."
Jimmerson's online article based in a presidential address that he gave Embracing the Power of Archives He lists the ways that archives have been perceived:
- illusion of neutrality
- the temple
- the prison
- the restaurant
and says that we need to embrace the power of archives and use them for social justice. He quotes Zinn as saying that archivists have to make efforts to document all groups in society, not just the elites. Archivists are taking on the challenge, but we also have to be mindful of the biases that are associated with documenting and presenting the archives, being mindful to minimize our own biases.
Zinn, H. (1977), "Secrecy, archives, and the public interest", Midwestern Archivist, Vol. 2, pp. 14-26. Archives are not neutral, nor is their bias intentional. It is a consequence of a larger social structure. "the existence, preservation, and availability of archives, documents, records in our society are very much determined by the distribution of wealth and power." The archival collections were "biased towards the important and powerful people of the society, tending to ignore the impotent and obscure." Archivists also need to pay attention to the marginalized or ignored groups.
Foote, Kenneth. E. (2000). To Remember and Forget: Archives, Memory, and Culture. In American Archival Studies: Reading in theory and Practice. Randall C. Jimerson ed. The Society of American Archivists: Chicago.
Documents and artifacts collected by archivists are a form of spatial and temporal communication – or memory conservation. In other words, archives present contained information about the past that can be preserved and passed on over long periods of time as a form of collective memory. Cultural landscapes (such as parks, memorials and monuments) are a form of archiving or preserving information in space and time as a form of communication to the future generations. In American, landscapes are often used to commemorate historical events, but people are selective about what memories are preserved. In this way, archives shape collective memory in ways that depend on what institution decides what to archive and for what goal – this results in that some memories are preserved while others are effaced or diminished to irrelevance.
Attitudes towards the past and the institutions that store the archives have an influence on what is archived and what is effaced. People tend to reject the controversial or unpleasant memories. For example, when a monument to women was proposed on the site of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, people opposed not wanting to linger on bad memories. Social pressure can determine social landscapes and by extension, which archives get preserved.
Institutions play a large role in the survival of archived materials. It is best to entrust archives to a variety of long standing institutions to ensure their survival. Libraries have been found to be some of the most reliable places to store information for long periods of time. Mapping also is one of the most effective ways to preserve information for collective memory. There are a variety of resource in addition to libraries and mapping that societies have archived information, such as through social landscapes, oral histories and through branding (biohazard symbol).
Carbaugh, Donald. (1996). Situating Selves: The Communication of Social Identities inAmerican Scenes. State University of New York Press: Albany.
We perform identity in situated social scenes. Cultural Scenes (physical settings, cultural senses of those settings, and the larger cultural landscape) where identities are situated:
- Material
- Particular crowd
- Activities
- In certain ways
- Specific topics
- Own norms – a) for acting and b) interpreting action
“Attention is thus drawn to actual communicative practices, the social identities activated through them, and the larger scenes of which they are a part.” (pg. 32)
Sandweiss,E.(2004). Framing Urban Memory. In Memory and Architecture. E. Bastea (ed). University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque.
Entire urban landcapes have been turned into outdoor museum to preserve a "presumptive community" (as Michael Frisch called it)and a history of authority. Museums have not focusded on change as much. They "separated urban memory from its fluid and contested gronding in the chaning landscape." Museums today claim favor the inclusion of narratives once forgotten or the excluded. However, museums are still put assembled by institutions and academics drawing knowledge from 'established" sources which binds the narratives. The representational city is more aptly preserved through large scale preservation projects that are oriented towrds consumption. These have more influence on our collective memory. The urban landscape itself has become a sort of commodified museum that is well packaged and well sponsored. Museums used to serve as a repository of authoritative memory, today this need has passed as cities themselves can do that as "'Memory,' framed and matted for presentation, is all around us" as a product. Suggests that perhaps future museums can shelter "change, unpredicatbility, and social fluidity."
