cultural analytics: to be continued

I spent last weekend at a workshop on ‘visual methods in cultural studies’, hosted by the Department of Urban Culture and the Institute of Cultural Studies at the Adam Mickiewicza University in Poznan, Poland.  It was interesting, and I got lots of pointers from Polish colleagues who approach cultural studies from the humanities rather than the social sciences.  One of them is the Software Studies Initiative site, hosted by Lev Manovich and oriented to/from the digital humanities.

It discusses what Manovich calls ‘cultural analytics’: working with big datasets (of images, in his case), to show differences in a dataset both visually and spatially.  As well as some theoretical discussion pieces (one of which claims that scholars no longer have to choose between depth and breadth in their methodology), there’s lots of hands-on advice for doing this sort of analytics, and even a software package to download and play with called ImagePlot.  (When did it become trendy for one-word titles to have two capital letters?)

a visualisation of a million black and white manga pages

Having got over my embarassment at not already knowing about this site, I immediately thought about using this package to analyse the digital visualisations that my current research project is examining.  These are visualisations of an urban redevelopment project currently under construction in Doha, Qatar.  There are probably millions of these visualisations, if you take into account all the different versions of every image made as the project has evolved since its initial design work in 2008.  Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, to run these through ImagePlot and get some sort of visual description of the lot: the colours, the tones, the hues, the saturation.  This would be interesting because a lot of effort and discussion seems to have gone on about getting these aspects of the images ‘right’: right in terms of accurately reflecting the light in Doha but also in terms of conveying the right sort of ‘atmosphere’ for the development.  ImagePlot would presumably allow us to show these colour qualities directly.

But even if cultural analytics makes the possibility of such an analysis real, there are still difficulties.  In this case, the database itself.  I don’t have access to all those images and I’m not sure I ever would because they are scattered across hundreds of servers and hard drives in the offices of architects, visualisers and developers.  So there still seems to be a crucial issue for big data analytics about access to data; and about the (dare I say it) representativeness of the data that you can get your hands on.

I look forward to delving deeper into the Software Studies Initiative site to learn more about this and – I’m sure – many other aspects of visual cultural analytics.

let’s genesis blue sky thinking going forward for key stakeholders

I haven’t been posting on this blog for the past few months as often as I did when I started out.  Mostly because the part of my job which isn’t research has been particularly demanding recently: lots of management – sorry, ‘leadership’, stuff.  So for anyone else in the same position – doing admin work rather than research work – here is something that made me laugh out loud.  It’s a list of management-speak, from the Guardian newspaper last weekend.  The comments below the article are even better.  And my faculty’s brilliant Senior Administrator let slip another one yesterday: ‘to genesis’, a verb meaning ‘to originate’, as in ‘if you genesis that report I will revise it’.

The article is also a good example of the Guardian‘s need to locate a photo – any photo, no matter how weakly related to the news story – to head up each of its articles.  An example of the sort of ubiquitous photo that Martin Hand’s recent book discusses, and also an example of how interviewing viewers of that page might not be the best method to address the effect of that sort of photo.  What on earth is there to say about it, after all?

And here, then, is an image from BishopBlog that is entirely unrelated to the fantastically enlivening ways in which I have been spending my time not doing research, or blogging, for the past few months, with my actually very lively and wonderful OU colleagues.

what does ‘ubiquity’ do to ‘the image’?

I’ve just been reading Martin Hand’s new book Ubiquitous Photography, which is part of a series on digital media and society published by Polity Press.

It’s an interesting read because it takes an approach to photography which Martin describes as “non-essentialist”: that is, he understands photography not through A Theory of The Photograph, but rather as a practice, a process, which can and does take an extraordinarily wide range of forms.  He backs this up with some nice empirical investigations .  This approach is still all-too-rare in discussions of photography, in my view, but absolutely vital for understanding what photography and photos are doing now.

The book’s conclusions explore three broader consequences of ubiquitous photography: for the intersection of photographical practices with social change; for the making and remaking of memory; and for the public performance of selves.  All very persuasive, I think.

The book concludes by emphasising the “local assembly” of photographic technologies, images and modes of consumption (the latter interpreted pretty broadly).  And it’s here I might want to raise a question with Martin.  Because, although he insists that ‘local’ does not necessarily lead to lots of very small-scale empirical research projects, it is also the case that the empirical work he does is largely based on interviews with people discussing, for example, the photos uploaded to Facebook pages.  As a consequence, his conclusions focus largely on the implications of ubiquitous photography for identity and subjectivity.

