October 28, 2005
A Virtual Holiday in the Virtual Sun
A Virtual Holiday in the Virtual Sun
By MARK WALLACE
More than 10 million people around the world travel to imaginary destinations regularly, using online games like Second Life... New York Times, 10/28/05.
Posted by BKG at 6:43 AM
October 19, 2005
Edward Tufte
Check out Tufte on the visual display of information:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
Here are his books.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
Posted by BKG at 1:56 PM
Skype
While we are on the subject of free tools, let's add Skype: http://www.skype.com. It is free telephony! If you call computer to computer (using speakers and a little microphone, often built in to laptops or to a headset or cheaply purchased and plugged into the computer), it is totally free to anywhere in the world. If you call from your computer to someone's phone or cellphone there is a small charge. From computer to phone, it is usually about 2 cents a minute. The sound can be even better than by telephone. You can conference call with about 6 people at a time anywhere in the world.
And, you can chat by typing and retain the history of the chat.
Skype might be a useful tool for doing interviews with people you cannot meet face to face.
Posted by BKG at 1:22 PM
October 18, 2005
Writing fieldnotes
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
by Robert M. Emerson, et al (order used from as low as $7.28 a copy)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226206815/102-1294036-8932953?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance
http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac=sl&st=sl&qi=FpvPn4I0o4abbEhL4ElNrXh2FXI_0358612450_1:28:140
http://www.fetchbook.info/compare.do?search=0226206815
Posted by BKG at 10:43 AM
October 17, 2005
Refworks, Furl, Wayback, Picasa, and much more...
Refworks FAQ
Refworks is pretty straightforward, so if you would like to get going right away, try the online tutorial.
Sign up for a workshop:
There is one tomorrow Wednesday October 19, 3:00-4:30
And, another Monday November 7, 6:30-8:00
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Accunet/AP Multimedia Archive (Associated Press photo archive). Great resource for images. If you cannot access the site the first time, wait a while and try again, as there is a limit on the number of simultaneous users.
If you like them, you can add Furl and Wayback to the tool bar in your browser:
FURL (archive websites)
Wayback (retrieve earlier versions of dead sites--just enter into the little box on the Wayback site the URL of the site that seems dead)
Picasa (see ALL the images on your drive)
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Methods Workshop with links to everything you could ever want and more....
Research Log Forms
Methods syllabus
Interviewing #1
Interviewing #2
Logging, Transcription, Translation, Analysis #1
Logging, Transcription, Translation, Analysis #2
Posted by BKG at 10:50 PM
Instructions for conducting a walking tour of the Lower East Side
Here is a very interesting document. Instructions for the guide who conducts the walking tour of the Lower East Side for the LES Tenement Museum. Useful for studying this tour, but also for walking tours more generally, and for those working on the Lower East Side:
http://www.tenement.org/docs/wt_outline.pdf
Posted by BKG at 12:53 PM
Community Tourism in New York
Here is an interesting idea, "community tourism" in New York:
Tourists and New Yorkers alike want to know the "real New York." Thus the need for community tourism. As opposed to mass market tourism, community tourism is organized by the stewards of their communities. These tours take visitors into areas not on the typical tourist map and connect them to local music, immigrant history, parks, waterways, architecture, cuisine, artists, murals, and one-of-a-kind stores.To help popularize community tourism in New York, we have created this, the City's first online guide.
Congratulations to The Community Tourism Roundtables of Business Enterprises for Sustainable Travel (BEST), an initiative of The Conference Board in association with the World Travel and Tourism Council, which inspired us to undertake this project.
Posted by BKG at 11:21 AM
October 11, 2005
Project ideas
Looking for interesting project ideas? How about:
Museum of Sex
Madame Tussauds
Manhattan Hell House, 220 Church St. through Oct 31. plus info on evangelical hell houses more generally and panel discussion on October 14.
Forgotten New York
Poetics of decay
Central Park Movie Walking Tour and other movie and tv location tours from On Location Tours, including Sex in the City and The Sopranos.
Big Onion Tours
Big Apple Greeter
Municipal Art Society Walking Tours
Place Matters
Talking Street: Cell Phone Tours: Lower East Side and Lower Manhattan.
New York Celebrates Halloween
NYC Heritage Tourism Center
Historic Richmond Town, Staten Island
Historic houses in New York City
Thomas Alva Edison Memorial Tower and Menlo Park Museum
New York City Marathon
Chocolate Show
Food Tours
Noshwalks
New York Culinary Tours
Savory Sojourns
Posted by BKG at 11:39 PM
October 10, 2005
Readings on souvenirs
Hitchcock, M. and Teague, K., eds. 2000. Souvenirs: The material culture of tourism. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Stewart, Susan. 1984. On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Love, Lisa L. and Sheldon, P. S. 1998. Souvenirs: Messengers of meaning. Advances in Consumer Research 25: 170-175.
Love, Lisa L. and Nathaniel Kohn. 2001. This, that, and the other: fraught possibilities of the souvenir. Text and Performance Quarterly 21, 1: 47-63.
Gordon, B. 1986. The souvenir: Messenger of the extraordinary. Journal of Popular Culture 20, 3: 135-146.
Shenhav-Keller, Shelly. 1993. The Israeli souvenir: its text and context. Annals of Tourism Research 20: 182-196.
Jules-Rosette, B. 1984. The Message of Tourist Art: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective. New York: Plenum Press.
Belk, Russell W., Melanie Wallendorf, and John F. Sherry, Jr. 1989. The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey. Journal of Consumer Research 16 (June): 1-38.
