Here at the slides from my second presentation at the IB Heads World Conference: “More Data, Better Learning? A Balanced Look at Adaptive Learning Systems.” See also my bookmarks.
Rev: Added missing citation 10-5-13.
I’m honored to be presenting at the IB Heads World Conference on global collaborative learning. Here are my slides. I’ve bookmarked many resources as well.
I might worry a bit excessively before and be afraid that I won’t be able to give an interesting talk or teach students anything, but then while I’m doing it and afterwards I realize that I really enjoy it. Teaching.
Its been a year now since the public health masters course in Public Health Science Communication at University of Copenhagen took off. Since it finished in December 2012 I have only taught science communication a few times. Last week I got a new dosage of interaction with students to discuss the communication of science.
I was invited to give an introduction to science communication to a group of 14 PhD students under the Marie Curie Actions Initial Training Networks (ITN). The students all had a background in biology (or similar) and were just into the second year of their PhD. Most of them (if not all) were deep into lab science and were working at the smallest possible scale of the human cell and genetic materials. In my experience lab scientists often represents one of the most challenging group of researchers when it comes to arguing for why the should communicate science. Not because they don’t recognize it as necessary and useful, but primarily because they find it almost impossible to explain what it is they do. Overall these students were not much different.
Focus on you!
I had three hours at hand on what was equal to a Friday afternoon for the 14 students who after two weeks of presentations, social events and classes where looking forward to returning to their labs and weekends. Combined with the premises that this was an introduction to science communication I decided to try to make the class as fun and as interactive as possible and centered around the students themselves. My four main headlines around which the class was structured were therefore:
We did a lot of common brain storming of why one should communicate science, who is involved in science communication and where it takes place. The students were actually pretty good at this at a general level, but when it came down to their own research it seemed like they ran into the barrier that their research field is just so difficult to explain… I hope that at the end of the session the students had gotten some new perspectives on how you can approach communication of your research. For example that research is not just about the facts, theories, hypotheses and results but just as much about curiosity, frustrations, hope, processes, challenges, dreams and collaboration. All things that can be easier to explain than the genetic description of what determines the structure of a receptor protein on a cell involved in the development of fat cells. Or at least easier for the outsider to relate to.
Practical writing tips
I chose also to allocate some time to some practical communication (mostly writing) tips. Little things that can make writing a little easier, which I learned in School of Journalism. I tried to include some fun examples with little YouTube clips (e.g. The Great Sperm Race as an example of the power of comparison) and sound clips (e.g. Radiolab’s podcasts and experimenting with sounds). And then of course I tried to open their eyes to social media as something that is not only useful in their private life but could play a role in their research and research communication! When I mentioned the word ‘blog’, I saw many rolling eyes, but arguing that even peer viewed journals like Nature uses blogs seemed to legitimize the blog just a tiny bit.
All in all it was great being back in my teaching mode and I hope that the students got something out of it too. I look forward to my next teaching job which is in Copenhagen at Informations medieskole, where I’ll talking to Danish researchers about social media’s role in research and science communication. More on that to follow.
As I wrote last week, Thomas and I are trying to work up a paper on the rhetoric of object agency (preliminarily entitled ‘Do Things Act?’). Here are a few thoughts from the reading process:
Most reasonable and clearheaded account of object agency so far:
Lambros Malafouris’ work on nonhuman agency. He has co-edited a very useful volume (Material Agency: A Non-Anthropocentric Approach with Carl Knappett) in which he has a paper called At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency, which provides a reasoned, well-argued and detailed argument for how agency “is a property or possession neither of humans nor of nonhumans. Agency is the relational and emergent product of material engagement.” And he summarises nicely why we struggle so much with the concept of agency:
“The constant errors in our agency judgements are simply the price we have to pay for being skillfully immersed in a physical world and at the same time of being able to experience this world from a subjective first-person perspective. It is the price of being human.”
The ultimate cause of action is, as he says, none of the supposed agents, but the flow of activity itself. My gut instincts agree very much with this.
