exploringmapping

planning

Shannon Mattern, Ph.D.Assistant Professorwww.wordsinspace.net

“survey the historical development of the field”

“critically examine some of the key terms presently at the center of debates concerning the defining goals and purpose of the work” in the field

“create a collaborative, explicitly intradisciplinary space within the department to explore the often competing commitments of our discipline and to articulate the stakes (individual, field-wide, institutional, cultural)” of various approaches

“provide students with opportunities to locate themselves and their professional commitments in relationship to the field” Crisco et. al. 369

Understanding Media Studies is a required colloquium for all Media Studies students in their first semester of study. Students must register for the Monday night lecture and an online discussion section; online students register only for the online discussion section and access recorded lectures and lecture materials through Blackboard. Recordings will be posted within 24 hours of the class meeting. Every week, members of the Media Studies Principal Faculty and other invited guests from the University and the wider field of media studies and practice will share their own work and methods, thereby exposing students to the varied dimensions of research and practice in the field, and particularly in our Department. Over the course of the semester, students will meet the instructors, support staff, and colleagues with whom they will work throughout their graduate studies; become familiar with useful University resources; and develop skills and practices needed for graduate study. Students will complete several reflective and exploratory exercises leading incrementally toward the completion of a comprehensive academic plan, which will help students to map their own paths through the program and will serve as an essential advising document. Grading will be pass/fail.

C. Wright Mills:

“A widespread, informal interchange of such reviews of ‘the state of my problems’ among working [researchers] is, I suggest, the only basis for an adequate statement of ‘the leading problems of [the field].’…. Three kinds of interludes – on problems, methods, theory – ought to come out of the work of [researchers], and lead into it again; they should be shaped by work-in-progress and to some extent guide that work. It is for such interludes that a professional association finds its intellectual reason for being.”

•Traditions within which they’re working

•How they develop project ideas and hone them into feasible tasks

•Methods

•Grants, fellowships, festivals, awards

•Professional organizations

•Professional resources

•Courses they teach

•Theses they’ve advised

Guy Debord, Naked City, 1957;Constant Nieuwenhuys, Symbolische voorstelling van New Babylon, 1969

mapping

“As a [researcher] you have to control this rather elaborate interplay [between past, present, and future; between professional and personal], to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman. But how can you do this? One answer is: you must set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist’s way of saying: - keep a journal” (Mills).

“…use your experience and relate it directly

to various works in progress. By serving

as a check on repetitious work, your file also enables you

to conserve your energy. It also

encourages you to capture ‘fringe-

thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday

life, snatched of conversations

overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead

to more systematic thinking, as well as

lend intellectual relevance to more

directed experience.” (Mills)

“Under various topics in your file there are ideas, personal notes, excerpts from books, bibliographic items and outlines of projects…. [S]ort all these items into a master file of ‘projects,’ with many subdivisions. The topics, of course, change, sometimes quite frequently.”

“…the use of the file encouraged expansion of the categories which you use in your thinking. And the way in which these categories change, some being dropped and others being added is an index of your intellectual progress and breadth.” (Mills)

Reflective Journal

“‘off-loading’ device” : “allow[s] the learner to take stock, evaluate and ‘deposit’ ideas and feelings about the learning experience” (58)

dynamic: “a depository for a range of information in a range of media, which is added to and consulted on a regular basis” (59)

Possible Contents: bibliographic database, project glossary, contacts, correspondence, activity log

Carole Gray & Julian Malins, Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design

(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).

Reflective Journal

Document the failures

Evaluate the pace and progress of your work -- e.g., key incidents, decisions, realizations

Brainstorm, think aloud, have insights, make decisions, make changes, ask ‘what if’ questions, make plans for improvement

Carole Gray & Julian Malins, Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004); http://www.biad.uce.ac.uk/research/rti/riadm/issue1/abstra

ct.htm

Commonplace Book

http://mycommonplace.com/

"Most children like to collect things. At four I started to collect documents of my own development as correlated with world patterns of developing technology. Beginning in 1917, I determined to employ my already rich case history, as objectively as possible, in documenting the life of a suburban New Englander, born in the Gay Nineties (1895)-- the year automobiles were introduced, the wireless telegraph and the automatic screw machine were invented, and X-rays were discovered; having his boyhood in the turn of the century; and maturing during humanity's epochal graduation from the inert, materialistic19th into the dynamic 20th century. I named my documentation the Chronofile.”

