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the poetry of the everyday
Beautiful, often poignant fragments of everyday life at The Department of Me: The almost daily ritual includes a photo of the day (PoD) and a haiku of the day (HoD): Wet grass after rain – the fertile damp of dark dirt smells like green to me. I can relate to that after our recent deluge: […]
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A Cartography of Vernacular Creativity
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 […]
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Bookcrossing hits the mainstream
I’m shocked – if there was a Most Mundane Local Current Affairs award for Australian television, Brisbane Extra would have to win it. Normally they run shows about when to prune your garden, how to wash your car, and where to buy the cheapest petrol. And yet, tonight they ran an upbeat story on Bookcrossing, […]
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Convivial Tools
Although there are problems with referring to technologies as “tools” (which implies that they are relatively neutral conduits for solely human-derived action), I love this Ivan Illich quote that Digital Storytelling maestro Daniel Meadows brought to my attention: “Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the […]
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Storybox
Storybox is “an Internet writing project for people who have come to Western Sydney as refugees or recent migrants”: the outcome is a network of blogs written by participants in a series of workshops. Ben Ho is behind it all – I’m most interested in hearing his thoughts on how it is going, especially in […]
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If you read this, I’ll kill you
Jen and Nancy at The Write Doctors are putting together an anthology of teen writings which includes old diary entries, passed notes, stories, essays, even yearbook entries. I’m interested in this in vernacular creativity terms, of course. And they are calling for submissions: If you?re anything like we were, as a teenager you kept a […]
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roxio review
For the bit in my thesis about contemporary constructions of amateur creativity: review of Roxio’s Easy Media Creator
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OurMedia
Look at this: an idea whose time has come, to my mind. There’s a graphic depiction of how it will work here. It’s been a long time since I stumbled across some cool new web project that spoke to a niggling question raised by my research – and there are always a lot of niggling […]
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Real thesis thoughts
Late in the day, two readings from my own field helped me to place some bricks in the hole where my sanity and my conviction about the political importance of “ordinary” grassroots cultural production used to be: Jim McGuigan’s The Cultural Public Sphere (MS Word), and Chris Atton’s The Mundane and Its Reproduction in Alternative […]
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resources on personal essay filmmaking
useful list of secondary resources on personal essay filmmaking from the center for social media.