vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Six Questions To Guide Your Research

In the honours research subject I teach I have nutted out a simple rubric which I think is quite effective in helping students to identity what they are doing, why, and begin to see how. The issue in the past was always trying to teach particular ‘methods’ or to begin from something like project or practice based research, and work out how to get them to understand where it fitted with what they thought they were doing. This is just clumsy since they haven’t really had to think about their knowledge practices in this way before. So I have simply flipped it around to make the research problem drive everything else.

I know you will go, “isn’t that obvious!”. But it isn’t. If you are new to research you don’t know about different methods so you don’t really even know how to frame a question about what method you might use. Yet I think it is imperative in research to learn that there are varieties of ways of understanding, doing, enflaming, and therefore answering. That one research question could have very different shapes and answers by using different methods or even theories. But more importantly that all the talk of ‘methods’ gets in the way of recognising that you need theoretical frames to apply, make, and argue and if you can identify and use these then this then segues into the implications of methods. IN my experience most methods courses do this the other way round. Here’s a method, here’s how you use it, use it. Yet we all know that as researchers we don’t use ‘methods’ in this way.

This is particularly a problem in the context of students making things. Trying to conceptualise their making as ‘practice’ or ‘project’ based research seems to require building quite a complex edifice around doing that just seems to complicate the heart of the issue which would appear to be that you a legitimate research question, that the artefact must in some way respond to this, and that you need to use the artefact to provide evidence for your question. I’ve made this very simple by making visible not that it is practice or project based method but simply by asking at the start, what theories do you need to use to understand the question? Now, use these theories to evaluate the project.

So, the six questions:

1. List the theories or frameworks that you think you have, know, or use that matter for your research question
2. What will you make as an outcome of your research?
3. My research problem is (Use four sentences. The first states the problem. The second states why the problem is a problem. The third is my startling sentence. The fourth states the implication of my startling sentence.)
4. How will this problem — from (3) — be present, evident, or apparent in the artefact you make?
5. So the theories or frameworks I will use to understand the artefact in light of my problem will be?
6. These are the relevant ones because? (How does 5 answer 3?)

What It Was

The network. The term has become so diluted because it has moved from the imaginary of early hypertext (Nelson, Bolter, Joyce, even of course Gibson), to its current condition. However, the term itself is haunted by earlier histories of industrial media, as in ‘network’ television and radio, and so retains connotations of the much less transgressive broadcast source and transmission model. In this older, but still extant context, the network are the formal affiliations between partners to achieve national systems of ‘badged’ content distribution, a branding and economic exercise in concert with the economies of scale that such agreements allow. This is not the new network, the network now.
The network is, and while the phrase has all the hallmarks of cliche it remains the best and simplest explanatory schema, rhizomatic in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. Acentric, structurally asymmetrical in relation to traditional networks in terms of information and power flows, it is made up of a diversity of parts that can be placed into ever changing relations and it lacks the authority of the centre. It is fragmentary, partial, transitory, ephemeral. A shape shifter. Technically, what has mattered has been processing power – what your terminal can do, and bandwidth – how much data can be delivered how quickly. In the beginning text ruled because it was computationally easy to deal with, and required little in the way of bandwidth. Even into the early years of this century these two conditions were the major constraint on online video, constraints which have now, certainly in urban centres in the first world for the everyday user, been resolved.
In softvideo these constraints were recognised less as the limits preventing the possibility for online video than as enabling conditions that had to be recognised, appropriated and utilised within softvideo. Indeed, it was common at the turn of the century for video practitioners of all persuasions to be wary of working online because of concerns about the ‘compromises’ their work would suffer due to the small screen size video required and the compression artefacts that may appear due to the demands of getting a file with a small enough data rate to be delivered online.

