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Vernacular photography
Geoffrey Batchen defines vernacular photography like this: The term ‘vernacular’ literally means the ordinary and ubiquitous but it also refers to qualities specific to particular regions or cultures. Its attachment to the word ‘photography’ allows historians like myself to argue for the need to devise a way of representing photography’s history that can incorporate all…
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generating ‘enthusiasms’
I captured this ‘event’ in my morning commute for Glen (well, and a little bit for me re: gender and the mastery of technologies). Current thesis word count: 26,733 (URGH).
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no more sentences this week
I wrote something like 7,000 words this week. The next step is to tidy up, remove the most embarrassing notes-to-self, and hand it over to the supervisors to get some feedback and fuel up for the next leg of the journey. I’d prefer to wait until it’s finished before anyone is allowed to see any…
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the uses of participation
Ross Mayfield has made a nice graph of a continuum of participation in social software and online communities: I use something similar in my PhD, talking more specifically about ‘creative’ and ‘network’ literacies. But I was struck by the way that the continuum moves from ‘passive’ consumption through to mastery and control. Something that I’ve…
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no cinematic equivalent to autobiography?
In this videoblog remix, I think Trine begs to differ. Lovely stuff. I’ve been thinking as well that perhaps ‘the everyday’ is the currency of videoblogging in a way that is more muted for (personal) text-based blogging. Not that everydayness is more or less present, but that it is more important in creating whatever affective…
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flickrtags
Last (but hopefully not best) sentence of the day: The ‘most popular tags’ cloud is characterised by the convergence of the most predictable subjects of vernacular photography – places, family, birthdays, weddings – with muted versions of the structurating categories of capital ‘P’ photography – technology (canon, film, black&white) and genre (art, portrait). Current thesis…
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craft, thesis, update
I just can’t seem to avoid the craft at the moment. Current thesis word count: 24,017 The refusal at work in these DIY communities is not only a refusal of the affluent Western individual’s interpelletation as the consumer of inauthentic, technologised and mass-produced artifacts; it is also avowedly a recuperation of everyday domestic labour and…
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word count obsession
Current thesis word count: 22545 Which makes it around 3,000 in the last 24 hours. (Although admittedly I did find about 5 pages that I had forgotten to paste in from early chapter drafts). Inspired by Jane McGonigal via Anne’s online writer’s retreat, here is one of the newly minted sentences: Texts and their meanings…