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You need to email me to be added to the group of people who are collaborating on this map.  Once you’ve been added, you’ll be able to add placemarks to the map (and to link to images and add commentary).  There is a good tutorial for google maps here, here, and here.

note: To be able to edit the collaborative map, it seems that you need to have a google account.  When I send you an invitation to see the map, you’ll be able to view it.  You’ll also have an option to “Save to my maps”.  If you follow that link, you’ll be given the option to log in to your google account or to “Create an account now.”  Follow one of these options and you’ll be able to edit the map.

note 2: Here are explicit directions for editing a map: http://maps.google.com/support/

due: feb 23February 27
value: 5%

Techniques of the observer, making sense, and the violence of order

This assignment will extend your exploration of the everyday world through observation, notation, and representation. You are asked to observe a location of public gathering or passing (an arcade, a bar, a coffee shop, a mall, etc.). Try to go to this place more than once and stay longer than fifteen minutes. Map this place into google maps and create a scrapbook entry. For this assignment I don’t want you to take any photographs but rather to find images (from newspapers, the internet, magazines) that can be used in a collage. The point is to explore the way that non-specific photographic elements can be used to illustrate, ’embellish,’ and extend your observations.

Think of Hoggart’s descriptions of the milk bar as an example:

“One supposedly striking portent of the journey in to the candy-floss world is the habitual visitor to the new milk bars, ‘the juke box boy’ . . . Milk bars are themselves symptomatic: they ‘indicate at once, in the nastiness of the modernistic knick-knacks, their glaring showiness, an aesthetic breakdown so complete . . . Patrons are mostly ‘boys between fifteen and twenty, with drape suits, picture ties, and an American slouch. . . Their amin reason for being there is to ‘put copper after copper into the mechanical record player’ . . . Records are played loud: the music ‘is allowed to blare out so that the noise would be sufficient to fill a good sized ball room’. . . . Listening to the music, ‘The young men waggle one shoulder or state, as desperately as Humphrey Bogart, across the tubular chairs’ . . . Compared even with the pub around the corner, this is all a peculiarly thin and pallid form of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk. Many of the customers – their clothes, their hair styles, their facial expressions all indicate – are living to a large extent in a myth world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life.” (Hoggart in Storey 2006: 33).

note: This passage is just over 200 words.

Deliberate in terms of mass culture and trends. You might consider going to a place that is not familiar to you, where you even maintain some disdain or contempt for the kind of culture that you’re observing. If you were doing something on youth culture, you could consider juxtaposing youth culture to your own experiences. Think about Hoggart’s idea of the ‘chains of cultural subordination’ and creativity (or the lack of it). Are we looking at people who are caught up in a swell of consumer culture or mass produced culture or is this somehow authentic?  What does authenticity mean, anyway?

Remember you are not taking photographs in this space but you will nonetheless be scrapbooking your assignment. Part of the challenge will be the inclusion of collage elements, documents, embellishments, etc.  If you go to a public park, you might seek out images in a magazine (perhaps even drawing attention to the difference between an idealized version of this location and the location you visited).  Cut in parts of a map or a napkin from the cafe.  Consider how the addition of these elements can add to your observation.  Don’t add elements if they don’t extend or add to your observations.

As always you also have recourse to a metacommentary that can help to provide direction and commentary on the reading of your scrapbook. You should have around 500 words of written text (in total, including the metacommentary). This is only worth five percent of your grade so you need to be frugal with your time. The more focused you make this assignment the easier it will be for you.

due: February 9
value: 5%

Mapping the extraordinary in the ordinary

This is your second scrapbooking entry.  For this assignment you are asked to photograph at least three scenes (up to five) from a route that you typically follow to and from work, the university, or home.  You will need to create extended captions for each of the photographs.  This written part will be an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between writing and photography.  What is a typical caption?  When does a caption cease to be a caption? How do captions frame interpretation?  You should be prepared to share at least one of these photographs and captions in class.  As with the first assignment you can use metacommentary to reflect on your work and/or to give reading directions for me.  You should have around 500 words of typed text (in the form of captions and/or commentary).

The idea of following a route that you are familiar with is important because it allows you to engage with the ‘mundane habits of seeing’.  You are useing your camera as a tool of inquiry.  What you see before you take a photograph is different than what you see during and after.  The key is that you take the time to explore your route and most importantly that you take time to defamiliarize the world around you.

The second component of this assignment will be to create a collectively generated Google map.  I’ve already created the map, you just need to send me your email address (use the subject line: “soc345 google map”) and I can add you as a collaborator.  You will then be able to begin to map your sites of observation.

What are the scenes that you need to photograph?  I can’t tell you that because it is a highly subjective thing.  You won’t know until you begin looking out.  I tend to think of myself as a coinnoseur of public street art and posters, so there are not a lot that get by my gaze.  Then again, when I look more carefully, there may be an entire category of posters that I don’t look at or consider.

reference articles for this assigment:

Bourdieu, Pierre (1991) Towards a Sociology of Photography. Visual Anthropology Review. Vol.7, No.1: 129-133

Campbell, Craig (2008) Residual Landscapes and the Everyday: An Interview With Edward Burtynsky. Space and Culture. vol. 11: 39-50

Miller, C. C. (2006) A Beast in the Field: The Google Maps Mashup as GIS/2. Cartographica, 41: 187-199.