Frisch, M. H. (1990). A shared authority: essays on the craft and meaning of oral and public history. SUNY series in oral and public history. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Giorgia
Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, & Eric Aoki (2005). Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum. Western Journal of Communication, Vol. 69, No. 2, April 2005, pp. 85–108
This article is a critical analysis of the spatial/material narratives found at the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming. The authors state that “[h]istory museums are a popular way for US Americans to engage the past, and more importantly, they are perceived by the public to be the most trustworthy source of information about the past” (p. 88). Because of their perceived trustworthiness, history museums contribute greatly to the (re)production of public memories regarding the heritage and history of nation. However, the authors claim that the three main rhetorical practices of history museums – which they identify as collecting, exhibiting and (re)presenting – entails high degrees of selection, erasure and interpretation, and are therefore worthy of critical scrutiny.
- Collecting – “the appeal to memory is always selective, incomplete and partial” (p. 89)
- Exhibiting – “situating, locating, and (re)contextualizing artifacts in actual spaces”
- (Re)presenting – “Through their various modes of display, museum curators and designers, interpret artifacts and render them meaningful” (p. 90)
History museums as “sites of both remembering and forgetting” (p. 89)
“In functioning as sites of forgetting, museums have the potential to cleanse, absolve or relieve visitors of painful, conflictual histories. Traditionally, history museums have collected primarily material artifacts, which, unlike oral discourse, anchor the transient character of memory” (p. 89) >>> a project like UA collects material artifacts via images; however, because these are artifacts are emplaced in the city and are often unsanctioned or mundane, they are also subject to disappearing (not unlike oral discourse)
Arguably digital repositories of soon-to-be historical artifacts do much of the same work of “remembering and forgetting” that traditional museums carry out.
As a site for the creation and preservation of public memories, the Urban Archives database is not exempt from the problematic nature of acts such as collecting, exhibiting and (re)presenting. However, one can argue that the processes underlying each of these acts in a project like this make for a less exclusive outcome.
- Process of collecting is not top-down, but collaborative/dialogic (i.e. students as collaborators and participants in their communities, community members pointing us to various sites that are worthy of attention). The images and annotations that make it into the archive are still selectively gathered (and therefore exclusive to a degree). However, the aspects that are usually included in the frame are also dimensions of the built environment that are usually neglected in other archival practices.
- Exhibiting becomes, to a degree, an interactive endeavor, as the archive’s images are displayed in configurations that are the outcome of the user’s interactions with the searchable database (through the search engine and metadata). Naturally, these configurations are also limited by our own acts of tagging and organizing, but there is a more ample spectrum of possibilities.
- (Re)presenting, or the act of interpreting the artifacts/data, becomes a potentially multiplicitous endeavor, as the database is available for anyone to use for their own research (examples of research based on collected images/metadata are posted on our website)
Tom
Anderson & Verplanck (p. 355): "The present findings indicate that when there is an issue of great public concern, graffiti will reflect it. The inference, then, is that graffiti will demonstrate, perhaps better than the media pundits, what issues people are thinking about."
Duany, A., Plater-Zyberk, E., and Speck, J. (2000). Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Pointe Press.
The authors critique much of the urban planning that has led to suburban sprawl and the decline of the city. More importantly, they present pro-active guidelines on how traditional spaces, uses, and designs can once again be employed in the construction of new spaces. By doing so, much of the best of the old associations, representations, and designs that have made successful city spaces over generations can be used again to create new spaces.
C. Libraries, digital archives and public scholarship
The article online Rethlefsen, Melissa L. (2007) Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us: Social bookmarking and tagging boost participation. Library Journal. 9/15/2007. retrieved 12/1/2007 Tagging means the loss of control for librarians, but it can but used to the libraires' advantage. Libraries are using social bookmarking software to make organizing books more accessible for patrons and library staff, to create customized bundles of books. These tags are also more social in that people can share tags and the most used tags come to the forefront in tag clouds. [Though the article talks about books, same can be said about digital image collections. Libraries can use image tagging to their advantage. For example, people have contributed their own knowledge to our data by emailing us with corrections or explanations. If allowed to tag and annotate on their own, they could have added that information there for others to find.]
