Visual Epidemic

I have a wish from a student in my Språkkonsult (Language Consultancy) course who wants to learn to build websites. I have been teaching them to use wordpress + tools to create an integrated (albeit fragmented) online web presence. I wonder if building a site, say from Dreamweaver, is a useful skill in a course that only goes three weeks and tries to cover a lot of ground? How useful are sites that are built outside of content management systems? Of course these sites are useful – but to give these students who are not online a lot of the time  a course in website building instead of the cultural and discourse/linguistic aspects of online tools (+ the popular, social media) seems to me to be the wrong way to go.  What do you think? Is there some kind of tool that will let the students build a presence online (it does not have to contain a blog), but that looks nice and contains relevant, professional information?

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I have an ethical dilemma in my research. I am looking at responses across platforms towards ’secret sharers’ who share about domestic abuse on the Post Secret website. These postcards are anonymous, and are even published by only one person (although they are also often taken and put on facebook, other blogs and even flickr), so IP information and other identifying characteristics such as user names are hidden. The postcards are user-created, and often an analogue hodge-podge of images put together to create their desired message/secret. These secrets are often responded to in tweets, facebook comments, and on Post Secret’s own forum. What I am trying to work out is how to use (or not use) these images in my research – not least in future presentations of results. Permission to use the images is another matter, but what I am concerned with today is the potential harm that could come from using these pictures. You never know with these secrets if they are pictures of the abused, or stock photos, or download online, etc. There is, of course, a chance that these cards to depict the victim, and by using them in a presentation – even for the analysis of responses, not of the picture or secret itself – you may open the victim up to further abuse by ‘outing’ their secret. And yes, they are published online in a very popular weblog – but there is also a perception of anonymity, and by sending the card, the sender is agreeing to have them displayed on that site. So what is the ethically responsible thing to do? Describe the card, and do not use an image or screen capture (again, the permission to use the image is a different matter and must, of course, be received as well), or use the card as it is a published work? Difficult. I am leaning towards description, preferring to err on the side of caution – but would like to have a discussion about the ethics of this type of research.

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I need some advice here.

I am starting a new article and I am looking at various sampling methods. The article will examine audience design over three different weblog communities of practice – an activist community, an academic community, and a knitting community. I have always used snowball sampling (half mined by a script, half by hand), but I wonder if that is not overkill for this much more qualitative article. For this article, I was thinking about using a stratified sampling method where I define the affordances/qualifications for the different communities of practice, then randomly pick 4-6 from each of the three groups. I thought about having both group and individual blogs, but actually having only individual blogs may give a clearer picture as it would eliminate more of the ‘talking amongst ourselves-ness’ of a group blog. Of course, that would have to be acknowledged in the article. The hypothesis of this article is that there are differences in the conceptualization and addressing of community members that are not accounted for by the affordances of the weblog tool – rather they are negotiated together with community members. So my question, dear readers, is about the validity of the sampling method. Can one make generalizations (even hedged ones) from such a small sample size?

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Slow blogging, but much chapter writing – and that it important!

I am still working on this parkour chapter (deadline Friday). Tomorrow I will add the link analysis to the section describing the online space. But for now I will leave you with two reading suggestions and a little excerpt.

The Young and the Digital

Video Cultures: Media Technology and Everyday Creativity (esp the chapter on Self representation, identity, and visual style in a youth subculture).

and from the chapter-in-progress on value in digital remixing of parkour videos in opposition with valued aspects of parkour.

Swedish youth parkour films enact the identity of parkour runner through the skill portrayed in the run itself. Films by experienced parkour runners focus on the terminology of the tricks in the film’s description, or by enacting the tricks in a teaching/instructive capacity. Conversely, films by beginner runners often linguistically hedge the skill level in the description by labeling them ‘quickly made’ or ‘made when slippery outside’. Another marker of beginner versus more experienced parkour runners can be seen in the speed of the film. Less experienced runners, although possibly more experienced video editors, would slow down the motion of the trick and ask for commentary on the performance of the trick. One runner even entitled his video ‘What did I do wrong?’…

…Digital remixing in order to create videos which show the flow of the run, or a flow of tricks also proved to be an identifying marker of parkour runners. This is common both in amateur videos, but also in international, professionally made parkour YouTube videos. This is not to say that the Swedish youth are copying or mimicking international videos, rather that there seem to be implicit, agreed upon ways of editing together a video. Several informants in this case study termed these videos ‘flow films’, which may refer to a mediated edit of a central concept in parkour. Flow, in parkour, refers to the smoothness of transitions between moves. According to howtoparkour.net, the quality of the flow of a run is a marker of the runner’s skill. The videos, which used the term flow, were highly edited, thus it is unclear if the uploaders were referring to the flow between the edited tricks, or flow as a parkour aesthetic.

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Just a quick note (and a placeholder for future reference), the State of the Vlogosphere 2010 has been released by Mefeedia.

I will look at it more closely this week, but a few things caught my eye. I was surprised at the rate of syndication across platforms. They found that “pro-vloggers” upload their video to an average of 3.6 sites. (This changes my spin on Grussin’s promiscuity of YouTube a bit – this will be tomorrow’s entry.) I was not surprised, however, by the rate of consumption on mobile devices. Was it not always a question of quality and price of bandwidth? As the bandwidth prices drop, I am sure we will see bandwidth-heavy media consumed more and more. The other interesting fact I found was the watch time. It is actually something I have noticed in my own research. It seems that optimal video length is about 2 minutes. YouTube suggests no more than 5 minutes (optimal in this sense being related to receiving the most views).

What did you think of the report? Change your mind on anything? Wish something was report which was not?

