English

Practice-led Outcome

Submitted by Lindsay on Sat, 10/13/2007 - 16:32

Even though I was accepted onto the PhD programme with a Scholarship, in the Scottish practice-led PhD system it is usual for researchers in their first year to be classed as MPhil students with a transfer to PhD after one year. For this transfer to take place students have to make a presentation of their work, give a brief talk and write a paper of around 10,000 words. Next week I will present some of my practical work in a public setting, the details of which I’ve listed below. After this I will be concentrating on my transfer paper for which I have been given a six-month extension.

blogger API and del.icio.us rss feed block

Submitted by acracia on Thu, 10/11/2007 - 17:16

Hello world:
The already configured module called "blogger api" has a kind of hard to get feature really useful:

The little image at the right of the rss blocks now allows you to quickly enter a review on your "research journal".

This way you can quickly pick the items from your (or other's!) rss feeds and create a review of them.

easy mapping

Submitted by acracia on Thu, 10/11/2007 - 15:51

easy mapping - So the trick to map easily is:
I take pictures with my Canon Powershot A630, and get the gps information from my telephone.
I match them with gpscorrelate-gui (I have to get the proper commandline yet…). The most important part is calculating the difference between your camera and your gps, so you can align them perfectly. For doing so, a nice trick is to start the mapping taking a picture of the gps driver.

Edrigram: Newsletter of European Digital Rights Initiative

Submitted by scavenger on Wed, 10/10/2007 - 19:56

From: EDRI-gram newsletter
To: edri-news@edri.org
Subject: EDRI-gram newsletter - Number 5.19, 10 October 2007
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 21:06:11 +0300 (19:06 BST)

Working Backwards Through a Methodology

Submitted by Lindsay on Mon, 10/08/2007 - 18:40

It is almost one year since I started my practice-led PhD, and in that time my eight-page proposal has reduced to five hundred words and grew again like an unwieldy hedge that needs constantly maintained by clipping. This first year has also been spent avoiding the issue of how, as a practicing artist, I can fit my non-verbal language and ways of researching into a recognised framework, where my hypothesis or questions are still not clear.

Subjects and Questions

Submitted by Lindsay on Mon, 10/08/2007 - 18:36

For my Master of Fine Arts degree I started looking at the cross-over of interior and exterior landscapes. My initial investigations were done in quite a basic way, where I concerned myself with the sanitised representations of ‘man-made’ nature contained in domestic interior and exterior decoration, taking the separation of space provided by architecture for granted. The time-span that predominately interested me was from the 1750’s through to the Victorian age.

Conclusions

Submitted by Armin Medosch on Mon, 10/08/2007 - 16:19

We live in an extraordinary time when the democratic cornucopia of media is very close to becoming reality and where there are hardly any technical barriers, and if there are the free software community will be capable of solving them. Yet the power elites have already found ways of either subverting that and subverting the creative impulse and the desire of the people, or they are simply moving the goalposts by reminding us that they have naked force on their side.

The Internet as Democratic Media Cornucopia

Submitted by Armin Medosch on Mon, 10/08/2007 - 16:16

The 20th century can be understood along the lines of a process of democratization of access to media and the means of cultural production. Things that originally were the privilege of social elites only became accessible for a much greater number of people. At the beginning of the 20th century access to education and knowledge was restricted as well as access to high culture. People from lower income classes had insufficient means of participating in the democratic process because they were either not allowed to vote or they did not have an opportunity to get an informed opinion.

Subcultural Communications

Submitted by Armin Medosch on Mon, 10/08/2007 - 16:02

Only 10 years later, in 1980, the post-hippie rock industry had become one of the repressive aspects of capitalism's media machine. The democratic 'spectacle' had been enhanced by modern subconscious manipulation techniques derived from advertisement, the rise of 'telegenic' politicians such as Reagan to power and new techniques of opinion polling. In the early 1980ies centrist German political parties had reached a compromise over the liberalisation of democratic media. The deal foresaw the running of privately owned radio and TV in post-war West Germany for the first time.

The Decline of the Public Sphere

Submitted by Armin Medosch on Mon, 10/08/2007 - 15:56

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Jürgen Habermas (1962/1990) gives a historic account of the formation of the public sphere and its decline. There he argues that in the feudal system, while public events did happen, they were merely of a representational character. Everybody was present, but in a representational capacity only, there was no public discourse, no difference of opinion was allowed and all actual power was centralized in the institution of the souvereign/monarch. The events of public life followed a strict ceremonial protocol.