att arkivera bilder

I lördags var jag på ett seminarium som anordnades i samband med Fotografi i fokus. Det handlade på olika sätt om fotografier i våra kulturarvsinstitutioner och särskilt intressant tycker jag att diskussionen om digitalisering var. Anna Dahlgren från Nordiska museet talade om i sin presentation om hur “the material turn” i forskningen har betydelse för hur man ska tänka kring digitalisering. Foto är inte bara en bild med ett innehåll som visas fram utan baksidan, kontexten och de materiella aspekterna kan vara minst lika viktiga. Hur har bilden brukats? Vem har använt den? Var finns den? Det har också skett saker med tillkomsten av digitala bilder från att det är ett analogt foto som digitaliserades till att vi har digitalt födda foto till hur foto idag också distribueras och sprids. Det har funnits en uppdelning i det analoga och det digitala men idag läggs egentligen inte så stor vikt vid det. Snarare måste man fundera på det materiella även för de digital födda fotografierna. Anna tog sedan upp exempel på hur beskrivningar av samma foto i olika samlingar kan se ut. Ett foto med en kvinna i klänning och en fotogenlampa bredvid sig var beskriven på ett sätt i Moderna Museets samling och ett annat på Nordiska museet. På Moderna var fotografen nämnd men inte på Nordiska, på Nordiska stod det om klänningen (det var en modebild) men inte på Moderna. Det är ett väldigt tydligt exempel på hur kontextens spelar en roll för vad vi väljer att beskriva och vilken betydelse vi ger till vad som ska beskrivas. Plötsligt höjs det en röst i publiken som lägger till att ingen av beskrivningarna innehåller namnet på modellen som sägs vara Heidi Göransson en känd modell från tiden då fotot var taget. Detta tillägg är också en intressant illustration nämligen hur kännedom om ett särskilt material kan ha betydelse. Anna tog upp det som en särskild poäng och hur användningen av arkiv underlättas tack vare alla kunniga arkivarier och intendenter som kan bidra med mer kunskap än det som syns i beskrivningarna. Hon lyfte också fram vikten av en dialog mellan forskare och ABM-sektorn för hur man ska arbeta med digitalisering och digitalt bevarande framöver för att hitta olika strategier framåt.

En annan aspekt på digitala bilder kom fram i Kajsa Hartigs presentation. Hon pekade på hur större institutioner tillgängliggjort bildmaterial digitalt de senaste 5 åren, bland de första var The Tibet Album från British Museum 2006, Library of Congress började lägga ut bilder på Flickr 2008, ett samarbete mellan Life och Google resulterade i Lifes arkiv på nätet, på Wikimedia Commons har tyska Bundesarchiv lagt ut 80 000 bilder. Kunskapsproduktion kan därmed ske genom en annan typ av tillgängliggörande av bilder och annoteringen av dem. Vem blir användarna i detta och hur kan användarna själva bidra tillbaka när de kan hitta bilderna på webben. I Australien har Powerhouse Museum använt Instagram för att allmänheten ska kunna bidra med sina bilder. Tillgängliggörandet öppnar upp för nya sätt att interagera med bilderna och möjligen andra användare. Men på vilket sätt ska ABM-institutionerna bidra i detta och samla, förvalta och förmedla bilder? Kajsa frågade vad är det vi ska samla in, hur bevarar vi kontexten och hur kan vi förmedla mer än bara motivet? Just med tanke på det materiella som Anna tog upp som viktiga aspekter för forskningen är det viktigt att tänka på detta.

Det är alltså många frågor som man måste ställa när man talar om digitalisering och digitalt bevarande men det är ju också det som gör det så intressant!

Tags: digitalisering

Ny blogg för ABM-mastern i Lund

Äntligen har vår blogg för masterutbildningen i ABM (arkivvetenskap, biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap och museologi) gått live. Den heter Otlet och varför vi valde det namnet kanske ni kan förstå om ni läser om denna intressanta person på bloggen. Bloggen kommer innehålla både nyheter från utbildningen men också om ABM-relaterade saker och vad som händer i biblioteks- arkiv- och museivärlden. Förhoppningsvis kommer den att vara intressant såväl för de som funderar på att läsa utbildningen i Lund, de som redan är studenter här och de som är verksamma inom de olika yrkeskategorierna som vi utbildar till.

Kolla in Otlet på:

http://www.abm.kult.lu.se/

Order from chaos

This is how my desk looks like at the moment…will this somehow become an article soon? Sometimes you wonder how that can happen. I’m trying to make this chaos to become something readable.