My biggest concern with object agency so far:
But I can’t help but think about what comes after the ‘merger’ of man and materiality? Is there a different argument beyond pointing to flow, networks, complexity, emergence and process? My concern with object agency being used in a strategic way to confirm complexity is that is potentially leads to a stifled form of analysis, in which pointing to complexity becomes both the theoretical starting point and the analytical end point – similar to how social constructivism often worked in the 90s. It is (perhaps not yet, but on the horizon) a possible dead end. But I can’t make out what lies on the other side of it yet – my instincts tell me that it is something more experimental, possibly focused on building things rather than constructing waterproof arguments. As theory needs to move beyond pointing to the hybrid nature of everything, then the next step might be simply making things. Crazier stuff, really (see last point).
Book that made me think stuff even if it has shortcomings:
Jane Bennett‘s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. I have encountered a lot of exasperation with and dismissal of Bennett’s work (just ask Thomas if you’re in the mood for a diatribe), but I quite like it. Vibrant Matter manages to get me excited about thinking about things, which I prefer any day to a solid but uninspiring correctness. Even if her book is sort of a hodgepodge of ANT and some Deleuzian ideas, it captures a vital and energetic concern with things, their weirdness, wonderfulness and ability to confound a lot of our knee jerk conceptions of ourselves and our relationship with the world around us. I thoroughly disagree with her call for a strategic anthropomorphism (I think we need to go the other way and ‘objectify/thingify’ us instead), but I appreciate the vitality she manages to infuse her text with.
Best books so far that explore a form of object agency in creative ways:
Ben Woodard’s Slime Dynamics and Thierry Bardini’s Junkware. Lovely and disturbing books. More on those coming soon. Cover of Slime Dynamics below.
I’m preparing a grant application for the Danish Humanities Research Council, which if successful will include a PhD position in science communication/media studies.
The project investigates ontologies of mind/brain in neuroscientific studies of hunger and obesity, via philosophical analysis, media studies, and exhibit making. The specific direction of the science communication/media studies PhD will be developed by the candidate within this framework. The project is based at Medical Museion (www.museion.ku.dk), which (as regular readers of this blog will know) holds an interdisciplinary medical humanities and science communication research group, where many staff members engage in curatorial or public engagement practice alongside their research. The project is in collaboration with the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication, local neuroscience research groups, and international collaborators from the UK and US.
The rules stipulate that PhD candidates are listed in the application, rather than advertising positions after an application is successful. We’re therefore looking for a candidate to join our application, which if not successful in the first round will be resubmitted, and could also be rewritten as a specific PhD funding application. On the other hand, if it is successful, participation in the application would not constitute a binding agreement.
Candidates might have a background in media or cultural studies, STS, science communication research, or relevant interdisciplinary training. Interest or experience in cognitive science, psychology, or neuroscience would also be an advantage.
If you are interested, please send a CV and max one page explaining why this position appeals to you to *protected email* by end Wednesday 10th October (apologies for the short deadline), and we can arrange a time to meet or speak by phone/skype. Please also feel free to forward this on.
Tom, Dan, Mills, Amanda, and Stephen returned for this week’s episode of Digital Campus, joined by Digital History Fellows Ben Hurwitz and Jannelle Legg. We began by discussing a JSTOR’s new individual subscription offering, JPASS, which allows individual users access to more than 1500 journals for a monthly fee of $19.50 or $199 annually. While our panel commended JSTOR’s efforts, Mills expressed concern that the cost of subscription will effectively prohibit JSTOR’s target audience (including adjunct faculty) from access. Amanda pointed out that while JSTOR access has been greatly expanded through library and other institutional subscriptions, many people are unaware of the ways they can currently receive free access. The discussion then moved to “Signals,” a performance monitoring software from Purdue University. Signals is a data-mining program which collects information about individual students such as time spent in online assignments, completion of homework, and performance on quizzes and tests. This information is used to alert students to areas of strength and weakness within their academic schedule. While the program is showing early signs of success, the panel was concerned that this type of program will not encourage students to develop independent study skills.