Softvideo begins from a different set of propositions. Rather than looking at existing video practice, whether narrative, experimental or art based, and thinking how that could be translated online, softvideo took the qualities of the network as its material given and then tried to think ‘videographically’ from within the context and constraints of the network. In practice this means that the screen size of the video is small in contrast to the more usual assumption in video practice where whatever screen I have (television, cinema, gallery wall) is all mine. This also means the data rate is often deliberately, joyfully, low so that the material arrives immediately over existing network connections (which in 2000 still meant 56Kb dialup modems), which in turn allows for the sorts of things that are givens in traditional video become material to work with in softvideo. For example, the resolution of the image (its visual quality), and the frame rate of the finished work, are all manipulated in softvideo to produce an aesthetic of what has been characterised as lo bit rate, lo fi, lo–res media. Pixellation and video artefacts can be deliberately sought, shifting softvideo from being merely a recording medium bedded and wedded to verisimilitude and indexicality towards a painterly, digital, reflexive materiality where its pixels, the necessity and facticity of compression, become the material subject of the work. Softvideo has some semblance of relation to the world as it is observational, stilled, showing not telling mode of engaging with the world, and is situated within the spheres of nonfiction and documentary rather than fiction and drama. This world becomes available to aesthetisation via digital glitch and grunge as others might use chiascurio, lighting, mise-en-scene, and in the case of video, the signal.

This accounts for my use of ready to hand technologies in software, networks and cameras. The network has always accommodated remix, what we once called bricolage. It is intended to survive and even play with interruption and the small scale. Each work is a gesture that lies between using a camera that is small enough to carry, what I happen upon, and composition, compression, seriality. Not as specialised equipment but camera as a ready to hand part of everyday stuff. A video snapshot. Closer to the note book and pen. These are not intended to be large, a grand gesture, but when realised as a practice in its own right — rather than steps towards something other, grander, larger (more ‘significant’) have a quality that lies in their polite smallness.

In these ways softvideo, when observed from the perspective of the outside of traditional video, has embraced the network as the site of small works, minor practices, a dirty aesthetic of bits and pixels, an enabling making do (de Certeau). Compression and its artefacts as stochastic image making. Troublesome.

[Deleuze on the minor, de certeau for making do?]

Thought Experiment: If I Were to Teach an “Internet” Subject Now

I have been teaching webby internetty things since 1995. It is easy to just get all technical and teach, well, technical things. But there is an ethics to network practice which any teaching about online stuff needs to include, model, perform and nurture. Don’t like web culture, well we can change that.

Sorry, that was an aside. Here’s a subject for you. The preconditions are:

1. trust your students
2. give them the space to do this stuff (which means a classroom, some tools and help, but also the time)
3. have a small budget (so you can pay for the basics but this really helps get their attention and makes it ‘real’)
4. they control the budget (trust, remember)
5. you want them to learn a pile of stuff about what we will loosely call the internet
6. you are capable of dealing with risk, openness, and even if it falls over that good things will be achieved
7. that learning is experiential, embodied, enacted
8. recognise your role is mentor moving towards being a peer in the system (thinking of the class as a system helps)

The aim: to install and host a Disapora server for the cohort and use it. Why? Well you will learn a pile of stuff about how you make things online, both how hard and easy it is. This involves negotiating technical things, social and technical protocols, and so on. Then you’re pretty much running a social networking site. What you do next is up to them.

Here are the steps.

1. Find out all we can about the Diaspora project. What is it? What existing knowledge do you have to understand what it is? What don’t you understand? OK, form groups, investigate and find out what you can about these gaps.
   report back. Repeat as necessary at various scales (whole group, individual interest, small group)
2. Technical: how do you host it? What does that mean? How do we find out how to do that? Do it.
3. What do we need to run it? Can we do it? No? Where can we find someone to get things started?
4. What are the issues we need to think about? Note them as they arise, e.g. technical (what is FTP, how do I do it? What is a host? What is DNS? what is code, what is open source?). Social (why and how is this different to, say, Facebook? What is a social graph? How do I make one? Why does it matter? Who or what does it matter to? How do you manage membership? Why? What matters and what doesn’t? Do people have to be real or can they be pretend? Why? What’s at risk, to who?)
5. And all the things that will arise of their own accord.

The things that will break this are to solve too many things for the students. Though equally just ‘throwing them in at the deep end’ is as problematic. In a subject such as this I would spend the first two learning blocks (sessions, classes) talking through and building models for how to communicate as a group, how to share stuff, and make sure that it becomes embedded. If this means setting aside specific time every time to this, then that’s what you do. I’d also give everyone plenty of opportunity to be able to identify what they are good and not good at, so they can initiate and contribute to what they want to and are capable of (there are various methods to achieve this, I personally use simple visualisation methods where students graph their previous experiences to identify what they like and don’t like, what they’re good and not good at).

