Recently, I had a meeting with both my supervisors and the two lecturers who run my course. This slightly-scary meeting was labelled in my diary as “super supervisory meeting”. These are my notes from that meeting.
(click for more notes)
This site’s not finished yet – the ‘about‘ page is less than informative, the theme’s a little clunky – so you might not know that I’m doing a leading-edge research course in academica. Well, I haven’t really brought it up.
As part of that course, we are occasionally required to write essays, and I wanted to post up my essay that I’ve just completed. The full title is “I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE: How are the use of memes and tropes by those within online communities
building a self-critical approach to contemporary cyber-culture?”
I’m also going to post up the proposal for the essay, which was radically different to the actually essay (in my opinion). This was mainly due to the fact that, upon really reading some of the authors namechecked in the proposal, I found my skin crawling at their apparent misconceptions of contemporary internet culture. This is one area where I find that the value of fiction writers such as Charles Stross far outweigh the perceived academic value of authors such as Paul Virilio. Why?
Where this essay goes into a academic discourse about the effects of a convergent culture on socialisation, and how networked lives will be different to what has gone before, Stross has written a novel called “Halting State” that looks at the dramatic knock-on effects of today’s technology. Some of the questions he poses are what will it be like when the police start to use networking in a realistic way, and how will the future economy cope with online gaming?
I am planning to post a longer article about Stross’s work and other sci-fi authors who are influencing and predicting the changes related to technology, but that will have to wait.
I-see-what-you-did-there (Essay)
online-essay-proposal (Essay Proposal)
Topics covered in these essays include 4chan, twitter, and social networking. All constructive comments are gratefully recieved.
This blog entry might not look like a lot, but there is a fair amount of words to chew through in the linked files.
These files relate to the ongoing work of Unnamed Laboratory, and to my coursework within the Digital Media unit. As such, they are here as much for reference as for reading. If you decide to use them in your own work, or reference them in some manner, they are licensed under the Creative Commons Share-alike Non-commercial Attribution License, and you should check that you are using it within those terms.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
As part of my research, I’ve been maintaining a list of Hackerspaces, Medialabs, and other related initiatives. But the problem of storing the data about them is one of storing it in a useful manner – how can I create a relational database of my research?
Thankfully, I have two database experts on hand. My parents – even my mother is known to crack the odd database joke (most often at the expense of Microsoft). And as far as I’m concerned, that’s awesome.
One of the things I was concerned with was putting multiple entries into a single field, and how that would affect my dealing with those entries in the future. And, as soon as I starting thinking that relational databases of my research were a lot more possible, then I started realising that all my research could be put into relational databases.
Of course, I do have some previous experience in databases…
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=146296&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1
Spreadsheets and Databases – An Informal Lecture from petehindle on Vimeo.
(RSS subscribers go here to see the video)
Now I should have to ponder the question of sharing those databases… it’s possible to embed them, of course, in frames, but is that the best way? Ben Fry likes to share his as CSV format, which is a pretty standardised format. We’ll cross that bridge later though: it’s time to start pounding the spreadsheet program first.
I’m working on a series of portraits of people playing computer games. There are several problems with this – getting the picture right, getting people to play the game, etc – but I’ve nearly worked out all the kinks. I’m not entirely sure where this goes though, but I’ve drawn up a plan and I thought I’d share it with the entire internet.
We’ll have to see how this one pans out… I’m still working on that third part.