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This first week of 60 posts seems to be a lot of planning posts, but at the beginning of the term planning can be a beneficial and time-saving thing. A few days ago I charted out how much of my thesis was  done. Like done-done – not needing to be reworked done – and it was much less than I had thought.

To keep track of all the different projects I have going this semester, I started using a program called Curio. It seems like a good overall program, although there are more powerful task-specific programs for tasks such as mind mapping, outlining, and task management. The strength of Curio is that you can do all of these things in the same program – and it also syncs with Evernote (which I already use a lot and love). Unfortunately, Curio has a steeper learning curve than the screenshots and pretty colors would lead you to believe – at least for keeping track of the status of completed tasks, which is the feature I am most interested in.

I will try to implement this program into my task planning this term and see how it goes. Another feature I am excited about trying is the full screen mode. When planning with students (in front of a class for a final project, for example), the program can be a great visual way of planning together. Going full screen may be interesting for other teaching tasks, as well.

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Lots of the discourse surrounding web 2.0 talks about the potential for social media to bring together the masses for social change, but not many sites are geared towards the education in these media. However, the tactical technology collective is an organization that trains rights activists to use social media to actually go out and help create positive change.

I have been called an academic activist a couple of times because of my passion for the DVIS project, but I still have been much more the academic than the activist. Time to take a step further and use what I know about social media to affect change. A twist on Doctors (albeit PhDs) without borders?

For more tactics, and/or to get involved, go to their site http://www.informationactivism.org/

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I think I picked a bad time to start the 60 work posts – after all, this is ‘vacation’. I have been doing some work, however. I started the Post Secret article, and am working on the book chapter that is due in a couple of weeks. Hursomhelst, I will continue with the 60 work posts. Getting out of sync now would not be a good sign ;-)

So today I spent some time in a cafe reworking the introduction of the chapter. My big writing hurdle is formulating clear thesis statements – you know, that really important sentence that sets up the entire article. Mine are always a bit unclear, too complex and usually a run-on sentence that stretches into a paragraph. With that in mind, I have given myself ‘permission’ to write bad introductions, work the chapter, then go back and rework the introduction. Perhaps this is common practice in academic writing, but I was having trouble being ok with writing freely in the draft version. So much so that I was having trouble producing anything written. And this is coming from a once prolific writer. All that said, I am not quite ready to show my new intro so please enjoy the intro to the Reading Parkour Spaces section :-).

from the section “Reading the spaces”

Time and space are the central concerns when reading parkour films posted to YouTube. Spaces, according to Lemke (2005) are defined by the actions performed within them. Parkour uses objects in public spaces from which to run, jump, bounce, and flip. These acrobatic performances may seem like deviant public displays which show off strength and agility, yet the art is taken very seriously by its practitioners and much emphasis is placed on proper training and thoughtfulness during runs. These films portray behaviours that seem culturally inappropriate in offline spaces, yet are a defining characteristic of the art of parkour. Offline public spaces work because they tend to have culturally agreed upon behaviours. People sit on benches, walk down pathways, bike on roads, and hold handrails. Occasionally these behaviours are extended to dramatic performances, such as street theatre, or even demonstrations of protest 2. Parkour, however, uses objects in public spaces to run, jump, bounce, and flip from. While these acrobatic performances may seem like deviant public displays with which show to off strength and agility, parkour is considered an art by its practitioners and is taken very seriously and much emphasis is placed on proper training and thoughtfulness during runs.
In the Swedish parkour videos examined in this case study, three main offline spaces were found: the urban space, the training space and the rural space.

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I am writing up something interesting reported from my parkour informants which dovetails nicely with Grussin’s theory of the ‘YouTube sublime’ Accoring to Grussin, the YouTube sublime is the idea that the  number of videos is almost too large to comprehend (The YouTube Reader, 2009). I began this research looking for communities of practice within the YouTube larger community. While I still hold that these exist and that a sense of community (in the Rheingoldian sense) is strong in these communities, the Parkour group I interviewed reported YouTube not as a community enhancer or builder, rather as a searchable platform which allowed them to contact others in their *local* area to come together to train. In other words, YouTube was a way to build a local community. Furthermore, once this community of parkour practitioners was established, they reported finding no further use for YouTube. This may not be surprising given that parkour is situated so much in the physical, yet the level of interactivity on parkour videos makes me wonder about this disconnect between what my informants report feeling and what a rough social network analysis shows. Maybe this would be a good way to compare offline and online communities of practice – but again, maybe this would be an unfair comparison due to the focus on the physical of parkour.This relates to the YouTube sublime in that this group also understands the platform as a large resource rather than a community/social platform. This is just one of several groups we will study in our YAPA project. We will also look at a group using YouTube politically, and a flashmob group. I am very curious to see if this pattern repeats itself in other communities of practice.

1 Comment | In: tags: 60posts, parkour, YouTube. | #

I am teaching two classes next term, Web Media II for Language Consultants, and Information presentation and searching for Cultural Analysis students. Both courses are planned, but I want to get the compendiums printed this week (or…?). Last Web Media course I used a course blog and posted all the readings on a password protected page. The students could decide if they wanted to download the pdf’s, or read them on-screen. It was an attempt to be more ‘green’, but as I learn more and more about being green, such alternatives are not so clear-cut. For example, does the energy the computer consumes ‘cost’ the environment more than the paper the compendia are printed on? Does the energy of the printing process offset the cost of reading the pdf’s on-screen. And how many students actually read their articles on the screen, and how many just print them out in the lab? Before next term begins (the end of Jan.), I need to decide which alternative to try. I think at the end of this term I will give the students a questionnaire and ask them how they think it worked. I wish I had asked them last time.

What do you think? Which is greener – to print a 75 page compendium or to upload the articles on a blog and let the students choose to read them on the screen or print them out individually?

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