The article online McDonald, Robert H. and Thomas, Charles R. (2006). Disconnects Between Library Culture and Millennial Generation Values. Educause Quarterly. Volume 29, number 4.
Authors write that in the early 90s, libraries were the terra-formers and cartographers of the electronic landscape. However, they fell behind in that some gaps have formed with respect to the resources, services and possibilities that are expected by new users (the Millenials).
The historical role of libraries has been about openness, accessibility and sharing. This is what the users want but libraries are still clinging to the controlled collections model. A balance needs to be reestablished between tradition and meeting users' needs.
They outline three library disconnects:
- technologies - lack the tools, dogmatic privacy rules don't allow support of some technologies, no multimedia
- policies - hard to separate from technology. electronic multimedia is missing. library presence is outside student online activity. It would help to integrate library tool into other interfaces such as Facebook, Course Management Systems, [or as we have done with the UA). Also it would be good to integrate outside tools with the library, such as Flickr, Delicious, Wikis, etc. Libraries should link to other open access content that would add value to their internal collections.
- unexploited opportunities - libraries need to examine the ways that people are using social and everyday online tools and see how they can best accommodate changing user preferences.
"Research libraries have done little to embed themselves and their resources into the everyday tools, spaces, and activities important to today's learners. Most library information systems and discovery tools are not easy to customize and remain substantially limited by an enduring library obsession with individual privacy and copyright. Our services and policies are equally limiting, seemingly guided more by fear of litigation than any other factor."
The new (Millenial) users expect collaboration, networking, resource sharing and creativity. By being overly concerned with control, privacy and litigation, libraries miss out on exciting opportunities to be part of new creativity and new ways to conduct research and scholarship.
Giorgia
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, And Presenting the Past on the Web (http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/), also available in paperback through University of Pennsylvania Press
This book is a step-by-step guide to creating an online history project. The authors are part of the renowned Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. In discussing various options and ways to develop such a project, the book also offers critical insights into existing ‘best practices’. For example, the authors uphold accessibility and searchability as two “intrinsic advantages of the digital medium”, which should therefore maximized in online scholarly projects. Most interestingly for our project, the authors also explain what makes good and poor candidates for online collections:
“A good candidate for a collecting website often revolves around a topic that already has an active, historically conscious online community. For example, Apple Computer’s fanatical user base and committed employees have engendered numerous sites on the history of the Macintosh, including two major efforts to record the first-hand recollections of those who worked at Apple in the late 1970s and 1980s: the Computer History Museum’s Apple Computer History Weblog and Apple software engineer Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org website”.
>>> UA makes a very popular genre of online collection (images of graffiti, signage, urban spaces…) searchable and more accessible.
The book ends with a call for the creation of online history projects that increase the diversity and democratic nature of historical resources:
“Although we have taken you through a series of topics that may be new and at times complex, we hope that our larger message—that all historians can use the web to make the past more richly documented, more accessible, more diverse, more responsive to future researchers, and above all more democratic—has risen above the occasional technical details. The ubiquity of digital media in our lives—a pervasiveness that will only grow in coming years—makes this message all the more important. We believe it would be a grave mistake to cede this new medium to commercial interests or to “techies.” Surely, a wide range of historians—whether teachers or students, public or academic, professional or amateur—need to make their voices heard on the web. All of us have a responsibility to ensure that the new digital history is a democratic history, one that reflects many different voices of the past and the present, that encourages everyone to participate in writing their own histories, and that reaches diverse and multiple audiences in the present and future.”
