I like Blogging. At the Social Anthropologists national conference I got really interested in the fact that lots of the ethnographers wrote field notes in a different language and then wrote them up in their first langauge and sometimes put them into English for their PHD or journal entries. There was a big discussion on how the language changed the lens and the perspective. I got really interested in the idea of field notes and had a look about for some information - methods of gathering them. This was why I thought I'd keep a journal written in long hand as I've not really picked up a pen to write in joined up since I did my a levels. My Physio says that when I hold a pen my first rib pops out of alinement and this is an anchor for the pelvis - my Pelvis and sacreal joints give me annual problems so writing does actually make me ill.
Anyway a lifetime of avoiding writting long hand could not be shifted and although i baught a nice new book with lines on one side and graph paper on the other I could not bring myself to write much in it. My Ethnographer friend Tim has started doing Audio recorded field notes perhaps I'll try this but I think I'd never bother to listen to them - sound as a medium is sometimes very dense and linier.
I just read a transcript of an interview with Helen Sharman the first british person in space who came from sheffield. It was left on my desk and I was just about to put it in the Bin. Transcripts of spoken words are like copies they are a literal transfer of spoken word to paper and occupy a funny modle space - we read them with our text brain but they are infact not written text but words used as a camera to present a conversation - people use this re-presentation in Verbatum theatre but it feels to me that some of the conversations about authenticity and representation could be explored through thinking about transcripts - Might have to revisit Barthes on this. Anyway Helen has just left the earths atomosphere and says.
'When I was in space, the gulf war was happening and the ground war had recently started and I could look down and actually see the fires. Now seeing fires from space is quite rare, usually you see the smoke because the wind blows smoke in straight lines, your eye sort of follows these rather unnatural lines on the earths surface, but to actually see the golden glow of fire is very rare because it has to be extremely big and we could see those fires, that was scary.'
So I like the blog for now as I feel like I can keep it up so I'm going to ditch the long hand journal as I don't seem to be able to get out of the Dyslecsics habit of a lifetime of avoiding writing longhand and it didn't give me a lens or a new way of reflecting or ordering thoughts it just made me guilty for not doing it
Perhaps we should do one to one interviews at 2 points across the project and get them transcribed so we can see if this brings out a different type of information?
1 comment:
I got interested in talk to transcripts this weekend - I was at this literacy conference in Swansea and there was a lot of talk about talk.
I had this transcript of girls doing pre-play talk that is, setting up talk, getting ready to do the actual thing talk.
They had this environoment box they had made which was the artefact.
They kept telling me about how the dolphins were going there, and there and then there were the jellyfish. The dad died. It was all very sad.
Maybe we like blogging because it has that experimental pre-play feel and you can risk stuff on a blog you wouldn't in a proper article.
By the way, I am turning into a commenter not a blogger does that matter?
Post a Comment