—Buckminster Fuller, From Synergetics Dictionary citing Citizen of 21st. Century, (U, or 0, Chap. 1), 1 Apr'67 (http://www.bfi.org/node/105)

Do very hard things, just for the sake of it.

Try to make things that can become better in other people's minds than they were in yours.

A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius--the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this "scenius” --it means "the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene." It is the communal form of the concept of genius.

planning

Methodolatry (n): common form of academic idolatry; glorification of the god Method; boxing knowledge into prefabricated fields, thereby hiding threads of connectedness, hindering New Discoveries, preventing the raising of New Questions, erasing ideas that do not fit into Respectable Categories of Questions and Answers (Daly 1987).

I am an unashamed pluralist who uses multiple methodologies…to give greater rigor, reliability and depth to the work I do. Each element is designed both to test and to complement the findings of other elements. The different methods add layers of information but also provide a means of identifying inconsistencies and weaknesses.

--Sarah Bicknell, “Here to Help: Evaluation and Effectiveness” In Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Ed., Museum, Media, Message (Museum Meanings) (Routledge, 1999): 283-4.

http://www.vectorsjournal.org/

http://www.daytonexpress.org/

“…the multimodal humanist…brings together databases, scholarly tools, networked writing, and peer-to-peer commentary while also leveraging the potential of visual and aural media…”

“She aims to produce work that reconfigures the relationships among author, reader, and technology while investigating the computer simultaneously as a platform, a medium, and a visualization device. She thinks carefully about the relationship of form to content, expression to idea.” (McPherson 120)

“[I]magin[e] what it would be like to immerse yourself in a scholarly argument as you might immerse yourself in a movie or a video game…. [Investigat[e] what happens when scholarship looks and feels differently, requiring new modes of engagement from the reader/user.”

We use these media tools “not because the tools are cool or new…or because the audience for our work might be expanded…, but because scholars come to realize that they understand their arguments and their objects of study differently, even better, when they approach them through multiple modalities and emergent and interconnected forms of literacy.” (McPherson 120-1)

James R. Ackerman & Robert W. Karrow, Jr. Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Janet Abrams & Peter Hall, Eds., Else/Where Mapping: New Cartographies and Territories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006).

Minna Aslama, Kalle Siira, Ronald Rice, Pekka Aula, “Mapping Communication and Media Research in the U.S.” Communication Research Centre, University of Helsinki, Research Report (February 2007).

Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York; Verso, 2002).

Virginia Crisco, Chris W. Gallagher, Deborah Minter, Katie Hupp Stahlnecker, & John Talbird, “Graduate Education as Education: The Pedagogical Arts of Institutional Critique” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 3:3 (2003): 359-76.

John Culkin, “Why Study the Media?” excerpt from doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Education (1964): http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article430.html

Carole Gray and Julian Malins, Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).

Katharine Harmon, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).

Joanne Hershfield & Anna McCarthy, “Media Practice: Notes Toward a Critical Production Studies” Cinema Journal 36:3 (Spring 1997): 108-112.

Henry Jenkins, “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” [white paper] Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning (MacArthur Foundation, 2006).

Douglas Kellner, “Media Communications vs. Cultural Studies: Overcoming the Divide” Communication Theory 5:2 (1995): 162-177.

Tara McPherson, “Introduction: Media Studies and the Digital Humanities” Cinema Journal 48:2 (Winter 2009): 119-23.

C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” Appendix to The Sociological Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1959).

Gerald O’Grady, “The Preparation of Teachers of Media,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 3:3 Special Issue: Film, New Media, and Aesthetic Education (July 1969): 113-134.

John Durham Peters, “Genealogical Notes on ‘The Field’” Journal of Communication 43:4 (Autumn 1993): 132-.

Colin Robson, Real World Research, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1993/2002).

Grace Roosevelt, “The Triumph of the Market and the Decline of Liberal Education: Implications for Civic Life” Teachers College Record (2006): http://www.tcrecord.org/

David Rumsey Map Collection: http://www.davidrumsey.com/gmaps.html

Pamela J. Shoemaker, “Communication in Crisis: Theory, Curricula, and Power” Journal of Communication 43:4 (Autumn 1993)

William David Sloan, Makers of the Media Mind: Journalism Educators and Their Ideas (Lawrence Earlbaum, 1990).

William Uricchio, “Historicizing Media in Transition” In David Thorburn & Henry Jenkins, Eds., Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 23-38.

Kevin Williams, Understanding Media Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).