Wednesday 6 March 2013

A note about this blog

This blog gives a record of my micro-ethnographic research project on the documentary by Simon Shama - Mark Rothko.

The posts offer a time line of the activity. The tabs above, entitled 'Rizome' and 'Alloy' are my observations from a digital cultures perspective.

I also created a digital artifact in Thinglink

This task is not complete but in view of the time schedule it offers a first glimpse of what I felt was an exciting activity.

9 comments:

  1. Wow Gina, this is a great piece of work. I think you are really onto something here, in your focus on how the audience for art clusters around these popular video artefacts, and how they construct, debate and re-construct an 'art story' which has already been filtered through the 'lens' of the celebrity academic, the BBC, the genre of the television documentary and all that other paraphernalia.

    There are so many levels here to engage with, and I think that the way you present your ethnography starts to show that - the blog constitutes a really interesting start at a set of digital fieldnotes, while the 'rhizome' and 'alloy' tabs do an admirable job of starting to pull things together, and to theorise them.

    I got the sense from the thinglink that you were starting to make clearer patterns from your data - beginning to cluster users into groupings, and draw out some of your thoughts on whether these constitute 'community', or not. I guess another angle you might look at would be educational - to what extent to these interactions constitute 'learning', and how would we know?

    You mention that you would like to do further work on this - I think you should!

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    1. Google didn't put my name in - that comment above is from Sian : )

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    2. thanks Sian, I hope to pick up on this and your comments for the dissertation...
      With thinglink, I have to be honest, I did not try and group topics, although I can see this might be a really useful tool, a bit like a map. The thinglink platform is slightly awkward in that the actual work space is much more of a squeeze than the end product - not sure why. Initially I just wanted to illustrate the emerging strands, popping up, but the idea of grouping might work well with a suitable image. (I loved the bamboo!)

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  2. Hi Gena - Love Rothko and the almost religious zeal that surrounds him and his work. But I'm slightly confused as to what your trying to do here? Are you trying to understand / investigate a Rothko community (via Schama), or understand how YouTube communities work in relation to popular culture? YouTube is notorious for 'stupidity' so not so good for a serious look at a Rothko community. An interesting juxtaposition - but I'm not fully visualising the final product or possible outcomes? Maybe it's just me :)

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    1. hi Phil, thanks for the comments. The ethnography is letting me map out a YouTube community development (my blog posts) and at the same time reflect on the digital culture of the platform (my tabs) I used Mark Rothko as I have an interest in art, but I guess it could be any topic.
      I tried to customise the blog more,not happy with the spacing, but gave up because of time. Technology can be a real hassle :)

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  3. hi Gina. Really nice work with this under what I know were pressured circumstances. "YouTube is an affordance in the building of communities on other internet platforms." - I thought that was a really important point, and one that I think might connect with what Phil has asked - about what the focus of this work is (or is it an alloy?).

    In another post (which I've lost now) you cite the youtube notice thanking the community - they want to have it both ways, maybe? To be the source of content that drives conversations elsewhere (which it undoubtedly is), but also for people with accounts to see themselves as community members. But they don't really have the mechanisms to support the latter...

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  4. hi Jen, thanks. Indeed, I realised after I announced the blog that was one of the points I missed, I think 'YouTube affordance' could be developed into a 3rd tab.
    In reply to Phil: the blog itself is also a purpose, with me aiming for new academic discourse (away from the traditional textual narrative): almost like building X and Y axes, with X the timeline and Y 'consumption' (you can tell I work in an economics environment!) What I liked about this is that both YouTube and the Google blog architecture gave me a technological framework that allowed me for such exploring.

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  5. Hi Gina I think this showed the rhizomic idea quite well--I found my own thoughts while going through it hurtling off on tangents that you then addressed, and took off into another direction, and then took back to another element touched on earlier...etc. : ) I thought the comments on YouTube being 'stupid' were particularly interesting--here were people commenting on YouTube arguing that the group of people who comment on YouTube have one quality in common--that they are stupid. Or is it the group itself that is stupid? Either way, I can see how the posters who were of this opinion were separating themselves (and some of their readers) from this 'other' group of people who post on YouTube, maybe because they were watching Rothko and not...One Direction? Anyway, it made me wonder whether people often perceive 'community' around a topic rather than around a webspace...which I think you address here as well...!

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  6. I really like the way you have described Youtube environment as rhizomatic - "There is no recognisable structure, a forest that has grown, to some extent uncontrollably, only limited by the YouTube community guidelines." ...."each upload as a new fringe...

    I have always wondered how youtube is organised and how it really works apart from the availability of the audio-visual repository. You have given me a good understanding of the cultural processes of the Youtube management and the community. I also thought the "alloy" metaphor really does capture the sense of "impurity" of the content really well. Love the picture on your thinglink!

    As always, very intellectually-provoking piece of work. Thank you!

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