Gapnotes

Notes from the gap

Study diary

Week 25: 17-23 June 2019

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God, what a busy week. Lots of classes and readings, plus that I prepared my presentation for Space and Place, which I will have tomorrow. Such a challenge to condense it to ten minutes after having done so much research.

I also wrote questions for the guest lecturer of next week’s Media Activism (no class this week) – that was our assignment.

The highlight of the week was when the grade for Digital Anthropology from the first semester came on Monday, along with very extensive feedback from one of the lecturers. I put a lot of effort into my machinima and I think the grade and feedback was very fair.

It’s such a great feeling to be graded by a superior. You seldom have that chance in life after you finish school, is my experience.

I started to contact people in Japan, starting with one mangaka and a subculture expert who I know from before. The latter replied and immediately sent me to some relevant web resources. He also offered to check the Japanese translation of my machinima. I’m planning to make a new version where I narrate in Japanese. I’m translating the narration myself, but let native speakers on Lang-8 correct it, one chunk at a time. Lang-8 is such a great idea, I can’t believe I haven’t used the site for years!

The landlord of the Tokyo house I stayed in in 2013 replied that it was taken.

On top of all this I completely refurnished my studio and the result was amazing. It has become a place (!) which inspires me and which I long for. The final touch was a desk for S, so that we from now on both can use the studio as we want. Unfortunately it is extremely hot right now.

Classes:

  • Monday: Space & Place. Unit 6. Third and last unit on applied mapping.
  • Wednesday: Qualitative Methods. On interviewing across ethnicities.
  • Thursday: Immersive Tech. Unit 6. Guest lecturer.
  • Friday: Research Proposal. The last unit out of four.

Readings

Media Activism

Unit 7: Digital Activism

  • Postill, J. 2018. Chapter 2: “Nerds of a Feather”. In The rise of nerd politics: Digital activism and political change, pp. 27–57. London: Pluto Press.

Space and Place

Unit 7: The Built Environment

  • Gieryn, Thomas F. 2000. “A Space for Place in Sociology.” In Annual Review of 
Sociology. Vol. 26, pp.463–496. Palo Alto: Annual Reviews. (Originally for unit 1, but I had apparently not got through it then, so it was good that this important text was repeated in this unit!)
  • Latham, Alan. 1999. “Powers of Engagement: On Being Engaged, Being Indifferent, 
and Urban Life.” In Area. Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 161–168. Royal Geographical Society.

Qualitative Methods

Interviewing 2

  • Gunaratnam, Y. 2003. “Messy Work: Qualitative Interviewing Across Difference Researching Race and Ethnicity.” In Methods, Knowledge and Power, pp. 79-105. London: Sage Publications. (I’ve only read half so far!)

Immersive Technologies

Unit 6: Uncertainty as a Technology, Technology as Uncertainty

Japanese

Apps

  • Memrise: 40,900
  • Nextbook 漢字: 小2 level 27–41

Podcast

  • サブカル 003-007

Other

Articles

Video

Radio

Week 24: 10-16 June 2019

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I presented in Media Activism Unit 6, titled “media activism and ethnographic research”. I chose to present on Anonymous and how to research them and similar groups. I included clips from an interview with Anonymous ethnographer Gabriella Coleman that we made for the 5july podcast in March 2017:

Click here to display content from YouTube

Although I didn’t write much about it last week, that was the week when I kick-started my Japanese learning again, in preparation for my preparatory field trip to Tokyo in September 2019. Not least did I try to immerse myself in Japanese podcasts, but most of them were terrible. This week I finally found one I really liked, something on subculture and philosophy – but mainly just a serious and clearly articulated talk. I have only listened to one episode so far.

I also found an app by Nextbook that trains your kanji writing skills. It’s for primary school grades one through six, which is the levels I’m doing at Memrise too. I’ve just started grade five at Memrise, but in the Nextbook app I’m only in grade two, because I realised I can’t even write simple kanji like 家 (house), despite I would recognise them immediately. So I bought the full version for 28 euro and hope it will pay off!

Reading manga
Captured while reading manga.

I finished Kurumatani Haruko’s manga “アイドル様の夜のお顔” – the main part last week and the little afterstory “眠れぬ夜は彼のせい” this week. Both stories were as lovely as I have come to expect from Kurumatani, my favourite shoujo mangaka.

I have yet to start contacting people in Japan. It’s a bit of a hurdle to start writing those emails. At least I inquired about accommodation today, by contacting the landlord of the house where I lived during autumn 2013.

On Friday I spontaneously joined the conference AI Traps at Bethanien and listened to two panels with presentations. It was very warm though, one person in the audience even collapsed.

