Archive for November, 2004
Comments are Toast
Nov 4th
I can’t keep wading through 300 spam comments every morning, trying to find any legit comments and deleting the bogus ones. (And I can’t keep looking at the increasingly unsavoury titles of the comments, especially not right after breakfast).
So I’ve disabled comments, which I am very angry about. If you want to respond to something you read here, do it via your own blog, I guess.
As more and more bloggers are turning comments off, I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing waves of trackback spam?
qualitative research
Nov 4th
Nice list of qualitative research methods books from Anne, who is v. good at sharing.
A Cartography of Vernacular Creativity
Nov 1st
Some early morning metaphorical whimsy for you (possibly the result of a little too much Calvino and not enough sleep)…
If there were a map of the terrain I want the concept “vernacular creativity” to cover, these are some of the features that would be marked on it:
story
play
conviviviality
tinkering
collecting
remembering
sharing
remixing
[what did I leave out?]
The map would of course be connected to, overlaid or underlaid with others:
Industrial creativity (capital city: Production) and Romantic creativity (largest mountain: Authorship) would be its neighbours, with plenty of traffic between the three.
And in these latter times, “digital culture” might be an atmospheric shift, causing the network of networks to leak into everything…
But there are other maps of this terrain, just like there are military maps, topographic maps, and political maps of “real” places. The same space has been variously mapped as “everyday life” (not-work), “amateurism” (not-art, not-professionalism), and small sections of it even as “independent media” (not-mainstream)… And in each case, maps tell us what is important enough to chart, hiding everything else; and they tell us where the boundaries lie…