Kyler sent in this great video and writes:

I’ve never watched the show but from what i’ve seen it must’ve been a big upset…I just think the video is interesting because of how much adoration the girls in the video had for the finalist.

This is a good point.  Their adoration seems so genuine.  We can ask, though, what exactly is adoration and how do we measure this.  Clearly there is a lot of performance here, maybe all performance.  One thing that interests me about this . . .

Continue reading

Detailed explanation of the Scrapbook project

Keeping a field journal is an important technique developed by ethnographers as part of their practice of long term participant observation.  It is also useful in any other discipline, but especially those which trade in observation, participation and study of social practices. Refer back to Taussig’s (2003) article for more ideas about the place of the anthropologists diary in everyday research. While we are not doing ethnography in the way that cultural anthropologists do, this is still a useful method and paradigm for our own practices of observation and documentation and could become an important element in your own bag of methods that you take away from your tenure as a student at this university.

This project takes the field journal and reconfigures it as a scrapbook.  By doing this we are trying to take the diary/ethnographer’s journal out of the exclusive realm of the textual.  In doing this project, keep in mind that this is not a conventional scrapbook either; it is not a journal,  it is not a diary, it is not an anthropologist’s field notebook… this scrapbook needs to be apprehended and turned into *your* own work-collection.  While it is a highly personal document of your own research and study it is also necessary that I am able to understand what you are trying to say. A mixture of text and image is the safest approach.  Sometimes extra commentary may be necessary to help me understand what you are trying to do.  This doesn’t necessarily have to be written into the entry itself but could be on an extra piece of paper or even a stickey note.

Parameters:

• max. 500 words
• 2 – 5 pages in a standard scrapbook (or equivalent)
• Major passages of text should be typed, not hand written
• Do not include highly valuable or original images that you would be sorry to lose.  I’ll do my best to take care of your scrapbooks when you hand them in but I can’t guarantee anything.

Due dates:

• Scrapbook 1:  January 23
• Scrapbook 2:  February 9
• Scrapbook 3:  February 13

Evaluation of the Scrapbook entry assignments.

You are going to be evaluated on your ability to write coherently and intelligently.  Your grade will depend also on the degree of creativity and reflexivity that you show.

Subject position

The predominant idiom of contemporary scrapbooking in North America is concerned with documenting (and subsequently participating in the construction of) important life events: weddings, vacations, births, graduations, etc.  Working within this idiom you are asked in this assignment to create a journal entry that considers your own subject position.

This is a minor work of autoethnography and it is a useful part of developing a reflexive framework for future theorizing about society and culture.  Developing a reflexivity to your own subject position is sometimes easiest in terms of a question (eg. “Where do I stand on this issue”) but you can do it with just about anything.  To get to that point, though, you need to be able to reflect on the important institutional/discursive frameworks that enable you to make meaning of the world.  Following the lead of French theorist/philosopher Michel Foucault subject position should be understood as the way that multiple discourses position us as subjects within networks or webs of knowledge-power relations.  This assignment allows you to explore one of more ways that your own subjectivity is constituted.

Follow instructions given in the detailed description of the scrapbook project.  You can do further research on the concept of ‘subject position’ (see for instance the Blackwell guide to Sociology) and you should include references (as footnotes or endnotes) to any quotes and references you make.  I am looking for a critical understanding of the terms of both subject position and of  contemporary scrapbooking practices.

Due: January 23

We looked at a little bit of an old soviet propaganda film the other day. Thinking about propaganda, persuasion and social manipulation links us to theories of (mass) media and ideology.  One more current example of the intentional manipulation of thought/opinion can be seen in the internet phenomenon of ‘astroturfing‘.  There is a recent article on the BBC website about how the Chinese government appears to be astroturfing the internets with positive impressions of life in China:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7783640.stm

The Alberta government is also interested in public perception of the oilsands (having spent X$ on advertising last year).  With recent studies showing that the ‘public’ thinks that the Tarsands industry is doing a poor job of curtailing environmental impacts, it is likely that we’ll see a lot more effort to represent the industry as a green industry (they’ve done a lot already, but they’ve admitted that they need to spend more money on public information/persuasion).

The critique of this is that the Alberta government and the petroleum industry have a lot more money to represent their interests than does ‘the public.’  Arguably the role of government of Alberta is to represent the public but do they really do so?  If so which public?

Monday (Jan. 12)  is our first scrapbooking day.  Please bring in a scrapbook that you think that you might like to work with.  Essentially it can be anything that will hold pictures, images, and text.  The only parameters I have is that it isn’t too big (as you will need to hand it in to me for grading).  I will explain more about the scrapbooking project on Monday.

• Wolfgang Staehle
  • www.postmastersart.com/archive/staehle.html
• Animated Soviet Propaganda
  • www.kino.com/video/item.php?film_id=851
• Michel De Certeau
  • http://www.ubu.com/papers/de_certeau.html

Reading:

Taussig, Michael. 2003. “The Diary as Witness: an Anthropologist Writes What He Must.” Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 17: B12-B13. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost.

Due Date: Monday, January 12

Notes: You can download this article from the UofA library.  Search for “Chronicle of Higher Education” as a periodical.  If you are having trouble finding the article, you can ask a librarian for help.  Remember that if you’re off campus you’ll have to authenticate.