Next, the group examined the growing complexity of free speech on the internet with two recent news stories. In the first, Facebook ‘likes’ were found to be protected by a fourth circuit appeals court in a case involving a newly re-elected Sheriff and six fired deputies. The second story involved a tenured journalism professor at the University of Kansas that was put on leave as a result of a controversial a tweet. Our final news story concerned the digital footprint that shadows us on the web. In this story a law in California requires the creation of an “eraser button” for minors. The aim is to give users under 18 the ability to delete content from websites, apps and online services. While some contended that the erasure of some data, particularly on popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, could be effective – our hosts expressed skepticism that these imprints can fully be erased from the internet. To conclude, Patrick Murray-John delivered a report from the Center about the release of the Omeka API, which will allow users to connect Omeka with other platforms.
NOTE: I mistakenly said that Patrick Murray-John is the Lead Developer for Omeka. Patrick Murray-John is the Omeka Dev Team Manager; John Flatness is the Lead Developer. See http://omeka.org/about/staff/. — Amanda
Links to Stories Discussed:
JSTOR individual passes - http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/09/digital-libraries/jstor-launches-jpass-access-accounts-for-individual-researchers/
Coursework nagging software “Signals” at Purdue apparently increases graduation rates - http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/purdue-u-software-prompt-students-to-study-and-graduate/46853
Court rules that Facebook “likes” are free speech – http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4744288/appeals-court-rules-that-facebook-likes-are-protected-as-free-speech
Kansas professor suspended after tweet – http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/23/u-kansas-professor-suspended-after-anti-nra-tweet
“Delete-button” for minors in California - http://gizmodo.com/why-californias-new-web-wide-delete-button-for-teens-w-1377730365
Related Links:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/27/fat-shaming-professor-geoffrey-miller_n_3509505.html
Running time: 50:39
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Dear Nico,
You and your mass of inexplicably blond curls passed out half an hour early today. We’d been playing hard all day, starting with a 7:30am (!!) breakfast with friends and ending with a housewarming, with a lot in-between. It’s been like that a lot. Here are some snippets.
We went to Cape Cod the weekend after Labor Day, thanks to your babushka’s kind invitation. Yep, you’re still a water baby. I have mixed feelings about Cape Cod at best, but beach time with you is a bubble of pure happiness.
You love books like crazy. You’ve started pointing to letters everywhere and naming them, often correctly. Thanks to a Zooborns book, you can say “aardvark.”
The word explosion is impressive. Your sentences are getting more comprehensible. You call socks “slock” and stars “tai.” You know most of your friends’ names, my favorite being “Oony” for Romy. You know the name of George, the neighbors’ cat.
The guesswork isn’t gone from communicating with you, but you’re usually pretty clear about what you want. When we were at our friends Josh and Tori’s house and I asked you if you were ready to go home and go to bed, you nodded and said, “All done Josh.”
We’ve had conversations. “Would you like to sit in the stroller?” — “No. Push.” — “OK. Hey, can I put the bag in it?” — “Yeah!” Wait, was that just a… yes, it was.
You have a stuffed giraffe you’ve named Fluffy. Or maybe you were trying to say “giraffe” and it came out as “Fluffy,” and I extrapolated. Anyway, we’ve named him Fluffy. He has a knob and some buttons on the back, and makes noises. Really, it’s intended to be white noise for crib babies, but you weren’t much interested in him until recently. One of Fluffy’s noises involves a drum. You’ve started doing a little beatboxing to it. It’s the most adorable damn thing.
Sometimes we’ll be in the kitchen, and you’ll go away behind a wall to eat or poop in peace. I try to respect your privacy.
You say bye-bye to everyone and everything: me, other people, cats, Pici the great dane, fans, flowers, those little decorative garden twirlers.
You’re a curious mix of extrovert and observer.
