June 11th, 2010
Image by Road Fun under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license on Flickr.
It’s been a few months since I finished my Honours at RMIT in November 2010.
Since then I’ve been working at a digital agency, InDigital Media and have started up another blog. A real blog! With my own domain name and everything!
I will continue to post as I’m learning more about the online world, just as I’ve done through this university blog.
But with a new stage of my life comes a new blog…
Catch you at emilynaismith.com.au!
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June 6th, 2010
My Honours project is finished!
You can find it on another blog called Emily Coughs. You can download the exegesis in pdf format or read it online.
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September 21st, 2009
image “Pick up the phone” by chaps1 under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license on Flickr.
It’s so hard to use Twitter within this project! I’ve tried three different ways but none of them seem to be working or interesting enough. Then I thought about tweeting my coughs. This is interesting because it embodies my theme of interruption. When I explained this to Jenny, she built upon this idea, saying that I should research whether or not tweets could be sent to mobile phones. Then my coughing tweets could be actually sent to my examiners phones during a designated time frame during the marking period! It would be amazing. But! I have been researching this and on the Twitter website “devices” page it says:
If you use your mobile in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada or New Zealand you can also receive tweets via SMS. You can text “OFF” to stop receiving and “ON” to start again.
So I don’t think anyone in Australia can recieve tweets as text messages on their phones yet. Which is a shame. Perhaps the idea would still work just by web updates? In this way part of the project would in a sense be performed “live” over a period of a few days.
Anyone else know how to receive tweets on your mobile phone?
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September 21st, 2009
It’s been really interesting hearing about where other people in the Labsome class are at with their projects. Sandy asked people to have a read of her reviews and possibly comment. I read the review she wrote Regina Spektor: Machine. I thought it was a really refreshing review. It’s really cool how she starts off in the present, but in a kind of abstract way. It’s not like some music reviews where they spell out the painfully obvious, “It was Tuesday night and I was in the line to see this band etc etc”. I also like how instead of just focusing on the aesthetics of the song, Sandy points out to a larger theme about the digital age/machines. Also the reference to Guitar Hero makes the review more current because it mentions a recent news item, it also lets the reader relate and have a better connection with the review. This is just a suggestion but in the middle bit where it talks about the trend of artists writing songs about digitisation, you could also mention some artists actually going to the extreme and digitising their voices with vocoders and things like that. Does the artist have a place in digital culture? Or do they have to embrace it. Haha, maybe these questions are too hard to answer in a song review? Anyway, I really liked Sandy’s tone in the article and think it describes the song, and issues surronding the song really well.
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September 17th, 2009
Things I want to say in my abstract:
I am trying to use fictocriticism as a practise to write the self.
Reflect on having Cystic Fibrosis.
Theme of interruption.
Social media.
Abstract:
I have never reflected on the impact having Cystic Fibrosis has had on me. I see it as an interruption to my normal life. I will explore this theme of interruption by using fictocriticism as a writing practice and social media (or networks?) as a medium. Through engaging creatively with the theme of interruption in content, practice and medium I hope to better understand myself and my relationship with Cystic Fibrosis.
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September 17th, 2009
I’m right in the middle of a panic attack about my project. So after working steadily on my project for ages now, I have to assess how much I have to go and realistically how long this will take me. We spoke about deadlines a lot in class and this freaked me out.
List form is always easiest…
PROJECT
- the social media parts I am really happy with are Facebook, the blog and Flickr. Potentially a little more work has to be done with Google Maps. All need to be tidied up though.
- Investigate Twitter and it’s ability to interrupt the examiner with tweeted coughs.
- make a home page and links throughout including brief intro
- define my final abstract
EXEGESIS
- re write what I have already written in more formal prose
- research Facebook, blogging and Google Maps in the same way I did with Twitter
- make sure EndNote is in correct format for bibliography and all entries have correct fields entered
- research narrative theory and stuff about “writing the self”
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August 10th, 2009
image by Today is a good day under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license via Flickr.
After going into hospital for the past two weeks, I felt like I really needed to sit down and work out exactly what I’ve done on my project, how much more needs to be done, and how I’m going to do it.
I’ve been writing little pieces of it usually at around 1000 words each, but I haven’t combined them to see how much I have actually written. I did that today and was suprised that I have written around 5237 words so far.
When I initially met with Jenny, we thought that 10,000 words may be a good aim. I don’t think this has changed, but I see actually getting to 10,000 words very hard!
I mapped out my exegesis plan today and thought that it may come to around 11,800 words. My aim for this was also 10,000 words, so perhaps seeing as I’m writing around 2,000 more than I planned for the exegesis I can take 2,000 words off the project? Possibly. I think this would probably be more realistic.
The parts of my actual project that I would like to build on with these extra words I have to write are the Facebook page, the wiki and possibly Flickr.
Today I also mapped out my project and how the sites will link together, which is very straightforward and easy to follow. I definitely do not want to confuse the examiners.
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August 10th, 2009
image by Jason Gillyon under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license via Flickr.
I orginally thought that Facebook had to be automatically excluded from being one of the social media sites I use to publish my project on. This was because I thought you couldn’t access any Facebook sites without having Facebook yourself. I think this is still true of profiles. But what if I created a Page? I tried this by trying to access Pool’s page on Facebook whilst being logged out. It still worked, so this is promising.
So far the social networks I will be incorporating my writing to are Google Maps, Twitter, Flickr, a Wiki and probably now, Facebook.
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August 5th, 2009
image by soylentgreen23 under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license on Flickr.
I’ve just posted one of my new pieces of writing (written for Twitter) to two new Twitter profiles (that interact with each other through @replies).
I realise what I want to do it show a story that is mainly from one persons perspective, but have the coversations she has with the other person also show within the one page. At the moment, when you just go to the Twitter page, obviously only one side of the conversation is showing.
Previously, I thought I could rectify this by using a conversation reader like Tweader. But I tried a few examples at it isn’t really working.
So what I’m thinking now is perhaps I should somehow embed the Tweets (or just copy and paste them) into another web page or something, this way I can control the order of the Tweets (currently they are reverse chronological, and I would like them chronological).
But then the problem with this is, I’m not really then using Twitter to tell the story. Well I am – but I’m modifying the characteristics of Twitter to suit myself, not using Twitter how it is meant to be used.
Part of the problem for me lies in the fact that I am trying to tell a linear based story using something that isn’t traditionally used to tell stories like this. Twitter useful for giving short immediate pieces of information, that can be read in isolation to previous tweets ie. the idea isn’t to read every single tweet, it’s about reading what is happening in that instant.
So the basic idea of story telling has to be modified for Twitter. Which I kind of did within my story. Although the tweets relate to each other and form a linear story, each tweet can be read in isolation and hopefully still have some significance to it!
But now I still face the problem of how to present my Twitter story so it makes sense as a story and you don’t have to read it from top to bottom…
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July 30th, 2009
image by Laertes under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license on Flickr.
Earlier I posted about not being able to view conversations in Twitter. I have found Tweader, which seems to be what I am looking for. It somehow groups conversations between two people. So I will try this and see if it works. Fingers crossed!
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