Debra DeRuyver and Jennifer Evans (2006). Digital Junction. American Quarterly. Sep 2006, 58(3), pp. 943-982
This article is an attempt to survey “the digital landscape of online primary sources” (p. 945) in American Studies. The authors introduce their overview of available online resources in different – non all-inclusive – categories (including a section on graffiti, which highlights the UA) by emphasizing the importance of primary sources in a time when, as a technology, the Web has become ubiquitous and therefore also invisible. Because the technology in itself is now widely used as tool rather than read as a text by scholars, there has been an uptake in the digitization of primary sources by scholars in the humanities. However, the authors also lament the lack of transparency of digitizing processes underlying digital humanities projects as well as the digital illiteracy that characterizes scholars in American studies and the humanities at large. Through their overview, they advocate for the development of a generation of American Studies scholars that is much more in tune with the technologies, processes and languages at work in the digitization of primary sources.
“our illiteracy places us on the margins of discussions and decisions that are being made every day with regard to the digital transformation of our cultural heritage-the primary sources that are of vital interest to us as scholars and educators.” (p. 944)
“This kind of hypertextual cross-connecting is supposed to be one of the great features of the Web, but without a concerted effort and a focus on something other than simply making one’s own materials accessible, even the simplest of connections will not be made” (p. 944)
“Overcoming our technical illiteracy would help us make the Web visible again and give us the vocabulary to develop or participate in new, connected, scholarly environments” (pp. 944-945)
>>> UA offers built-in associations and interpretive connections through the searchable metadata (categories are somewhat interpretive in and of themselves, and the different configurations that appear through different searches)
Tom
Anderson & Verplanck: "Writing graffiti is a private behavior that leaves a visible public record. The significance of privacy for graffiti production is attested to by the remarkably low incidence of observations of individuals writing or drawing graffiti, or even of individuals telling others that they write or have written graffiti. (p.344)" Since the authors wrote these words, the internet has somewhat altered this situation. At first, numerous Web-based photo galleries have sprung up to showcase street graffiti. Additionally, many well-known writers have begun showing documenting their own work on sites such as Flickr. These developments have slightly modified A&V's assertions. While there is still an emphasis on privacy [1+1=3 flickr page], it is no longer an absolute condition. Some writers [Heck, Sirkullay] even post images of themselves (presumably) along with their street art. Additionally, other photographers are now documenting graffiti as well. This has occasionally led to the creation of shared community photograph "pools" dedicated to a particular writer. In a sense, posting of these photographs further extends a writer's mark into cyberspace.
More importantly from a libarian's or archivist's point of view is that sharing sights such as Flickr provide rudimentary classification tools that are more robust and useful than mere gallery sites. Flickr members can apply simple tags for their photos, which is a beginning step toward classification. Interestingly, we have had actual graffiti writers tag (appropriately) our own photos with additional tags identifying authors where they felt that our metadata was lacking.
Additionally, users can organize their photographs by placing them in any number of "photosets", which reside within their personal account space. These can be based on location or theme, for example, or even a particular number. The system is robust enough that one photo can be in several sets. Finally, they may share their photos by contributing them to community "pools" that function similar to photosets except that they exist in the public space. As with photosets, photographs can be placed in any number of pools. Photos may also be placed on a map by their author so that visitors can see where a photo was taken. This geolocation may also aid in mapping a writer's geographic extent, for example.
In the end, online services like Flickr allow graffiti writers, street artists, and their fans to not only document their work but also to organize and present it in very meaningful and sophisticated ways. Essentially, the Web has space for writers to transgress/intrude into a larger arena and share their work with a larger audience. Just as rail-cars helped spread (and still do) a writer's mark, the Web seems to be doing the same. For example, in the spring of 2004 we noticed a stencil [one term president] appear in Seattle. Later that year, while walking along the Chicago lakefront, we noticed the same stencil.
Yet with all these advances in online technologies, little thought is given to the long-term preservation of these materials. Nobody can say for certain how long a photo sharing site like Flickr will remain. And nobody can tell whether their business model will remain the same. What, then, is to become of the current, rich treasure trove of organized, categorized, and shared media? It is precisely this concern that Urban Archives wishes to address with our Digital Collections.