Blogging academics as part of labour politics

I recently read an article by Melissa Gregg and have been thinking of her approach on academic blogging. The title is Banal Bohemia: Blogging from the Ivory Tower Hot-Desk and she discusses how PhD students and junior faculty bloggers differs in the way they uses blogs from senior academics. Her point of departure is subcultural theory, which I never heard about before I read this, and it’s interesting to see a similar idea like mine as the starting point for her discussion. That is, it is similar in the sense that blogging practices is situated in other cultural practices. For Gregg that means that the blogging academics she has studied uses the blogs as a way to handle the pressure that they feel in their work as academics. The blog community forms a place, a subculture, for the blogging researchers were they can discuss the changing conditions in an institutionalised academia which have changed for the worse. Gregg says “blogs offer parables of these wider shifts, a suite of ideological narratives for explaining and understanding what is happening”. Even if I can see Gregg’s point I haven’t at all seen that kind of discourse in the blogs that I have studied. Some (most?) of the blogs in Gregg’s study are anonymous and I have myself specifically chosen blogs were you can identify the person behind it. Maybe that is the big difference? However, I find the notion of blogs as “an embryonic site for labour politics” intriguing.

Lund University and blogging

A new sub site is added to the Lund University web presence, it includes the blogs that are written by researchers, students or others at Lund University. You will find a link from the top page of the university’s web site to the “Focus on Lund University” site. Here blogs and facebook groups as well as RSS for news are collected. My blog is of course in the list ☺ even though I am a bit slow on updating it…however to be more frequent is one of the promises for the new year.

2 articles about scholarly blogging practices

I’ve published two articles during the last couple of months! They will be included eventually in my thesis since I’m writing a compilation thesis (sammanläggningsavhandling) which means that it will consist of four articles in total, with a summary that binds them together. It feels great to be able to see that your work suddenly is out there for others to read:

Kjellberg, Sara (2009). “Blogs as Interfaces between Several Worlds: A Case Study of the Swedish Academic Blogosphere”. Human IT, 10:3, 1-45.

Kjellberg, Sara (2009). “Scholarly blogging practice as situated genre: an analytical framework based on genre theory” Information Research, 14 (3) paper 410.

User or something else?

I heard just now and interesting report on the radio from the conference Interact in Uppsala. The conference is about Human Computer Interaction and one of the keynote speakers, Kristina Höök, problematised the user concept. Can we talk about a user in the new digital development where we see people are as much producing as consuming? User feels to passive she says and suggets instead actors, players, creators or constructors. Her reflection was that we make it harder to be innovative if we think of a user rather than a creator when we design new digital tools.

I thought that was rather intriguing at the same time I have sometimes been thinking of my own project in terms of understanding a special user group. When I study why and how researchers use blogs I see that as part of being more aware of how to meet their needs in other situations of their scholarly process (and by we here I mean librarians or the research libraries for example), but maybe I should rather think of actors actually…

Twitter is really entering the scholarly world

If you would have asked me six months ago I would have just shaken my head…but now I just tried out Twitter to see what it was after meeting Lilia.  A couple of months later I have made some observations about scholarly activities on Twitter…

• I learned today from Cornelius that a guy has started a way of listing mentions of papers in ArXiv in Tweets and had to look it up. So from the Physicsworld.com blog I found out that Robert Simpson, a PhD student from Cardiff University in the UK, is the one counting tweets “citing” ArXiv papers.

• From Stephanie I saw about the Ethnographic “Twibe”. There you will get a collection of Tweets that include tag(s): ethnography OR fieldwork OR anthropology.
• In gatewatching an attempt to list Australian academics/researchers that are Twittering has been made.

Somehow one way of using Tweets as a remembering tool of links is done in the same way as the early blogs that often were link collections of good web sites to remember or recommend to your community.

What does writing do

I found Bazerman’s Shaping “Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science” online fully available as a PDF file, which was great since it is hard to get hold on and I have to return my library copy now. As the title suggests he writes about written knowledge in science and studies the writing practices in different disciplines. His standpoint is constructivist oriented and praxis based and is looking at science as carried out by rhetorics. It is all in the writing you could say but not entirely so or at least you have to problematize what you mean by writing. To carry out his examination how written knowledge in the sciences is created he uses case studies and looks at rhetoric activity as the interaction of microevents where the choices are made by individuals and macrostructures where the context and social forms over time is shaping choices. You could also say that he intertwine the scholarly practice with the written discourse and don’t separate it to make specific writing rules etc. The writing is not only defined as the text and you can not tell what writing does by only textual analysis but Bazerman situates the text in the discourse community much in the same line of thinking that I understand Swales genre theoretical approach. Also with Bazerman is physics the main case study – although it isn’t the intention for Bazerman it is strange that physics always becomes the discipline to use as a “role model”, why is that?

Tags: writing

Unconference

Quite recently I stumbled upon the concept of unconference which is kind of a triggering idea. It is a way of meeting people which share the same interest that you do, but not in the traditional organised way of a conference but more chaotic and doing/creating something together. There is no spectators on a unconference, you have to participate and be active otherwise the whole idea fails. Some examples that have come in my way of this nice kind of sharing knowledge is:

Geek Girl Meetup - yesterday in Stockholm. I wish I could have been there it sure looked fun.

Bibcamp – a lot of librarians meet in Göteborg later this spring to discuss e-publishing and web stuff.

Reboot – about digital technology and change in Copenhagen each year, which in 2009 will be in late June.