Talk: RMIT’s Digital Ethnography Research Centre – Locating the Mobile workshop

I made this pair of 1896 cycling bloomers pretty much the night before I flew to Sydney for the RMIT event. Given the change in weather, I tried to use slightly lighter material than the pair I made in the first Bloomer Making Workshop. The choice of footwear possibly also gives away my locale.

I didn’t get around to finishing the button holes, so I had to adopt a ‘research-in-progress’ aesthetic – ie. with pins in the cuffs and waistband. Still, this kind of worked (I thought) in terms of what I was talking about.

I was invited by Larissa Hjorth to speak in the afternoon session’ Discussion of inventive, interdisciplinary and speculative method’ about ‘Emergent media methods and transmission’.

I used the opportunity to talk about my project, its theoretical and methodological framework and more specifically about what this project promised for generating ideas about knowledge transmission. Making and wearing Victorian cycling bloomers and focusing specifically on constructing garments from late C19th patents offers new ways of getting inside a research project in new ways. Literally wearing, moving and embodying these garments offer new ways of thinking about invention, women’s bodies, technology and mobility.

More about Larissa’s project:

Locating the Mobile: Intergenerational Locative Media Practices in Tokyo, Melbourne and Shanghai

Mobile devices play an increasingly important role in the economic, cultural and social lives of Australians, as they do the lives of what are now billions of users worldwide. The locative capacities of these devices are now widely exploited in applications (i.e. Facebook Places) that can provide users information about their surrounds and provide others information about where the user is located. These practices have implications for privacy and surveillance across public and private, local and regional contexts. ‘Locating the Mobile’ provides the first cross-cultural and intergenerational study of this phenomenon in three key sites (Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne). This project is a partnership between Larissa Hjorth (RMIT), Heather Horst (RMIT), Sarah Pink (RMIT), Genevieve Bell (Intel), Baohua Zhao (Fudan University) and Fumitoshi Kato (Keio University).

This was the programme:

Digital Ethnography Research Centre – Locating the Mobile workshop
Friday 13 December 2013

MORNING SESSION 10-12.30
10-11am Morning session: Knowing Locative Media, Knowing Families
Visualities of Play, Place and Mobility: Case studies and roundtable discussion of camera phone apps, playful apps, and locative media in everyday life (Emma Witkowski, Rowan Wilken, Larissa Hjorth, and Sarah Pink).
11am -12: Families in Context
Cross-cultural dimensions of Intergenerational Media Use (Heather)

LUNCH 12.30-1.30
AFTERNOON SESSION: METHODS FOR RESEARCHING (WITH) LOCATIVE MEDIA
1.30 Mobile Media: From cultural object and media practice to researcher’s tool
Roundtable: what are some of the directions we can go with mobile media as researcher’s tool? What are some of the limits? How does this challenge the researchers’ ethics of participation? (led by Larissa and Heather)
2pm Diary Study/Everyday Life Methods: Discussion of various approaches to using mobiles, and platforms accessible in/through mobiles, as a form of documentation; examples will range from a designed program (Momento) to collect and track photos, analyses of things like contact lists as well as the use of existing platforms to capture people’s everyday practices (Heather)
2.30pm Video methods: using video to understand unspoken tacit knowledge, habitual activity and everyday routines (Sarah)
3-5pm Discussion of inventive, interdisciplinary and speculative method

• Present findings of the ethnography+design+futures workshop (Sarah)
• Discussion of emergent media methods and transmission (led by Kat Jungnickel)
• Genevieve Bell to discuss some of her relevant projects in relation to this research

DINNER 

Saturday 14^th December 2013
MORNING SESSION 10-12.00

Pilot Studies
Presentations of pilot studies of initial fieldwork conducted in Melbourne, Shanghai and Tokyo regarding cross-generational locative media within everyday life.
Chris Malmo and Larissa Hjorth (Melb); Fumitoshi Kato and Kana Ohasi (Tokyo); Baohua Zhou and Miao Xiao (Shanghai).

LUNCH 12.30-1.30 

AFTERNOON SESSION 1.30-4.30
1.30 Working together
Practical issues of how we will all work together, how (and what platforms) we will use to archive, log and share research materials and findings, and the kind of protocol we would like to use for authoring and co-authoring, as there are quite a lot of us and we are from different academic cultures, it would be good to be able to clarify all of our positions and needs.
Our aspirations and what we would like to achieve with the project—what each of us is most interested in, what we might each want to develop publications around as time goes on, et— then we will have some ways to all keep talking to each other during the project.

3pm Where to go from here: logistics of fieldwork and milestones