We’ve been going to friends’ houses past your bedtime a lot this month. These days, when I wake you to go home, you stay awake until we get in bed back at our place. Sometimes the moon is out. Once we saw a raccoon. I love these tiny dark just-us moments.
One day this past week you took a three hour nap and woke up naming all the letters you could see. I feel like we’re hovering on the brink of the next thing. I’ve been feeling that way most of the time you’ve been alive.
Love,
-Mama
PS pix
Infogroup - one of the leading providers of business listings - has an interesting post on their site about the problem of errors in local data. In this article they talk specifically about the error of business closure and the frustration that consumers experience when they look up a business, travel to the location only to find that the business is closed.
A report released today by Infogroup, the leading provider of high-value data and multichannel solutions, finds that 52 percent of consumers using local search services have visited a closed business and 44 percent have had a social outing ruined by outdated business listing information.
You can read the full article here.
Now, upon reading this, you might reflect on your own experience and grumble in recognition of this problem. However, the probability of failure can be misleading.
Let's imagine we have some event that has a probability of .99 success. This means that if we attempt this once, there is a .01 chance that we will experience failure. If we attempt this twice, we will have a failure probability of 0.0199. This is computed by calculating the probability of two successes and then subtracting that from 1 (i.e. 1 - 0.99^2).
If we interpret the survey data from Infogroup as meaning consumers have a 52% chance of experiencing an error (on the closure of a business) then we can ask - for a given quality of data, how many unique businesses would a user have to experience in a search engine such that the probability of seeing a single error was 52%?
For example, if our data's accuracy for being open was .99, we find that 1-.99^73 is approximately .52. In other words, a user would have to see only 73 distinct businesses before the probability of having seen a single error reaches 52% as per the Infogroup article.
As data is never perfect, we can then ask - for any corpus of data - how good is it? To be able to determine that a corpus of local listings has a precision of .99 for some attribute (e.g. being open rather than closed) is actually very difficult. Firstly there is the size of the sample required to get reasonable error bounds at 95% confidence; secondly there is the error in labeling (which at this degree of precision is a very tricky issue).
All told, while this is an interesting article, it is important to step back and look at the big picture both in terms of interpreting the results and in terms of understanding not just the challenges in getting accurate data, but even the problem of determining how accurate that data is.
The most important thing in data engineering (the job of building systems that aggregate data and improve it in some regard) is building a system that can respond to change and apply updates and improvements in a fluid manner. When evaluating a data provider, while it is important to ask them for details on the quality of their data (surprisingly, many of them won't be able to tell you) it is equally important to learn about the processes they have in place to update and correct data with as low a latency as possible.
One of the ways I clear my head on the weekends is by doing trail maintenance for the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club in the Prince William Forest Park. There is nothing like getting down and dirty with a chainsaw, a Pulaski, or a McLeod, to help you forget for a minute that you have so many and various job responsibilities. And, once all the committees, compliance reports, and other minutiae of higher education vaporize, I find that I get some of my best thinking done about my teaching when I’m out on the trail digging, felling, and fighting erosion.
Last month I was fortunate enough to have a crew of Marines come out to the trail I oversee to help me out. The four men and four women of that crew got more done in four hours on the trail than I could have in three weekends of work. About an hour into our morning together one of them came up to me and said, “Sir, you need to understand. I just want to move some shit.” I pointed him at a large tree stump that was in our way, and half an hour later it was history.
This weekend I was up in Shenandoah National Park moving some very large rocks to help build a culvert out of a spring along the Appalachian Trail. While I was working, I got to thinking about that Marine’s desire to just move some shit, and it occurred to me that one of the things we don’t do very well in post-secondary history education is give our students the opportunity to do that—just move some shit. They spend far too much time sitting in a classroom listening to lectures, circled up with others in the class discussing a primary source, or reading, analyzing, and writing about sources we give them and not enough time just moving shit.