This makes for a strong conclusion to his book.  But it doesn’t engage with the sort of question that the book on YouTube in the same series does, which is written by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green.  Which is that, if something is ubiquitous, are new methods required that engage with one of the key aspects of ubiquity, which is sheer numbers?  Burgess and Green advocate a quantitative approach in order to conceptualise YouTube as a massive system with its own dynamics and agency.  Similarly, if photos are everywhere, do we need a new method to get to grips with that spread-ness?  Quantitative, even?

academics and visual social media

Thanks to David Beer’s great blog, I came across this post by sociologist Deborah Lupton, called ‘Social media for academia: some things I have learnt’.  What caught my attention was her use of Pinterest and Storify to collate visual as well as written materials relevant to her research; she also uses Slideshare to make powerpoint presentations public.  Prezi doesn’t appear in her list, perhaps because it’s not a form of social media; but you can make Prezis public to share them.  I have a plan to develop a public Prezi as part of my current research project.  And, like David, Deborah’s enthusiasm has had the effect of making me seriously consider starting with Twitter…

The other aspect of Deborah’s post that I found really interesting was her sense that her use of various social media were carefully integrated in relation to each other.  Facebook does one thing, Twitter another and Pinterest a third; and she manages each to build a dispersed portfolio of online activity that gives her a rounded presence.  I’d love to experiment, as Deborah did for a year, with all these sites and more, as a way of engaging with the ‘ubiquitous photography’ that saturates all these sites (the phrase ‘ubiquitous photography’ is Martin Hand’s, from his book of the same name).

a conference on the production of photographs

There’s to be a two-day conference at De Montfort University in June 2013 on ‘Workers and Consumers: The Photographic Industry 1860-1950′.  The details here.

The more I think about it, the more important looking at photos and asking how they got made – and then what’s happened to them since – is important.  Not just as a scholarly project, but also as a performed way of seeing photos.  I hope to come back to this in a future blog post.

using a phone as an exhibition guide

So, as a previous post mentioned, I visited a photography exhibition a couple of weeks ago; and it had a downloadable pdf file as its catalogue.  As the relatively new owner of a very smart phone, I decided to make use of it.  Which was an interesting experience…

So, the idea is that you download the pdf onto your mobile device and consult it as you walk around the exhibition.  As a visitor, you thus get more information – for free – about the show than you get from the texts in the exhibition itself.  And the curators of the exhibition were also updating the pdf during the exhibition’s run, as people sent them comments about the various pictures and places on display.  Both great ideas, I thought.

However, on reflection, the whole process was actually rather fraught with all the complexities of digital culture now.  So, the online and editable pdf/catalogue allows the visitors to the exhibition a voice in its interpretation – which is great, and much more easily done with an online pdf rather than a printed catalogue.  However, that particular choice of format also keeps the power to share that voice in the hands of the curators.  An exhibition wiki or blog would have been more interactive and participatory, of course.  But all of these possibilities raise some difficult questions for archivists and researchers about what is/was ‘the’ catalogue of the exhibition: the one the curators wrote? that, plus all the submissions they received from visitors? or only their final version?  Origins and end points get rather blurred in this sort of interactive process.

And then of course there were all the technological complexities (‘smart’ is just one definition of my phone at least, one that only makes sense as an average of ‘too clever by half’ and ‘really confusing’).  First I discovered I had to download the Adobe app in order to be able to read the pdf.  Then the pdf was obviously designed to be read as a document, and wasn’t very easy to use on the phone’s tiny screen; and I kept on losing the trick of swapping between the main catalogue pages and the sub-pages where more extensive commentary on individual photos was placed.  (I’ve also just been struggling to read an ebook on Adobe’s ebook reader Digital Editions, which is also very reader-unfriendly I think.)

Most problematic, though, for me, was the unavoidable sense that, in a gallery, you should be looking at what’s on display, and not at your phone.  As I kept on trying to find more about a particular photograph or photographer on my phone, I felt more and more that I also needed somehow to convey to the other visitors that I was actually studying the catalogue, and not texting my mates about what time to meet at the pub.  In the end, that was what made me give up on the phone and just concentrate on the pictures; which is, of course, what gallery spaces are intended for.  The white cube triumphed again.

Using photographs in social and historical research

I’ve just caught sight of Penny Tinkler’s new book, called Using Photographs in Social and Historical Research.  It looks great, not least because, on my quick first scan, so many of the photographs it discussed are taken by, and picture, women, in all sorts of complex ways.

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, then, now, there, everywhere

I visited a great exhibition at the Djanogly Art Gallery in Nottingham at the weekend.  It was called Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: The Authentic Moment in British Photography, and although it closed on Sunday, you can download the catalogue as a pdf here.