BLAHLBAHLBLAH... we apply meticulous and standardized metadata and pack the stuff away into an instituionally-based repository... As a public university, this material will likely be preserved in perpetuity...
D. Folksonomies - popular tagging as a new way to organize knowledge
irina
Rainie, Lee. (2007). 28% of Online Americans Have Used the Internet to Tag Content. Forget Dewey and His Decimals, Internet Users are Revolutionizing the Way We Classify Information – and Make Sense of It. Pew Internet American Life Project. Jan. 31. [1]
Pew Internet Studies report that people are increasingly using tags to organize content. Data gathered in a 2006 survey, for example, shows that 28% of Internet users have organized photographs, news stories, blog posts and other content. This trend has been growing dramatically. Organizations are making it increasingly easier to tag content, for example Gmail users can tag email content and Amazon users can label books. Data from Hitwise, a web tracking firm, illustrates that photography organizing sites like Flickr are growing in popularity as users become aware of them.
In an interview, David Weinberger, the author discuss why tagging matters. Tagging lets us organize the web in our own way. This takes us outside of the realm of collective knowledge organized be experts, which is they way it has been until folksonomies became poplar. Folksonomies is a term that emerged from taxonomies, which refers to the expert organization of knowledge into particular categories. Folksnomies is the vernacular organization of content into categories. It is social in that they the tags, or keywords create public categories that can be shared and exchanged and they rely on the collective impetus to grow and to stick to particular chunks of information. Public folksonomies allow us to see what tags others have assigned to content, making online research more collective in nature. They also allow social groups to form based on common interests. We can also see what tags are most commonly used and how they relate to one another. The problems that tags pose is that they can be ambiguous or they can create a “majority rule,” dwarfing other ways to group content simply because of popularity.
Farkas, Meredith G. (2007). Social Software in Libraries. Information Today, Inc.: New Jersey.
Social bookmaking, or tagging, is one way that people organize the huge amounts of information on the web in a way that makes sense to them. Users can capitalize on the actions of other and to make better decisions in that when people tag items they by extension help others to find information. Taxonomies are hierarchical and use controlled vocabularies, while folksonomies are created from bottom up by regular people in everyday language. The taxonomies are meant to disambiguate by creating very specific categories that cannot be repeated. Folksonomies reflect how people actually think of objects, enabling serendipity by allowing users to encounter new items. The tags that people assign to things often reflect their motivations, for example one of the most common tags in LibraryThing is “read” also words can mean more than one thing and one thing can have more than one words. So websites are experimenting with controlling tagging in folksonomies by suggesting tags or as the authors suggest, suggesting synonyms so that people can tag their item with all possible words. So the challenge with folksonomies is how to disambiguate the terms without controlling making tagging so complicated that people will stop using the system. But the idea is that enough people tag some things with the same folksonomies are useful, even is still most useful for personal use or a exploratory research that requires the more formal taxonomies later in the process. Folksonomies are in a away (insurgent) spaces of organizing information. If here we define insurgent as information gathered and organized outside of cultural authority (as Socrates said).
E. Pedagogy through -- digital photography, Web 2.0 and exploring the city
Irina
Garrison, D. R., & Vaughan, N. D. (2008). Blended learning in higher education framework, principles, and guidelines. The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Educators are interested in how the new (Web 2.0) technologies can be harnessed for educational purposes. There is an interest in digital photography and other tools [ways to organize content] like Blogs and Wikis that can create an opportunity for interaction in a way that was not previously possible in a traditional classroom. Communities of Inquiry is a traditional concept of learning that engages students with the material and with one another. The typical, lecture based, classroom experience can be passive or lack meaning to students in their everyday lives and students do not always interact with one another academically on a deep level. These new technologies (if used well) can create an opportunity for students to engage with content and with one another. Technology should offer an educational benefit – this requires careful design of learning outcomes and assessment. Large lecture in particular, should be replaced by more engaged face-to-face and online interactions in order to create more engaged and meaningful learning experiences.