On Saturday I went with S to an art opening for Frau Katzenfisch aka Sushi Girl in Friedrichshain, where we met K & S who joined us for dinner and a stroll around Reuter & Weser-kiez for some 48h Neukölln.

Sunday was spent reading in the sofa – my favourite pastime!

Classes:

  • Tuesday: Media Activism. Unit 6, which turned out to be all about my presentation on Anonymous and how to research similar groups.
  • Wednesday: Qualitative Methods. We almost missed this as the teacher was one hour late. So that was one lost hour of confusion and worried messages in our Whatsapp group. So unnecessary.
  • Thursday: Immersive Tech. Unit 5.

Study

Media Activism

Unit 6: Media Activism & Ethnographic Research

  • Jordan, T. 2015. “Hacktivism: Operation Tunisia, Modular Tactics and Information Activism.” In Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society, pp. 176-91 (read from p. 185). London: Pluto Press.
  • Wong, W.H., & Brown, P.A. 2013. “E-Bandits in Global Activism: WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and the Politics of No One.” In Perspectives on Politics 11 (4), pp. 1015-1033. (Read selectively.)

Unit 7: Digital Activism

  • Postill, J. 2018. “Hiding in plain sight”. In J. Postill, The rise of nerd politics: Digital activism and political change, pp. 1–26. London: Pluto Press.

Qualitative Methods

Interviewing – ground skills

  • Bernard, H. R. 1995. “Unstructured and Semistructured Interviewing. Research Methods in Anthropology.” In Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. London, Altamira Press. Pp. 208-236. (Just looked it over, as I had already read the text “by mistake” in the first semester due to confusion about the structure of units. It’s a great text.)

Immersive Technologies

Unit 5.

Only videos this time.

Japanese

Manga

  • 車谷晴子：“眠れぬ夜は彼のせい” (2005). In アイドル様の夜のお顔 (2007), pp. 155–189.

Apps

  • Memrise: 45,800
  • Nextbook 漢字: 小2 level 1–26

Podcast

  • サブカル 002

Other

Articles

AI Traps

Conference in Bethanien on “automating discrimination”, organised by Disruption Network Lab:

  • THE TRACKED & THE INVISIBLE: From Biometric Surveillance to Diversity in Data Science (with Adam Harvey, Sophie Searcy and moderator Adriana Groh).
  • AI FOR THE PEOPLE: AI Bias, Ethics & The Common Good (with Maya Indira Ganesh, Slava Jankin and moderator Nicole Shephard).

Video

Week 23: 3-9 June 2019

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Studied Japanese and planned my presentation. Partied with my classmates in a park Friday night.

Classes:

  • Monday: Space & Place. Unit 5, on mapping.
  • Tuesday: Media Activism. Unit 5.
  • Thursday: Immersive Tech. Unit 4, with a guest lecturer.

Study

Media Activism

Unit 5: Power, Politics & Conflict

  • Postill, J. 2012. “Digital politics and political engagement.” In H. A. Horst & D. Miller (Eds.), Digital anthropology, pp. 165-184. London: Berg.

Unit 6: Media Activism & Ethnographic Research

  • Postill, John & Sarah Pink. 2012. “Social Media Ethnography: The Digital Researcher in a Messy Web.” In Media International Australia, no. 145, pp. 123-34. (Apparently a reread from week 47, 2018, when I read it for Digital Anthropology Unit 3.)

Immersive Technologies

Unit 4: Gaming Technology as a Game Changer – Immersive Tech Use Cases

And these videos:

Japanese

Manga

  • 車谷晴子：アイドル様の夜のお顔（2007）pp. 42-150

Memrise

  • 87,130

Podcast

Other

Articles

Podcast

Video

Week 22: 27 May – 2 June 2019

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We spent most of the week at Freiburger Filmforum, where S’ film was screened – I joined him on stage for the Q&A. It was a fantastic film festival with lots of really good ethnographic films from around the world. Almost all filmmakers were there and we got to know several of them. A very inspiring trip and a good fit to the programme I’m in.

Classes:

  • Monday: Space & Place. Unit 4, on mapping.
  • Tuesday: Media Activism. Unit 4, on media practice theory, a concept that was new to me. I did this class from Freiburg.
  • Friday: Research Proposal. Unit 2. I tried to do the class from Basel airport, but it was a complete fail due to Adobe Connect.

(Thursday’s Immersive Tech was cancelled due to a public holiday in Germany.)

After coming home from Freiburger Filmforum I rushed to the Apple Store to get back my Macbook Pro – it had got a new screen but the keyboard remains, cleaned though. We’ll see, maybe that’s enough.

And then we rushed to the monthly Critical Mass but aborted because of heavy rain.

