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<TITLE>Imaginative Ethnography Paper (placeholder Title)</TITLE>
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<CENTER><IMG SRC="clouds.jpg" ALIGN="BOTTOM"> </CENTER>
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<h2>THST6329: Imaginative Ethnography Paper (placeholder Title)</h2>
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<h3>Michael Palumbo</h3>
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<p> some notes about creative usage of this webpage.
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[would be great to embed the pageNN.html of the matching indexNN.html, and embed that in an iframe somewhere in this page. however i don't yet know how to do that in html]
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From the beginning of this course, I approached my learning process by experimenting with documentation. The intention, at the outset, was perhaps just simply to continue on from previous experiments with documentation of the ontogenesis (Boesch 182) of a project, as described in [citation and link for dvcs and research-creation, and the accelerationism and version control papers.] These earlier papers explore the creative potential of leveraging an already established archival system that is used by teams of programmers to manage the changes made to a given project towards expanded uses for research-creation. I enrolled in the Performance Ethnography course because I wanted to expand my usage of version control sytems through a type of enquiry that, as turned out to be oft-repeated in class, is not a method, but "...a methodology because it is improvisational." (Kazubowski-Houston 2017 [[week 1 cite]])
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The mechanisms of version control systems concern the way in which the changes to a work are represented. Where Professor Kazubowski-Houston told us at during the first class that
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<BLOCKQUOTE>
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A lot of performance ethnography has been to communicate research findings. a more rare approach is using performance ethnography to use it as a way of doing research, as a form of a research-creation practice. (CITE, during week 1)
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It is in this that VCS is well-suited to ethnographic practice. To use a version control system is to engage with, structure, and learn from the history of a process and the contemporaneous sentiments about its produced artifacts, people, and their exchanges (CITE dCOG).
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<br>What tended to emerge over the course of the past 4 months of in-class discussions was a sentiment about embracing the messy, unpredictable, and asynchronous tendencies of ethnographic research. [such as?] I was inspired by this very early on. And as I have been increasingly using a web browser as the delivery method and medium of my research papers, I grew emboldened by to represent both the 'finished' -- albeit probably best described as 'most recent' -- version along with all of its precedent versions in some form of non-linear or asynchronous fashion. I wondered if perhaps this would mean that upon first visiting this web page, a visitor would be taken to a random version of the page. However, would I make it possible to then navigate both forward and backward in time through different page states? Would I not provide this option, leaving the reader to have to refresh the page and look at the next version to load?
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I became interested in the prospect of presenting a 'finished work' in both linear and non-linear forms.
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For instance, during the latter few classes of the course, in-class notes were taken using Sangwon Lee's <a href="http://livewriting.eecs.umich.edu/"><i>Live Writing</i></a> interface (Lee 2015), as can be <a href="http://livewriting.eecs.umich.edu/?aid=YUdyxM7qIA74QMRSv14B">seen here.</a>
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<p> It is worthwhile to point out that from each experiment in form and representation came at least one desire to try and use this form somewhat differently the next time. For example, after using the Live Writing website for a few note-taking sessions, I began to want to embed the playback in a web page. This was motivated by wanting a visitor to remain on the page instead of linking outward. However, due to a security restriction placed by Lee into that website's code [what was the name of that problem? something to do with allowing embedding in iframes? search notes for this] this simply was not going to be possible.
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<p> I had been introduced to Sangwon just one week previously, and so in response to my request for assistance in embedding the playback of my writing in a page, he recommended that I try using a similar tool called Scrimba. Lee and the developers of Scrimba have differnt goals in mind for their work, but what their projects share is the ability to capture the input of text in real-time, and allow anyone to play it back. Where they differ, is that Lee's project is better suited towards creative and/or limited research writing, while Scrimba is designed for live programming, which is an educational tool. With Scrimba, I was suddenly able to write again in HTML, and render it to a webpage all within the same recording. I used it thusly in the <a href="https://blackcreekscores.weebly.com"><i>Black Creek Scores</i></a> project to create a <a href="https://blackcreekscores.weebly.com/#score_3">short text and image-based graphic score</a> of my path through the creek and some of the thoughts I had along the way.
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[[maybe say a little about what this taught you, or made you think of next?]]
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<p>I had intended to return to this very same tool to write the entirety of this paper. However, there were a few concerns. What if the Scrimba website produced an error during the recording, would I lose my work? With no information available related to the maximum length of a recording, would it be worth it to risk losing potentially entire pages of work by pushing this neat tool beyond its yet unkown limit? While some of my recent other works have each been crafted in the name of embracing and exploring failure, the fact that this ethnography carried a looming deadline pursuaded me to find another solution.
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<p>Following a critical reflexivity, I also questioned the intention and effect of framing the entire writing process in one singular, linear representation -- an endurance performance, if you will. Who would this serve? Through this I became conscious of a desire to perform a level of intelligence and 'put-together-ness'. Along this analysis of my own anxiety surrounding the presentation of myself in my work and process, I asked to whom and for what purpose would a very long video serve? What might one conclude about myself as a performer that I, at the outset at least, expected that a viewer would watch the entirety of a paper's coming into being? Further, while the video would purport to present my entire mental process as contemporaneously written text, it might give rise to a false narrative of an author with a consistent, singularly focused mind, rather than one that paused to do tasks such as laundry, devote time to serious procrastination, and what, at times, I might rather be doing.
