Utopian practices

What is utopian practices? I was at a conference yesterday were this question was asked, and the practices that are meant as being utopian is the practices that develop when art, design and science join together.
One important point in the end of the day was that we have to understand the process. We should study the black-box of the co-practiced work. To understand the process will be a good starting point for more collaboration and how it can be used. It was also said that to be able to use the collaboration for something in the end it’s incredible important with evaluation. A question was asked about how we evaluate the boundary objects that is created in these utopian practices?

The evalutaion was also what we discussed some of us afterwards, even though it might seem boring to bring that issue up after talking about the idea of sparkling collaborations and how visionary work can happen when joining these three together. If we want to bring the utopian practices one step further our idea was that the evaluation and how you can report what has been created in this co-practice must also be brought into focus.

The programme can be found at de Balies web and they will also in a couple of days put a video out with the presentations from the day.

Ethics in research

There is a lot of questions regarding ethics that arise when you are conducting research. In Sweden there is a new law and evolving a new praxis for “research involving humans”, including not only studies in medicine, where you have to hand in an application to a ethical vetting board:
http://www.epn.se/start/startpage.aspx

Although I know from a friend that handed in this kind of application to the ethical board that it was not easy to adapt the format of what you where supposed to describe about your research project to how you are doing research in humanities. The application form was still including things that are targeted only at medical research.

For that reason you could in way talk here about the way natural sciences or medical sciences practices will have an influence on how research will be performed also in social sciences or humanities. There is similar discussion in Sweden in regards to publishing practices and how the assessment of research is based on practices from a certain set of disciplines.

In June there will be a workshop in Amsterdam addressing ethical considerations in doing e-research. It would be interesting to discuss there the above issue…”how will the ethical rules and laws that are being developed in the end influence the way we actually perform research? This is also mentioned in the announcement of the workshop:
http://vksethno.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/ethics-of-eresearch/

Visualising the Public Sphere

I took part in an interesting workshop last week which was co-arranged by VKS and the Philosophical department at Gronigen University. The discussion spanned over a wide area of topics but with the common theme of how we could understand social, political and physical interactions and how that becomes visible in the public space. Anne Beaulieu talked about “Network realism: studying knowledge production around public databases of images”, Martijn de Waal presented ideas on “Urban screens and the Public Sphere”, Paul de Laat tried to connect two of his research areas with the title “Not so Public After All”, Judith Vega introduced “The visualisation for everyday life: pertinent or impertinent in regard to the public sphere” and Paul Wouters discussed the lessons learned from CYSWIK (Can You See What I Know), a two-day multisectorial workshop on knowledge visualisation. It is almost always fruitful to bring together people from different disciplines and see how the different approaches can hook together and form a bigger picture. One problem that where brought up for discussion was how new is new media? Is there new problems in this area or is it the same kind of problems only in a new setting? It all boiled down to that it is a matter of emphasis. A lot of people are using the digital media and the “user-generated” media and are treating it as something new and that is something we as researchers have to take into consideration.

This morning I was again listening to the Swedish radio and overheard their programme “På nätet” (on the net). They have apparently a series of five episodes about our social life on the net and today it was about blogquakes (“bloggbävning”, like a combination of blog and earthquake). The participants talked about the idea that the blogs are making the world more democratic, is it or is it not? This is the discussion that always comes back when talking about blogs and maybe a bit boring in a sense, but connected to the workshop above it suddenly makes more sense. The social practices in the public sphere that are now also present on the web is dynamic and changing and interesting to study further and especially by joining different approaches and disciplines ways of dealing with the problems or questions as research topics.

The poster from the seminar: Looking at a Scholarly Blogosphere

Download it to zoom in and be able to read 🙂

CYSWIK Pre Valentines Reception at VKS

Yesterday it was a Pre Valentines reception at VKS (that is the reason for pink balloons) with an exhibition where I presented a poster, and there was of course also a number of interesting talks (programme). I liked the idea from Architects of Interaction where they had created a book which should work as a toolbox when you work with interactive work methods:

http://www.architectureofinteraction.net/

One other talk from one of my collegues Charles at VKS, was about joining Quantum Physics and the ideas of Otlet and Knowledge Organisation. He is exploring these ideas together with Richard Smiraglia and maybe Richard will write more about their “idea collider” in his blog eventually:

http://mac.liu.edu/users/richardsmiraglia/?tag=idea+collider

Yet another talk was from an artist, Esther Polak, who described how she as an artist used GPS to make peoples everyday life visible.
It was all done under the umbrella or label CYSWIK (Can You See What I Know?). Here artists and researchers are joining together and I think it is a great way to start a discussion about the visualisation of knowledge:

http://vks.cyswik.net/

Amsterdam and VKS

Last week my stay at VKS in Amsterdam started. I will be here as a guest doctoral student for four months which is great. Virtual Knowledge Studio is a research institute that “supports researchers in the humanities and social sciences in the Netherlands in the creation of new scholarly practices and in their reflection on e-research in relation to their fields.” And I can say that it seems to fit right on the spot on what I am trying to do in my dissertation.

Yesterday I presented my research project at the VKS research seminar and got a lot of valuable comments and questions. Today I will exhibit a poster at an event called CYSWIK Pre Valentines reception:
http://vks.cyswik.net/

So I am getting right into the process of doing research in this new environment.