Today I booked my preparatory fieldwork trip to Japan! I’ll be gone about four weeks in September and the beginning of October. It feels great to finally have made the decision and bought the ticket! I immediately started to get back to my Japanese studies, and I picked up a manga book I hadn’t got to read yet: My favourite mangaka Kurumatani Haruko’s アイドル様の夜のお顔 (Mr Idol’s night face?). I couldn’t find her books in any physical shop on my last Japan trip in October 2017, but Japanese Amazon delivered them to my hotel.

Next, I must contact various people and see where it may take me.

Study

Space and Place

Unit 4: Applied Methods: I – Maps from Switzerland / Indonesia. Weakness and Limitations of Mapping.

  • Wood, Denis. 2014. The Anthropology of Cartography. In Mapping Cultures, Place Practice, Performance. Palgrave. Pp. 280-303.

Unit 5: Applied Methods: II – Classical Anthro. Methods.Techniques for Interviewing & Observation.

  • Silverman, David. 2009. Chapter 3: “Ethnography and Observation.” In Doing Qualitative Research. Third Edition. Sage. Beginning: Pp. 43-56 (82).
  • Andrews, Hazel. 2012. “Mapping My Way: Map-making and Analysis in Participant Observation.” In Mapping Cultures: Place Practice, Performance. Palgrave. Pp. 216-235.

Media Activism

Unit 4: Practice, Agency & Change

  • Borofsky, R. (1994). The cultural in motion. In R. Borofsky (Ed.), Assessing cultural anthropology, pp. 313-319. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Unit 6: Media Activism & Ethnographic Research

  • Coleman, E. G. (2010). Ethnographic approaches to digital media. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, pp. 1-19.

Japanese

Manga

  • 車谷晴子：アイドル様の夜のお顔（2007）pp. 1-41.

Podcast

Video

Other

Articles

Video

Film

  • Freiburger Filmforum!

Week 21: 20-26 May 2019

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I continued tweaking my essay for Theory and History during the week. In fact, the first draft needed some major changes. As always, S was invaluable in pointing them out. I finally submitted on Friday, a full week before deadline – as planned, but still!

Sending email
Submitting …

This is the first academic paper I write since being an undergraduate student, but it would actually be fair to call it my first academic paper ever. This is on a whole different level than when I studied at Stockholm University, which was also very long ago. So therefore, I feel extremely proud and accomplished, and the whole process was so satisfactory: To read lots of papers on a certain topic, to summarise existing research and to build on it – adding my own analysis, backed up by what has already been established. The feeling is one of being part of something bigger, of contributing my little piece to the vast body or why not building of knowledge that people are continuously constructing and repairing.

I remember when I was in Rotterdam with S in April last year and we visited the campus of the Erasmus university. Their slogan was something like “Leave your mark”, and S asked me: “Are you ready to leave your mark in academia?” That’s the first time he suggested I should apply for a Master’s programme, apparently having thought about it for a long time but not knowing how to drop the hint in the right way. Well, about a year later my feeling is one of having “left my mark”. A small mark, a contribution to something bigger, and most definitely only the beginning. It’s such a fantastic feeling. So we biked to Tempelhofer Feld and enjoyed the Friday afternoon in the sun, drinking beer and eating strawberries. (Of course I have made many journalistic contributions before, but on a more independent level, and sometimes “dependency” makes all the difference. This time my contribution counts, is the feeling.)

This week’s classes:

  • Monday: Space & Place, unit 3.
  • Tuesday: Media Activism, unit 3.
  • Thursday: Immersive Technologies. With an interesting guest lecturer.
  • Friday: Research Proposal. First session.

Because I was so focused on my essay this week I had not read all the mandatory readings for Space & Place and Media Activism. It was the first time that happened in this programme, and it was exactly as bad as I had assumed: I couldn’t engage in the discussions and didn’t get as much out of the class as I usually do. I haven’t caught up yet, since I rather started the readings for next week’s unit 4 of those courses right away – plus one from unit 6 of Media Activism since I will present then.

Today I voted in the European Parliament elections.

Tomorrow I will drop off my Macbook Pro to Apple, so that it can be repaired while we’re at Freiburger Filmforum.

Study

Space and Place

Unit 4: Applied Methods: I – Maps from Switzerland / Indonesia. Weakness and Limitations of Mapping.

  • Bartley, Brendan (2012): Chapter 1: Introducing Theory. In Continuum Studies in Medieval History: Thinking Geographically, pp. 3-21.

Media Activism

Unit 4: Practice, Agency & Change

  • Postill, J. (2010). Introduction: Theorising media and practice. In B. Bräuchler & J. Postill (Eds.), Theorising media and practice, pp. 1-32.