The show focused on the interest in regional British working class culture – and poverty – among photographers, filmmakers, journalists and social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s.  There were lots of different sorts of photos on show: documentary photography from the likes of Roger Mayne; architectural photography (of some of Nottingham’s new post-war housing developments); family snaps; photojournalism from the Nottingham Post; local adverts for hairdressers and grocery stores; snaps from local professional photographers of factory shopfloors and local clubs’ christmas dos.  Karel Reisz’s 1960 film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning runs on a loop at its heart.

The mix of visual imagery suggests that this is really a show about a particular moment in British visual culture – and a particular version of visual culture.  It doesn’t try to embed the different visions of working class life in different social locations – there’s no suggestion that different articulations of class, gender and race might be at work in its range of images.  There were quotes on the wall from the author Allan Sillitoe and from the social research Richard Hoggart, both echoing the other.  And there were indeed some interesting cross-overs between the social location of photographers and the genres of photographs they made; an 11 year old boy made some fantastic images of new blocks of flats, for example, and there were research assistants on sociology projects also snapping away.  But the section called ‘Them and Us’ had a lot of proud images of ‘us’, skilled workers mostly, and none of ‘them’, or indeed by ‘them’ who might have been hostile to ‘us’ (and vice versa).

Nor was there much engagement with the particular pathways these various images might have taken as mediated objects in the ’50s and ’60s.  Their circulation through a visual economy was rarely implied, though the adverts were surrounded by their anchoring text and there were some pieces of publicity for the film that embedded photographs of the stars in text and graphics.  So it seems to be the concept of ‘visual culture’ that allows these images to appear in relation to each other, in a gallery space now, rather than an effort to map their non/convergence in an actual historical geography.

The exhibition does, though, locate that visual culture in a particular place: Nottingham, mostly (although there are a few of Shirley Baxter’s photographs taken in Salford, Manchester, and a few others from other towns).  And there were lots of Nottingham folk wandering around like I was, reminiscing about how places used to look like and seeing if they could spot friends, family and acquaintances in the photographs on show.  The exhibtion catalogue also contains quotes from people who lived and worked in the locations the exhibition pictures.   All of which seemed a more significant enactment of that term ‘visual culture’ – making photographs part of ordinary everyday articulations of self, other and the social.

piiinteresting, very piiiinteresting…

My forays into various online image repositories continue… I now not only have an account with Pinterest, which in case you don’t know describes itself as “a content sharing service that allows members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pinboard”, I also have the app on my phone.

I opened an account because I am planning to redecorate a bedroom and I wanted to use a Pinterest board as a way of gathering ideas for the project.  One of the first things that struck me was that I was definitely not alone in using Pinterest as a way of collecting images of really nice home stuff.  There are loads of pictures of rooms, painting schemes, DIY projects, individual domestic objects…

… as well as cupcakes, fashion accessories and whole outfits, nails (I will never want for ideas of how to paint patterns on my nails in at least three colours again), pages of profound (or not) philosophical-like life advice, celebration cakes, cute guys, hair styles, kittens, architecture, recipes and gorgeous women.

That’s what comes up on Pinterest’s homepage when you land there to log in – in one way, a real mish mash of stuff.  On the other hand, it struck me as overwhelmingly focussed on things that conventionally are the subjects (or objects) of women’s work, women’s pleasure, women’s fantasies.  Fashion, cooking, domestic spaces, philosophy (just thought I’d slip that in), consumption, attractive men and women and, err, kittens (ok, not sure how that last one works, personally).  It definitely felt to me very feminine, of a particular kind.

There are also ways to select what you see on Pinterest, though.  When you open an account, you have to choose four images from about four screens worth, which identifies four ‘pinteresters’ that your account then follows – so that once you’re logged in, the images you see are selected by what who you choose to follow pins and shares (I think that’s how it works, anyway).  So by changing who you follow, you could avoid seeing too many cupcakes, kittens and nail art, or, indeed, see nothing else.

It would be an interesting project to figure out in more detail, more robustly, the content held on Pinterest, and whether certain sorts of content tend to cluster together in particular assemblages of visual ‘interest’.  James Ash has written recently about ‘attention’ and how certain images (in his case study, computer games) work to create a ‘retention economy’; though much less intense, I wonder if Pinterest might be a way of enabling ‘everyone’ (as in ‘here comes everyone’) to create their own regime of visual attention: something to get absorbed in visually.  The question is, I suppose, to what effects…

international visual methods seminar: observing and visualizing urban culture

The first International Visual Methods Seminar – on observing and visualizing urban culture – has just been announced here.  It will be held in September 2013 in Antwerp.  The announcement looks great.

If I was being picky, though, (or was suddenly transported back to the early 1990s when it felt easier to point these things out), I might note an interesting gendered division between those leading the seminar and those pictured in the seminar’s banner image, above…