Don’t get me wrong. While I’m on the record in dozens of places opposing the continued reliance on the lecture/listen format, I’m not entirely opposed to some lecturing, so long as it is not the be all of our courses. And there is a lot to be said for discussions, learning to analyze texts, and the other things we do. But I think it’s also important that we give our students opportunities to move some shit as part of their history education.
By that, I mean, we need to give them space to create things beyond the many papers they’ll write for us, to make things such as exhibits, websites, public displays around campus, 2nd grade curricular materials, digital stories, or any number of other tangible things that historians can do beyond analyzing sources and writing about them. Employers value these sorts of tangible outputs as demonstrations of our students’ ability to get things done. Students value them because through making and creating they learn in ways that let them apply the traditional skills and knowledge we give them to real world contexts that look and feel like what they’ll be doing after they graduate.
One of the best examples I have of the value of giving students the freedom to be historians is a photographic exhibit my former student Natasha Müller created in 2009 for an event commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. My only contribution to the project was pointing her at the collection of photographs at the Library of Congress and then acting as her mentor along the way. Everything else was her effort—from coming up with a concept for the exhibition, to selecting the photographs, to contacting the photographer, to getting space on campus, to launching the opening.
In a world where the vast majority of American adults think that college is not worth what it costs, giving our students the opportunity to move some shit is one way we can contribute to changing that perception. The more those outside our campus can see tangible outputs from our students as opposed to being told that we’ve done an excellent job of teaching them critical thinking skills, the better off our students (and we) will be.
I play football (soccer) every week in a recreational indoor league. While this is a pretty hectic game with no real time to breathe, I've noticed a few patterns that, in the moment, convince me that there should be a book entitles 'Strategy Metaphors in Soccer'.
Here are some of the relevant patterns I've noticed:
When attacking, you always have a little more time to set up a shot. I see less experienced players who, when the ball is at their feet and the goal is available to them, panic and shoot. The lack of preparation often means the shot is misfired, the ball goes off target and the opponent gains possession. You always have more time than you think because you know something the defender doesn't - which is precisely when you are going to shoot. Every moment you prepare improves your chances and keeps them guessing.
When defending, take time away from the attacker. I see this rather awkward movement of a defender standing their ground and moving backwards at the same speed as the attacker. You are giving the attacker that extra time. By taking the time away from the them - by aiming to take the ball aggressively - you force their hand (foot).
Own the direction of attack - you're dribbling the ball and a defender runs back to protect the goal; they are running in front of you watching the ball; you dribble left, they turn left to follow - you turn right, they turn right to follow - they will never gain ownership of the direction of attack and you simply have to decide how long to run them around before shooting.
Use your brain not your legs - the fastest thing on the pitch is the ball. It is more efficient to pass to your team than to run, run, run. Your team needs the skill of making and owning space (options). Let the other team run.
Core competencies are not optional (here I'm talking above my station) - running, trapping the ball and passing are some of the basics of football. It is surprising that some players I see have trouble with these basics, including running (running efficiently is a learned skill).
Digital Campus is back! In the inaugural episode of the 2013-2014 school year, Tom, Dan, Mills, and Amanda welcomed RRCHNM’s new director Stephen Robertson and two of the Digital History Fellows, Amanda Morton and Amanda Regan. We began with the union between Google and edX, and the potential for change in the way that MOOC platforms are chosen, a discussion that included brief thoughts on Google Apps for Education and the collection of data on education. Moving on, we looked at the launch of a new platform for iPhone called Oyster, which offers a Netflix-like service for ebooks. The discussion revolved around what this new service might mean for the current state of textbook rental, deals with publishers, and efforts to combat the rising costs of textbooks. Mills suggested the possibility of a flat fee for a subscription to a semester worth of textbooks instead of students paying individually for ebooks. We dug deeper into this topic with a discussion of the current state of ebook purchase and rental, citing the Kindle borrowing program as well as libraries’ offering ebooks through the Overdrive platform, and we wondered whether ebook subscriptions could be compared to movie and television streaming through services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.