Unit 6: Media Activism & Ethnographic Research

  • Barassi, V. (2015). The ethnography of digital activism. In V. Barassi, Activism on the web: Everyday struggles against digital capitalism, pp. 17-48. New York: Routledge.

Other

Articles

Video

Week 20: 13-19 May 2019

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A pretty full week with lots of classes:

  • Monday: Space & Place. I had only read one of the two mandatory texts, Ingold, but read Low after class.
  • Tuesday: Media Activism. Similar situation – I skimmed the second text but managed to write the mandatory review nevertheless. As an alternative to write reviews of the readings every week we can present more extensively in one unit. I chose that option and signed up to present in Unit 6: Media Activism & Ethnographic Research on 11 June 2019.
  • Wednesday: Qualitative Methods. This time on participatory action research (PAR).
  • Thursday: Immersive Technologies. A tech workshop on 360 photos (see featured image), which we enjoyed in VR headsets (mostly cardboard/plastic holders for our phones).

In Qualitative Methods the lecturer asked us to submit our presentation by video since the in-house classes in April, where we were supposed to have presented, were cancelled. So after zooming with my team members I recorded my part very spontaneously on Friday night. A perfect opportunity to try the green screen that I bought for other purposes:

Click here to display content from YouTube

I finished the “shitty first draft” of my essay for Theory & History tonight. My first drafts always tend to be quite close to the finished version (that’s why they take such time), so I expect it just to need a little finishing touch before I hand it in. I also zoomed with my classmate R to give her advise on her essay.

So much coming up, I think I must summarise it:

Upcoming deadlines and presentations, Summer semester 2019

  • 31 May: Essay deadline, Theory and History (S1)
  • 10 June: Video presentation deadline, Qualitative Methods
  • 11 June: Presentation, Media Activism
  • 17 June: Presentation, Space and Place
  • 9 August: Essay deadline, Media Activism
  • 20 September: Essay deadline, Space and Place

Otherwise the big news is that my programme will change institution from FU to HMKW. It won’t affect me though, but it means I belong to the last generation that studies the programme at Freie Universität. I’m glad I made it before the programme moved, I really like FU!

What’s more? I took S out for a nice birthday lunch, watched the Eurovision final with A (as S boycotted it) and voted for Iceland, and booked an Airbnb apartment for Freiburger Filmforum in two weeks (we had planned to camp, but it seems it will be cold).

Yesterday I had a meeting with a “genius” at the Apple store on Kudamm since the keyboard of my 2016 Macbook Pro starts getting worse. The “up” button has been unreliable for a long time, but recently the space bar started being unreliable too, which was really annoying, and tonight the backspace seems to start freaking out as well. The question is whether Apple considers “being unreliable” as enough a reason to exchange the whole top part. I also complained about miscolourings on the screen and a popping sound. I’m scheduled to hand it in just before we go to Freiburg.

In TV, we started watching the Swedish Netflix series Quicksand (“Störst av allt”) and sort of got hooked immediately. So great to see Felix Sandman, my favourite in the Fooo, move on to acting and doing it so well!

Another full week coming up. This is apparently the most busy semester of the programme. I love it. But will have to focus on giving the finishing touches to the essay – I really look forward to handing it in and leaving it behind, as its subject clashes with the current courses, which I’m getting more and more excited about.

Study

Space and Place

Unit 2: The Body, Landscape & Process

  • Ingold, Tim (1993): The Temporality of the Landscape. In World Archaeology, Vol 25, No 2: Conceptions of Time and Ancient Society. (Oct. 1993), pp. 152-174.
  • Low, Setha M. (2009): Towards an Anthropological Theory of Space and Place. In Semiotica 175 – 1⁄4, pp. 21-37.

Unit 3: Scapes, Sites & The Berlin Brigade

  • Appadurai, Arjun. (1990): Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. In Theory Culture Society, Vol. 7, pp. 295-310.

Media Activism

Unit 2: Historical Developments

  • Kidd, D., & Rodriguez, C. (2009): Introduction. In C. Rodriguez, D. Kidd, & L. Stein (Eds.), Making our media: Global initiatives toward a democratic public sphere, Volume 1: Creating new communication spaces, pp. 1-22.
  • Melucci, A. (1996): The construction of collective action. In Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age, pp. 13-41 – skimmed!

Unit 6: Media Activism & Ethnographic Research

Qualitative Methods

  • Stoecker, R. (2013): Chapter 3: The Community Development Context of Research. In Research Methods for Community Change. A Project-Based Approach (2 ed.), pp. 47-72.
    • (Chapter 2: The Goose Approach to Research (p. 25-46), I read in Week 15, 2019.)

Immersive Technologies

Other

Articles

Video