Powers, Elia. (2008). The Pedagogy of Place. Inside Higher Ed. Jan 4. [2] retrieved 1/6/2008
Teachers and students alike are interested in learning about the places where they live. Getting students out of the classroom and into surrounding communities also has the potential to improve town-gown relations. Studying the local community creates an opportunity for active learning and connects the students’ experience in the classroom and outside of, which is a rare case in traditional classrooms. We have to consider accessibility for students who might not have transportation or might be working and have a restricted schedule. What to do with the students’ material is another problem.
[3] Spicing Up U.S. History. Inside Higher Ed.
Richardson, W., (2006). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press.
Web 2.0 is not just about technology, its about collaboration, conversation and connections. As educators, we must ask what the ability to easily publish content can do to our curriculum when students have the ability to reach audiences beyond the classroom. What are new ways that we can bring new types of primary sources to the classroom? Photography is one of the easiest ways to get students and teachers to begin experimenting with publishing online as digital photography is becoming increasingly accessible. Moreover, this is powerful in the classroom because you can share and collaborate with others across space in distant parts of the world, by sharing immages, annotating them, commenting and subscribing to RSS feeds about particular topics.
Some of the most useful tools in Flickr is the annotation tool and the discussion tool [also the mapping tool!].
Sites like Fickr – Can connect people from around the world. Creative Commons in Flickr allows users to see that real people created the images, it is not just generic, faceless content. Associating Flickr photos to poems or other writing, organizing images, [mapping them].
Finkel, Donald L. (2000). Teaching with Your Mouth Shut. Portsmouth, Boynton/Cook Publishers: New Hampshire.
Finkel proposes an alternative to the archetype of “The Great Professor” as a performer or an actor. He suggests that another type of “great teaching” is teaching through creating environments of inquiry for students, for example, by a) posing a problem to be solved c) engaging the students in solving it and d) exploring knowledge through collaboration. He writes that what made Socrates revolutionary (and why he was put to death for corrupting the youth of Athens) is that he argued that we can figure out for ourselves what matters most without relying on cultural authority to do so (pg. 36). Finkel stresses inquiry as a process of learning, saying that ignorance does not mean that we should not actively engage in figuring something out (pg. 34). Knowledge is produced when students engage in the process. So the idea of ‘teaching with your mouth shut” is to create the circumstances that promote reflection (pg. 151), or in other words, providing the (insurgent) spaces for students to work through ideas.
Giorgia
Pink, Sarah (2001). “Planning and practicing visual methods: appropriate uses and ethical issues”. Chapter two of Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research. London: Sage.
In this chapter, anthropologist Pink points out that the adoption of visual methods for data collection should not precede an evaluation of whether visual methods are at all appropriate for the research site/context. In addition, once a decision to adopt visual methods is made, technology – e.g. still photography or video – needs to be carefully chosen according to its ‘fitting’ in the culture/field under study. Pink gives the example of when she set out to studying the culture around bullfighting in Spain through video-recordings and soon realized that bullfighting fans engaged in a prolific exchange of photographs, i.e. still cameras were very common but video-cameras were not. For this reason, she decided to switch to still images for her data collection and, in this way, also managed to enter a network of exchanges of bullfighting photos among fans.
The UA has focused mainly on still photography because:
1) ‘portability’ of photographs as data (they can be grouped and annotated in different ways) 2) accessibility of simple digital camera technology to scholars and students alike (i.e. research can happen also when not planned) 3) relatively unobtrusive nature of still photography while ‘walking the city’ (the “city” is used to seeing people walk around with cameras to photography
Collier, Malcolm (2001). “Approaches to analysis in visual anthropology”. In Handbook of Visual Analysis, eds., T. van Leeuwen, and C. Jewitt. London: Sage.