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I began to wonder what, when freed from preoccupations with the macrotemporal (Roads 3) accounting and subsequent representation of this paper's ontogenesis, what specific action could define the shorter temporal segmentations of the process? This particular problem offered the potential of a new way of approaching the work. While the VCS used in the aforementioned papers written in the spring of last year was sufficient for the contemporaneous documentation of changes to a project and the analysis of data contained therein, it a uses revision tracking algorithm that stores whatever lines of a document have changed. Referred to as delta compression (cite), this method saves storage space because it does not store the full contents of the file at each state save, but instead collects the differences between the current version and its immediate precedent version and stores them in a type of file called <i>.diff</i>. While this method is certainly beneficial for reducing the amount of data transmitted between collaborators, and is suitable for retrieving an older version, the diff's representation of a file, when taken out of the context of its nearest versions (the version before and after it), may not provide a viewer with enough information of the document's role in the overall project.
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<blockquote><p><iframe src="_lacking_context.html" width=100% height="400"></iframe>
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Note: conversion of the .diff into HTML formatting handles by the diff2html library, by <a href="https://github.com/rtfpessoa">rtfpessoa</a></blockquote>
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I wanted to have a copy of each saved state of this ethnographic document, paired with its corresponding diff which would include the full context of everything I had already typed in the document. Ideally, it would be nice to for the program also convert the latter into html so that there could be more options for how to make use of it in the final webpage, and so that I would not need to do this step for every single diff generated which, at the <a href="page133.html" target="_blank">time of this writing, is up to 133</a>. I set out to write a small computer program using node.js [[CITE]] which would run on the command line in the background while I worked.
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The first step that the program would need to complete would be to watch this document I am writing -- whose filename is <i>index.html</i> -- for modifications. In other words, each time I saved index.html, the program would notice this and begin to create the files I wanted.
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Once a save has been noticed, the program would then need to request a diff from the version control system, collate it alongside its full context within the document, and convert it to html. After a few tries, I came across a javascript library called <i>diff2html</i> (Fernandez DATE) that converts .diff files to .html.
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+ <!--The result was that for each time that I saved this very document, a copy would be produced and renamed with its numbered place in the project's history, along with a modified diff that included the full scope of the state it is describing.-->
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The last step would be to make sure that the version control system is now also tracking the two new files that were generated by the program, so that eventually, when the site is finished, all of the states and diffs would be stored on the remote server and accessible to the visitor of the site.
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Featured below is the code for the program that produces both a copy of the index.html document and its full-context diff in html for each time the file was saved:
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<iframe src="diff2js.html" width=100% height="300"></iframe>
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<BLOCKQUOTE>
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For Pink, "A methodology based in and a commitment to understanding the senses provides a route to forms of knowledge and knowing not accounted for in conventional forms of ethnography. It often leads us to the normally not spoken, the invisible and the unexpected -- those things that people do not perhaps neessarily think it would be worth mentioning, or those things that tend to be felt or sensed ratber than spoken about." (Pink 53)
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, and what affordances and constraints might that provide?
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<p> for the bulk of the writing of this ethnography, I wanted to have a copy of every single saved state of the paper [[and, WHY did you want this? how to relate to course material?]]. I then had the idea to have each state represented in html rendered as a page -- like the final version would be -- but also to verbosely label the changes between each of the states, a form of documentation referred to as delta encoding. (cite)
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<br>[[more on delta encoding later? With delta encoding, ]]
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<p> and taking from the ethic of the radical engineer, to always be questionning how a tool can be used differently. (cite the guy who wrote the article on alan kay?)
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Imaginings Workshops: Traces of Silence
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- Monday, November 20: Black Creek ethnographic Walk
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- Monday, November 27: First meeting with group members
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- Monday, December 4: Presentation of the ethnographic scores piece.
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1.a. Description of my imaginative ethnographic process(es)
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1.b. Analysis of my imaginative ethnographic process(es)
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2.a. Description of the ensuing ethnographic representations
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<br>- with an eye to my own positionality and engagement as an ethnographer.
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2.b. Analysis of the ethnographic representations.
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describe and critically examine their findings through analytical, creative, and imaginative writing
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For Pink, "A methodology based in and a commitment to understanding the senses provides a route to forms of knowledge and knowing not accounted for in conventional forms of ethnography. It often leads us to the normally not spoken, the invisible and the unexpected -- those things that people do not perhaps neessarily think it would be worth mentioning, or those things that tend to be felt or sensed ratber than spoken about." (Pink 53)
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This is how the document began, as a previously abandoned attempt at writing a web page for my presentation in class on Sarah Pink's Sensory Ethnography. This speaks a little to my process, I prefer to start with a page that has something on it, regardless of whether that content will remain in a later version:
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<blockquote><p><iframe src="_startpoint_index.html" width=100% height="400"></iframe></blockquote>
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<p> <a name="modulation"> note to self, go to page 30 of pink and insert your marginalia and shimojo and shams and newell and shams. </a>
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<p><h2> Learning </h2>
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For example, following Wenger's position that "...learning ... [is] the ability to negotiate new meanings," I have create explicit links between notes in this document to augment this. i.e.
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<p> Linking <a href="#modulation">modulation to</a> where Pink notes that "...Seremetakis suggests that 'sensory memory or the mediation on the historical substance of experience is not mere repetition but transformation that brings the past inot the present as a natal event. (1994: 7)" (Pink 44)
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</BODY>
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</HTML>
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