This doesn’t have a specific shape, different groups may form through the course (a tech team, a researcher team, a promotions team, a policy team, a documentation team), and different things may come to matter (sociology of online identity rather than the social graph, server maintenance rather than small world networks). It is driven by enquiry, a specific project, and a simple proposition: get a social networking site running and working (what does ‘working’ mean?). How you assess will end up probably being defined/constrained by your own institution’s demands or requirements, but give them the permission, scope and tools to document, outline and make visible to themselves where they started and where they got to then I reckon good things will have happened. (The rub is in letting assessment make visible this change, rather than merely how much they ‘know’ about something.)

Publishers Spam

So unless you’ve been under the academic equivalent of a rock lately (aka admin, attending innovation workshops, or just well, teaching) you might have missed that we are finally getting up in arms over the fucked up nature of academic publishing. The problem is very simple, though apparently deeply intractable.

As academics we do research which we publish (most of us because we want to, but it also part of the job description). Since we then need somewhere to publish we publish in specialised journals, though these journals are often owned by large academic publishing companies who very rarely, if ever, pay for what we write and which they publish. Oh, we also do the reviewing of the work submitted, and also the editing. Then we or our institutions pay a lot of money to buy our labour back again (the journal). My personal favourite is when you find an article via a publisher’s site and you or your library doesn’t subscribe and they want, usually, anything from $20 to $50 for one copy of one article – and it’s already digital!

Once upon a time not very long ago we needed to do this because to disseminate your work you needed a printing press and a distribution network. Both were costly. Then public research money invented the internet, and we don’t need that private infrastructure anymore.

(I’ve written elsewhere here how this does my head in. I go to meetings where I am surrounded by people who can tell me that we’re subject to patriarchal, neoliberal and colonialist assumptions but the backwards obsequiousness kow towing that this represents just goes through to the keeper. Called me old fashioned but there is something about getting ones own house in order that might be relevant here.)

Anyway, back to the trail. So a nobel prize winning mathematician wrote a blog post pointing this out and indicating they would boycott a particularly rapacious publisher. It has snowballed. But I’m holding my breath. In the meantime Sage sent me this invitation:

Dear Adrian Miles,

If you are interested in reviewing journal manuscripts, we would like to invite your participation in SAGE Open, an innovative peer reviewed open access journal from SAGE. Manuscript reviews are an important part of the publication process. Reviewers gain valuable academic and publishing experience.

If you are interested in reviewing for SAGE Open please click here.

Potential reviewers should have published in a peer-review journal and should have current knowledge in their area of expertise. If you accept an invitation to review for SAGE Open you should be prepared to promptly return your review.

SAGE Open has received over 1,000 manuscripts in the last year. We also encourage you to submit your manuscript through SAGE Track, SAGE’s web-based peer review and submission system. Submitting your manuscript is free.

Only if your manuscript is accepted will you pay the author acceptance fee of $395 (discounted from the regular price of $695)! For more information, view the SAGE Open manuscript submission guidelines.

Now, some disciplines have journals that you do pay to be in, but not mine. So here we have a publisher wanting me to donate my labour to them for their publication. I donate further labour through reviewing, and then I pay $400 for the privilege. Um, this is so arse about as to be just embarrassing for all concerned. It is sort of dressed up as crowd sourced academia meets social media (except this has always been the modern academic model) except its purpose is precisely the income stream. Two words. Fuck off.

Softvideo and Me

From my PhD draft:

Softvideo needed to allow for the same principles and affordances of the network and personal computer so that it could have the opportunity to be not only a ‘high’ form (of art, video, or online media) and to become part of the habitus that constitutes the everyday experience of online culture. Conceptually in softvideo there is nothing distinct about the video that softvideo uses — it is made, captured, and edited in more or less the same way as you would for any other video project. Softvideo has no particular claims regarding the technical quality of the equipment used to record, or of the final output, and does not recognise attributes such as “broadcast quality”. Indeed, in many respects softvideo explicitly celebrates a lo fi model of making and consumption. The works are, unlike heritage media, intended to be small scale. This includes their duration, where videos are usually only a couple of minutes in length, if not shorter, and also their screen resolution (size) and the amount of computer processing power required to view them is explicitly small scale.

