Group items tagged

The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard is a unique collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Visual & Environmental Studies (VES). Harnessing perspectives drawn from the human sciences, the arts, and the humanities, the aim of SEL is to support innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, with original nonfiction media practices that explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human existence. As such, it encourages attention to the many dimensions of social experience and subjectivity that may only with difficulty be rendered with words alone. SEL provides an academic and institutional context for the development of work which is itself constitutively visual or acoustic - that is conducted through audiovisual media rather than purely verbal sign systems - and which may thus complement the human sciences' and humanities' traditionally exclusive reliance on the written word. The instruction offered through SEL is thus distinct from other graduate visual anthropology programs in the United States in that it is practice-based, and promotes experimentation with culturally-inflected, nonfiction image-making.

Harvard seems to have a lot going on for it... In context for what we /do/ with digital ethnography materials, I wish that more of the projects that are featured were actually available for, at the very least, preview (at odds with the program's description of conduction through audiovisual media...). I wish I knew more about Zeega (and the apparent connection based on large logo presence on the projects page), even if it is only in alpha... http://zeega.org/about.php

The projects at SEL provide a rich landscape for sensory/experiential exploration. This type of work really opens the mind to new perspectives and detail that is often exploited or skewed through popular media - like maintstream cinema or video games. Being a huge fan of the film "Where Eagles Dare" and the old SkyTram at Disneyland, I really enjoyed the Greunrekorder - Swiss Mountain Transport Systems sound recordings. I wonder if anyone has conducted similar research on the Portland Aerial Tram. Many of the trailers were exquisite, too. "Sweetgrass" looks to be an amazing documentary.

For those of us looking for free cloud transcription service! Here's a great review from a KUOW Reporter.... "Register at http://www.voicebase.com, upload your audio, do something else for 10 minutes to an hour or two (the wait varies apparently), and it will do a rough but surprisingly not-bad transcription for you. What I've done is then paste that "machine transcript" into a Word doc (or you can download it) and correct major errors in it as I listen to my original audio. Much faster (and a lot less typing) than trying to log tape from scratch. Voicebase.com lets you do 50 hours of audio transcribing free. I did it for a half-hour interview I'd taped in the studio; I don't know how Voicebase will perform on phone tape, audio with ambient noise behind it, speakers with accents, interviews with more than one person, etc. But for my purposes, it was pretty freaking awesome."

This is a very handy transcription tool if you find yourself typing the same words over and over again. It allows you to create sort cuts and abbreviations that your computer will then expand into the real word. It's a nice time saver and its free.

I really like the concept of "scene," as it is applied here. The author uses it to mean the ways groups of people gather in clusters historically, emotionally, and physically. He argues the term avoids the "fetishiz­ing tendencies of subcultural theory". Does it, though? If mapping and analyzing subcultures brings with it a temptation to nail down hierarchies of taste cultures (as in - "my study of zine making shows this is a real zine, that is not" - a temptation that looms even bigger for those of us who try to study our own subcultures), how does scene help us avoid that? Might I be tempted to flash my knowledge of the scene/ being a scenester in ways that produce the same effect? The visualizations help map out the fluid connection between actors and organizations. Describing local fan communities as "a nexus of niches" is tremendously helpful. I'd be interested to see this kind of network analysis applied to online fandoms across platforms. Thinking about the graph though, I'm not sure I need it to understand what he found. It looks cool (and bonus - !science), but I could do just as well without it. If the graph isn't supporting the argument - what is it doing? Final note - I like the choice of the word "patronage" - it may capture something really interesting about the relational and inter-generational aspect of scenes!

ORDINARY MIRACLES: THE PHOTO LEAGUE'S NEW YORK is a feature-length documentary film which tells the story of the rise and politically motivated fall of the Photo League, (1936-1951) which for fifteen years served as the center of the documentary movement in American photography at a time when the camera was held to be, in James Agee's words, "the central instrument of our time."