Finally, we took a quick look at Topsy, an analytical service that allows users to search tweets from the earliest days of Twitter, an option that brings up interesting questions about how historians (and educators!) can use Twitter as a historical source. There was some suggestion that the release of this tool might be connected to Twitter’s IPO offering.
This episode concluded with a briefing on the state of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media by the new director Stephen Robertson, which marks the introduction of a new segment narcissistically titled “Reports from the Center.” Tune in two weeks from now (we promise) for more.
Links:
Related links:
Running time: 45:49
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Hvis nogen leder efter et godt studiejob er det her måske noget. Medicinsk Museion søger i øjeblikket 4 nye omvisere/servicemedarbejdere på museet op via KUs jobportal (søg på Medicinsk Museion). Vi bestræber os på at have en blandet flok af fagligheder repræsenteret – det vigtigste er, at vores medarbejdere har lyst til at bidrage til arbejdet på et museum, der ikke er helt almindeligt. Et kig rundt på hjemmesiden her kan give en fornemmelse af, hvilke udstillinger og aktiviteter vi har.
Opslagets fulde ordlyd kan læses herunder, men ansøgningen skal sendes ind via førnævnte hjemmeside.
Omvisere/servicemedarbejdere (4-8 timer/uge) søges til Medicinsk Museion, Institut for Folkesundhedsvidenskab
Medicinsk Museion søger fire fleksible omvisere som, i samarbejde med vores nuværende omviserteam, kan varetage museets publikumsfunktioner.
Jobbet er alsidigt og udfordrende. Du skal være omviser i vores udstillinger, fungere som museums- og kassevagt, og ad hoc varetage andre serviceopgaver. Jobbet kræver interesse og flair for mundtlig formidling samt blik for og lyst til at give vores gæster en god service.
Vi forestiller os, at du:
- Har to-tre års studier bag dig inden for fag som fx historie, etnologi, kulturstudier, arkitektur, folkesundhedsvidenskab, medicin, molekylær biomedicin, tandlæge, medtek, sundhedsfremme og sundhedsteknologi, antropologi eller lign.
- Har kendskab til eller interesse for sundhed, sygdom, forebyggelse og behandling i et kulturelt, æstetisk, teknologisk og historisk perspektiv
- Interesserer dig for museumsformidling
- Har lyst til at tage del i arbejdet på et museum, der i disse år undergår store forandringer
- Har gode mundtlige engelskkundskaber
- Er serviceminded, mødestabil og fleksibel.
Arbejdstiden er varierende og falder både som faste og ad hoc aftalte vagter, der kan ligge både i dag- og aftentimer, hverdag og weekend.
Da arbejdet som omviser kræver en vis oplæring, skal du kunne arbejde hos os i mindst ét år og gerne længere.
Løn og ansættelsesvilkår
Ansættelse sker som studerende HK. Aflønning sker i henhold til gældende overenskomst mellem Finansministeriet og HK/STAT med en anciennitetsbestemt timeløn på mellem kr. 115,96 – 121,64.
Arbejdstiden er 4-8 timer/uge med start hurtigst muligt.
Yderligere oplysninger om stillingen kan fås ved henvendelse til museumsinspektør Bente Vinge Pedersen på mail: *protected email* eller til administrator Mie Knudsen på mail: *protected email*
Send din ansøgning via hjemmesiden http://jobportal.ku.dk/tap/ under Det Sundhedsvidenskabelige Fakultetg vedlagt CV og dokumentation for uddannelse og tidligere beskæftigelse senest den 26. september 2013.
Medicinsk Museion, www.museion.ku.dk, er en enhed under Det Sundhedsvidenskabelige Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Vores fagområde er studier af sundhed og sygdom, fødsel og død i et kulturelt og historisk perspektiv. Vi har fire funktioner; forskning, undervisning, samlinger og udstillinger.
Københavns Universitet ønsker at afspejle det omgivende samfund og opfordrer alle interesserede til at søge stillingen.