Softvideo then contrasted itself deliberately to a variety of alternative approaches to online video and the digital. These other approaches routinely adopted some combination of a high art or high technology model. In the former video assumes and grants for itself the right to ‘own’ the users’ desktop by relying upon presentation environments that default to full screen resolution, with the collateral assumption that the work also requires the monopolisation of attention and time. Such work would often be large scale, so relatively long and, in some cases, complex in its interactivity and narrative complexity. Work which relied on high technology approaches almost certainly defaulted to the monopolisation of the presentation environment and rely on specialised hardware and software at some or all points of production, distribution and presentation. These works are not able to be part of the ‘everyday’ experience of networked practice and often required either very specialised hardware for viewing, or in some cases the visiting of specific installations and events to access them at all. Softvideo politically and aesthetically, deliberately place itself in opposition to these modes as softvideo advocates a lightweight, agile, informal, sketch like practice that extends from how works are made through to the the opportunities to experience the work. Softvideo implicitly recognises that the network is distributed, granular, and fragmentary, and that the site of consumption or experience of the works is someone’s computer screen, that this screen is theirs and that these users ordinarily are doing several things at once. In addition the capacity and ability to make similar works should be near to hand for anyone — the significance of softvideo is not so much what I use it to express but is in the conceptual change it proposes for thinking through and about what a networked video practice and object can become.

Softvideo eschews the culture of ‘monumental making’ that is the historical legacy of film and video as a scarce, expensive, technically complex practice, and leans towards the ephemeral and the transitory. This does not mean that monuments, large scale complex works, cannot be made, but that softvideo, in conjunction with videoblogging, relies upon seriality and repetition, the sorts of aggregations that accrue in small and minor moments through time. In this way there can be parts that break, fail, as well as moments that stand out, because there is never enough invested in a single thing to compromise the project as a whole. This form of serialised making and consumption also allows for similarities and differences between individual works to be identified and to form in their own way particular constellations of meaning and affect. One video of a subject is simply that, but when placed in a series a semiotic economy of difference is now established.

In my own softvideo practice there is an emphasis on observation, showing rather than telling, description rather than narrative. I use ready to hand tools (my phone, small highly portable video cameras, digital still cameras with a video capability) to record my everyday life world. Aesthetically the project is not for me to impose a ‘deep’ significance upon this world but to build systems that allow relations to be established between these recorded parts so that what it might be, which is always open, variable and certainly not limited or teleologically locked to ‘me’, can be made and remade.

From my Delicious: ACTIONNNNNNNNNNNNN

NOTE this is autopublished here via iftt.com because I’ve tagged it in delicious, so you know, being automated and all sometimes it might be odd without human intervention.

This can be found at: this spot

From my Delicious: [Infographic] A Brief History of Digital Video

NOTE this is autopublished here via iftt.com because I’ve tagged it in delicious, so you know, being automated and all sometimes it might be odd without human intervention.

This can be found at: this spot

From my Delicious: TribecaFilm.com | Future of Film | The Cloud Filmmaking Manifesto

NOTE this is autopublished here via iftt.com because I’ve tagged it in delicious, so you know, being automated and all sometimes it might be odd without human intervention.

This can be found at: this spot

Not sure just what I think about this. Sort of too close to those bad quilt projects that, well, the nicest thing we can say about them is that they’re folksy.’

From my Delicious: Parataxis

NOTE this is autopublished here via iftt.com because I’ve tagged it in delicious, so you know, being automated and all sometimes it might be odd without human intervention.

This can be found at: this spot

From my Delicious: Bxx, A New Multi Camera Storytelling Format

NOTE this is autopublished here via iftt.com because I’ve tagged it in delicious, so you know, being automated and all sometimes it might be odd without human intervention.

This can be found at: this spot

Big Brother house meets thriller meets real time drama.