Filed under: Uncategorized
i will be heading to amsterdam at the end of this week and was wondering if anyone had tips for the week that i will be there. i hear that marijuana is legal there. heh. joking aside, i’d like to check out galleries, cute neighborhoods for people watching, interesting buildings, fun bike routes, yummy places to eat…you know the travel drill. i will also be giving a talk with leah on linking and network theory at the new network theory conference, so wish me luck! public speaking makes me feel awkward and incompetent.
as i have been slowly gearing up for my summer writing projects, i’ve been trying to wrap my head around several things. first, i had previously briefly posted about the notion of information use to begin taking a closer look at the the things that people do in relation to the ways we make meaning of our lives. how we perceive the world is often informed by how we come to know the world. so in a digital-mediated-informational world, how has this altered how we exeperience and make meaning in our day to day lives?
i’ve been busy this academic year brushing up on the old social theory literature, which can really inform these questions. one primary question in this area has got a lot of do with exploring the relationships between structures and our ability to act independently (or not) of them. stuctures entails a wide variety of things, including: cultures, institutions, hardware, economics, language, government. unfortunately, what constitutes a social structure is ofen ill defined, but it’s often posited as a curtailing force on our ability to act independently, as freely thinking agents.
while that as a rather crude overview of social theory, i’ve been reading social theory in this lens in attempts to really get at that first question about how we make meaning in our lives. if we live in a network society now, how has our day to day and experiences in the world changed since industrial life, for example? clearly not easy questions and not easy answers. so, i’m kind of at a weird point in terms of summer projects where i feel like i have to choose between navigating down a information use path or an information structures path. what’s difficult is that i strongly feel that given developments in 2-point-duh applications, there is this kind of convergence between use-and-structures; a kind of explicit rendering and embedding between the two where use constitutes structures. structures have always constituted use, but it’s this second iteration that brings it all back together and makes it so fascinating. this relates to some of my earliers posts on the collapse of production and consumption in tagging and remix more largely, where acts of remixing or tagging actually are simultaneous instances of producing and consuming information.
anyhow, i will have to make a decision at some point and decide on what direction i need to go as it will require steeping my nose in books for the summer…that is, in between barbequing, reading fiction, travelling, napping, and being lazy. 
the summer is looking up to be a really great. as i’m slowly finishing the last to-do’s for the quarter, there are several writinig projects i will be working on, one of which will be a literature review the combines the sociology of culture (or a post-modern sociology of culture) literature with the informtion structure and information organization literatures. if anyone has suggestions for these, that would be so absolutely lurvely! i probably will end up spending a good chunk of time trolling the UCLA library website and meandering through the dusty stacks, but any pointers would be a wonderful help.
Filed under: art
oh my god you all should go to this website and check out this AMAZING video of a laser graffiti project in Holland where they built a “hybermobil” system that allowed them to laser graffiti all over a massive building.
the i and i likey. 
Filed under: tagging
so i am writing my last paper for the quarter on tagging and have been going through the previous research and literature and have been struck by the lack of qualitative approaches so far. i suppose given the recent growth and development of tagging, that shouldn’t be too surprising, but so far i have only seen one individual, adam mathes, argue for the need altogether.
it’s been interesting so see how most research on tagging to date has focused primarily on analysing the tags themselves, doing text-term analysis and trying to deduce actions, incentives, motivations by reading or tabulating the terms and more often than not they’ve maintained an explicit or implicit information retrieval framework, implying that the only reason why people engage in tags is to find things later. but it seems to me that there needs to be a reconceptualization of tagging towards an emphasis on use and context as there are some really interesting questions about the *social* dynamics at play in tagging. so far there has been little examination of the ways in which tagging, while an individual act, a lot of the meaninfulnes of tagging is *socially* constituted. alla zollers, a friend of mine here at ucla, has done a really nice exploratory piece on tagging and expressions, performance, and activism.
i still think that qualitative orientations should be emphasised in terms of trying to delve into the level of experience of tagging and i particularly like the frameworks of information use in framing tagging and brenda dervin’s sense-making theory is especially compelling right now, particularly with the strong social constructivist bent that emphasizes use and context in shaping how people engage with information seeking, creating, and processing. in my opinion, tagging represents a convergence of seeking, retrieval, creating, and processing all in one motion. unfortunately, the discipline of LIS has kept these rather separate. clearly, tagging represents a lot of challenges to the traditional cleavages in LIS but it gives us a great opportunity to reflect upon the traditional models we’ve been using and as some who isn’t “native” to the field (I don’t know anyone who is though nowadays) it’s really exciting to begin thinking about shapeshifting and redrawing these boundaries.
this is what i did
heehee! seriously, watch nick drum and just be in awe because he is an AMAZING drummer. he is so much fun to watch! this was from a show we played, probably in 2004? at liminal warehouse in oakland. ::sigh:: now i feel old…
[a bit of shameless self promotion, but it just brought a smile to my face]