Det Sundhedsvidenskabelige Fakultet har ca. 7500 studerende, ca. 1500 ph.d.-studerende og beskæftiger ca. 3200 medarbejdere. Fakultetet skaber ny viden og formidling gennem sine kerneaktiviteter: forskning, undervisning, videndeling og kommunikation. Med grundforskningsområder lige fra molekylære studier til samfundsstudier bidrager fakultetet til en sund fremtid gennem sine kandidater, forskningsresultater og opfindelser til gavn for patienterne og samfundet.
I recently came across a new startup product called import.io. The product provides a site wrapping tool which allows anyone to create wrappers for sites with repeated structured information and thereby access the data on the site. For example, one might wrap a business listings page, a hotel review site or a weather site and convert the data into machine readable form.
I certainly recommend visiting the site and experimenting with the tool. However, I note that in 2000, WhizBang!Labs created a product called Wrapster, in 2006 Dappit / Dapper created a similar tool. Site wrapping is not a new idea, the technology is reasonably well understood (though the UX that guides a user through wrapping and data collection is challenging), so the question is really what is the business model? and will import.io survive where others with identical technology have failed.
I'd be interested to see how a data analysis and presentation product, like Tableau, could leverage large and varied data sets to enhance their products and whether a community of wrapper creators embeded in their customer base might provide something of a data gathering social network.
In 2010, Thomas and I wrote a paper titled ’Do Things Talk?’, published in Susanne Lehmann-Brauns, Christian Sichau, Helmuth Trischler (eds.), The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship (the volume is available as a .pdf here). In the paper, we discussed the problems and pitfalls surrounding the still current ‘things that talk’ rhetoric. Our central observation in the paper was as follows:
What we suggest, then, is that the current ‘things that talk’-vocabulary may have something to do with wanting to pay attention to the thing-ness of things – their ‘bony materiality’ and yet keep one’s language- and culture-centered approach intact. To allow things become actors with an uncanny ability to speak to us, is (we suggest) a license to maintain the set of scholarly tools and languages associated with the linguistic and cultural turns in the humanities, while still appearing to do something new. By claiming that things talk, scholars today can maintain a certain set of institutionally and traditionally enshrined ideas, while seemingly engaging with a new agenda. Rather than exploring the presence and effects of things qua things, things are turned into something which we, as academics that are trained in a hermeneutical and interpretational tradition, can relate to immediately. It is business as usual on a new subject matter, which still holds out the promise of being something different.
We argued that this talk-rhetoric was a way of making things more like us, rather than making us more like things. Endowing things with anthropocentric qualities – even if done with cautious hesitation or as a metaphor for something else – ran the risk, we felt, of two problems: On the one hand, it might obstruct a possible re-examination and re-evaluation of theories and practices around objects in the humanities; and on the other, it runs the risk of diverting research on objects away from the agenda of re-examining the sort of creatures we are and how we are embedded in the world and the things around us.
Since writing the paper, a deluge of writing on objects, agency and materiality have poured forth, much which is stimulating, important and worthwhile. But it has also increasingly made us feel a need for writing a follow-up paper called ‘Do Things Act?’ building on the 2010 paper and commenting on the theoretical developments since it publication.
What we will do is to blog and tweet this new paper forth, in bits and pieces, over the coming months. Our motivations for this come from a variety of sources, from evolutionary biology to new materialist philosophy, and we will engage with these in various forms as the blogging progresses. Hopefully this will also allow us to engage, both on the blog and on twitter (@Museionist and @AdamBencard), with those of you who have an interest in matters of objects, agency and non-agency, human and non-human, and materialism as we write.
What do you make of the current talk of objects as actors and agents? Is it a theoretical dead end, a productive way forward, a useful rhetorical strategy or something that mirrors a deeper insight into our relationship with the stuff around us? Do things, in fact, act, or do we need other vocabularies to talk about things? And if, which?
7th newsletter from Medical Museion in 2013.
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