Diving deep into digital literacy:emerging methods for research

Literacy studies approaches have tended to adopt a position which enables ethnographic explorations of a wide range of ‘literacies’. An important issue arising is the new challenge required for researchers to capture, manage, and analyse data that highlight the unique character of practices around texts in digital environments. Such inquiries, we argue, require multiple elements of data to be captured and analysed as part of effective literacy ethnographies. These include such things as the unfolding of digital texts, the activities around them, and features of the surrounding social and material environment. This paper addresses these methodological issues drawing from three educationally focused studies, and reporting their experiences and insights within uniquely different contexts. We deal with the issue of adopting new digital methods for literacy research through the notion of a ‘deep dive’ to explore educational tasks in classrooms. Through a discussion of how we approached the capture and analysis of our data, we present methods to better understand digital literacies in education. We then outline challenges posed by our methods, how they can be used more broadly for researching interaction in digital environments, and how they augment transdisciplinary debates and trends in research methods

Consumption caught in the cash nexus.

During the last thirty years, ‘consumption’ has become a major topic in the study of contemporary culture within anthropology, psychology and sociology. For many authors it has become central to understanding the nature of material culture in the modern world but this paper argues that the concept is, in British writing at least, too concerned with its economic origins in the selling and buying of consumer goods or commodities. It is argued that to understand material culture as determined through the monetary exchange for things - the cash nexus - leads to an inadequate sociological understanding of the social relations with objects. The work of Jean Baudrillard is used both to critique the concept of consumption as it leads to a focus on advertising, choice, money and shopping and to point to a more sociologically adequate approach to material culture that explores objects in a system of models and series, ‘atmosphere’, functionality, biography, interaction and mediation

Stability and change the role of keepsakes and family homes in the lives of parentally bereaved young adults in the Netherlands 1

This paper examines the loss of a parent in young adulthood, showing how this emergent and distinctive life stage shapes Dutch young people’s experience of bereavement. Youth material cultures have commonly been analysed in terms of the construction and expression of youth identities, for example, through style, music and leisure. In this research, we highlight three themes in young people’s relationship to material culture as part of their everyday lived experience of parental loss: first, the parental home as a space of departure, memory and return, and the potential for conflict, destabilisation and misunderstanding when the remaining parent transforms the home or embarks on a new relationship; second, the different strategies young adults use to commemorate their parent in their own temporary or shared accommodation and online space; and third, the role of small, portable but effective keepsakes and adornment, such as jewellery or tattoos, that meet their need for the emotional experience of closeness with the memory of their parent. A focus on the material trajectories of grief grants insights into how young adults cope with loss in their everyday life, generating understanding of the ways young people may support themselves and be supported by others in the context of parental bereavement

"Outside, it is snowing": Experience and finitude in the nonrepresentational landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet

Copyright © 2008 PionRomanillos J L, 2008. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(5) 795 – 822 DOI: 10.1068/d6207This paper presents and explicates the anonymous and impersonal spatialities tentatively mapped in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Emerging from the kinds of landscapes and visualities articulated, these spatialities are at odds with the kind of anthropocentrism characteristic of phenomenological narratives of spatial experience that would start from an apparently stable human-subject position. It is argued that his body of literature dismantles the anthropocentric narratives and biographies that would produce in both the space of the world and the ‘phenomenological subject’ an unwarranted depth and naturalism. Importantly, and reflecting the theoretical turn towards the being of language, Robbe-Grillet questions the legitimacy of linguistic subjects to capture the spaces of the visible. As such, it is argued that his literature reflects an experience of the critiques of phenomenology. Importantly, this ‘critique’ goes hand in hand with the kinds of spatialities and landscapes that are rendered in the novels—the indefinite perspectives they open up, the paradoxical visualities they sustain or deny, and the disorientation they inject into the heart of spatial experience. These literary effects produce a nonanthropocentric and nonpersonal spatiality which, although contributing to an erasure of the ‘subject’, at the same time expose and open up a sociospatiality based on singularities, intensities, and finitude

News Interviews: Clayman and Heritage’s The News Interview

News interviews: Clayman and Heritage’s ‘The News Interview

Our Relationship with the Image as a Form of Being-With

This paper looks at the development of the artistic work from a narrative work into an experiential one. How the presentation of sublime in art has moved us away from finding meaning in narrative into taking on meaning through facing our relationship to the other. It traces how this change in communication has meant that the viewer’s experience with a work is the work. It takes an historical and theoretical perspective before discussing a proposed project, The Lamps of Presence, as a work employing these theories

Ideologiekritik und/als analyse textuelle

Inspiriert von Linguistik, Literaturwissenschaft und Psychoanalyse versteht die analyse textuelle den Film als ein Geflecht von Zeichen, die es als solche und in ihrer gegenseitigen Bezogenheit zu lesen gilt. Dabei geht es – wie anhand der verschiedenen Exponenten dieser Methode gezeigt werden soll – weniger darum, eine bestimmte, universell gültige Syntax des Films zu bestimmen, als vielmehr darum, den Film als dynamisches Gewebe zu untersuchen, das sich unentwegt selber um- und fortschreibt. Das ideologiekritische Potenzial einer solchen Herangehensweise liegt somit nicht bloß darin, dass Filme als Ausdruck herrschender Ideologien untersucht werden können, sondern auch darin, dass eine solche dynamische Textanalyse an sich die Vorstellung einer positiv zu fixierenden „Wahrheit“ oder „Botschaft“ des Films radikal in Frage stellt

After Convergence: YouTube and Remix Culture

The term "convergence" has been used to describe the media developments following digitalization. In this article, I argue that while convergence was a suitable term to describe the first developments, it is no longer fitting. Convergence levelled out the differences between media, allowing for the developments we now see, and for which I propose the term "remix". Using YouTube as an example, I outline how genre developments may be seen as remixes of earlier genres, how remixing has become a widespread creative practice, and how online media also remix power relations between media owners and their audience. The original publication is available from http://www.springerlink.co