Long-time visual anthropologist Collier discusses the value and potential of including visual records in cultural analysis, based on the complexity and often unexpected/unconstructed nature of the cues they provide:
“This visual field usually contains a complex range of phenomena, much of which is outside our awareness as camera person or subject. Consequently, the content of the visual image is rarely shaped only by thee constructive influences of recorders and subjects, a fact reflected in the frequent discovery of previously unseen phenomena and relationships in the process of visual analysis.” p. 35
Collier also points out that there are serious limitations in studying culture through visual records, mainly because of the lack of contextual information that characterizes most pre-existing images (e.g. images taken by subjects or others independently of the research) as well as images taken by anthropologists in the field.
“We are frequently faced with visual records that lack strong contextual information, that are divorced from any systematic annotation, or are isolated records. Such images may be analysed directly only if care is taken to properly annotate and establish contextual relationships and to work within the limitations of the images. Establishing such contextual background often involves making use of indirect forms of analysis as well as considerable archival and other research” p. 36
“Good research images contain complexity, they record associations and relationships, they are often unremarkable at first glance and take time to read” p. 38
UA images can be analyzed both directly (i.e. solely based on the information they and the metadata provide) and indirectly (i.e. through further contextual information, interviewing/elicitation)
Tom
Jakle, J.A. (1987) The Visual Elements of Landscape. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.
As a matter of methodology, Jakle introduces the simple concept of sight-seeing as way to study landscapes. This is not a watering down of academic rigor, rather, it is a suggestion for the researcher to think like a new-comer who is experiencing the landscape for the very first time. This outlook attempts to elicit the way in which visitors parse pieces and wholes of the visual landscape, find their way in unfamiliar settings, and generally make sense of their surroundings.
- place expectations
- subsequent behaviors
- cognitive maps
see "Touristic Behavior" page 8 onward. "Of all the varied kinds of general activity, tourism, more than any other, involves deliberate searching out of place experience. Searching the landscape visually for place cues is an overt, deliberate preoccupation of pleasure tripping. Sightseeing is of the essence in tourism."
Pedagogically, we encourage touristic behavior as a starting point for public space investigations. Quite often, students are told to first examine a chosen site without preconceived notions or a definite plan.
Check against naivetee... see page 9. After the initial "tourism" students are encouraged to research their topic...
work this into insurgency plays with expections and behaviors in unsuspecting, and at time unsettling, ways.
Observations in this seminal early work of sustainable and green design was based on walking and simple observations gained from such. As I call it "perambulatory investigations" to be wordy.
See also maybe Rudofsky's Streets for People.
also known as 'the city as a laboratory
- Jacobs, J. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (pg. 6): "Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories." Instead, Jacobs asserts that planners have learned from "towns, suburbs... and imaginary dream cities."
The UA takes this advice to heart by extending it beyond just urban planning. We inject it into the studies of communication as well as information science.
- Venturi, Scott Brown, Izzenour. (2000) Learning From Las Vegas, Revised Edition. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Although over 30 years old at this point, Venturi et. al.'s groundbreaking and controversial study of Las Vegas still holds valuable lessons for urban researchers today. More relevant than their actual findings are their methods, which involved direct examination of the actual landscape. On the surface, their methods may seem simplistic: photography, mapping of signage, and examination of lightposts on the Strip, for example. Yet these simple methods are precisely the sort of basic data collection that allows for grander and more insightful analyses. But they are not just a leisurely walk about town. The researchers combined academic research and rigor with fieldwork. "We spent three weeks in the library, four days in Los Angeles, and ten days in Las Vegas. We returned to Yale and spent ten weeks analyzing and presenting our discoveries. (pg. xi)"
- Studio 4321 --an architecture design studio that actively documented and analyzed the Ave. Afterward, students in the class created new designs for Ave storefronts as part of a "hands-on" approach to teaching and learning the subject matter. Such studios are common fare in architecture and planning programs but seem to be distinctly lacking in the humanities and social sciences (perhaps due to IRB restrictions?).