O'Guinn, Thomas C., and Russell W. Belk. 1989. Heaven on Earth: Consumption at Heritage Village, USA. Journal of Consumer Research 16, no. 2: 227-38.
Williams, Alan. 2005. Possessing the dispossessed: packaging the Holocaust for your home and garden, thoughts on the selling of Holocaust souvenirs. The Simon (January 20). Responding to Andreas Tzortzis, At the Gift Shop: Souvenirs of Buchenwald. New York Times (Late Edition (East Coast)). Sep 15, 2004. E.1
Posted by BKG at 4:11 PM
Readings on travel photography
Vernacular practices
So you want to take great vacation pictures
Kodak: Photographing vacations & travel
Magellan: Take great vacation photos
Fodor: How to take travel photos like a pro
DT&G Photographic: Digital photo vacation
Studies
Osborne, Peter. 2000. Traveling light: photography, travel, and visual culture. Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press.
Albers, P. C. and James, W. R. 1988. Travel photography: A methodological approach. Annals of Tourism Research 15: 134-158.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Photography: A Middle Brow Art. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Buck, R. C. (1977). The ubiquitous tourist brochure: Explorations in its intended and unintended use. Annals of Tourism Research, 4, 195-207.
Cohen, E. 1995. The representation of Arabs and Jews on postcards in Israel. History of Photography 19, 3: 210-220.
Cohen, E., Nir, Y. and Almagor, U. 1992. Stranger-local interaction in photography. Annals of Tourism Research 19: 213-233.
Collier, J. and Collier, M. 1986. Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
Crawshaw, C. and Urry. J. 1997. Tourism and the photographic eye. In Rojek, C. And Urry, J. (eds) Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. London: Routledge. On reserve.
Posted by BKG at 3:40 PM
Readings on tour guides
Pond, Kathleen Lingle. 1993. The Professional Guide: Dynamics of Tour Guiding. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Cohen, Erik. 1985. The tourist guide: the origins, structures, and dynamics of a role. Annals of Tourism Research 12, no. 1: 5-30.
Fine, Elizabeth and Jean Haskell Speer. 1985. Tour guide performances as sight sacralization. Annals of Tourism Research 12, no. 1:73-95.
Posted by BKG at 3:36 PM
October 7, 2005
Travel documentation
Dominika will be visiting Morocco and keeping a travel diary and experimenting with its form. For recent artists' projects related to tourism, see Bonami, Francesco. 2005. Universal experience: art, life, and the tourist's eye. Chicago, IL: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Distributed Art Publishers, New York. Available at NYU Book Center. Review.
Posted by BKG at 3:15 PM
Phenomenological approaches
Tylor asked about how to link phenomenology to performance. One way might be to think about the senses:
Check out the Sensory Formations series at Berg.
Howes, David. ed. 2004. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Also: Casey, Edward. S. 2001. Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World? Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 4: 683-93.
Simonsen, K. 2005. Bodies, Sensations, Space and Time: the Contribution From Henri Lefebvre. Geografiska Annaler Series B-Human Geography 87B, no. 1: 1-14.
Posted by BKG at 2:34 PM
Exhibiting slavery
Siobhan is interested in working on the new exhibition, Slavery in New York, which just opened at the New-York Historical Society. See the review in today's New York Times.
Fred Wilson: Mining the Museum; images.
Fath Davis Ruffins:
"Revisiting the Old Plantation: Reparations, Reconciliation, and Museumizing American Slavery.” Museums Frictions. Eds. Ivan Karp and Corrine Kratz. In press. Comments on emerging museums of slavery and their efforts to put that history on exhibition.
“Sites of Memory, Sites of Struggle: The ‘Materials’ of History,” Major Problems in African American History. Volume 1: From Slavery to Freedom, 1619–1865. eds. Thomas Holt and Elsa Barkley Brown. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. Brief analysis of issues involved in earlier attempts to put an African American museum on the mall.
"Culture Wars Won and Lost: Ethnic Museums on the Mall," Radical History Review. Two-part article. No. 68, Spring, 1997 and No. 70 Winter, 1998. (Part One: The Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian. Part Two: The African American Museum on the Mall Project.) Comparison of the work in the 1980s and 1990s to found the National Museum of the American Indian, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and the earlier unsuccessful attempt to pass legislation to put an African American Museum on the Mall.
"Mythos, Memory, and History: African American Preservation Efforts, 1820-1990." Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Eds. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Detailed analysis of the preservation of objects, folklore, music, governmental records over the 19th and 20th centuries.
"A Faithful Witness': Afro-American Public History in Historical Perspective," with Jeffrey Stewart. Presenting the Past: Critical Perspectives on History and the Public. Eds. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig. Temple University Press, 1986. Detailed analysis of the relationship between professional historians and "organic historians" of the African American experience.
Posted by BKG at 1:41 PM
Out of bounds
Scott is exploring several different project ideas:
Urban Exploration: Urban Exploration webring, Urban Speleology, Urban Exploration New York, Urban Exporers Network, Zone Tour, Infiltration, Jinx, Online and Underground
Soundwalks: Ground Zero; Williamsburg (2 tours, both Hasidic, 1 for men, 1 for women); Bronx (Hip Hop tour); and many more. Downloadable as mp3 files. Sign up to be a beta tester.
Kramer's Reality Tour: Reichman, Deborah Gar. 2003. Realizing sitcomes: Kramer's Reality Tour and the fine line between fiction and reality in television's most disparaged genre. M.A. thesis, New York University.
Institute for Applied Autonomy: Un-Surveillance Tour using iSee.
Confino Family Apartment, Lower East Side Tenement Museum
Posted by BKG at 12:31 PM
Post-Communist tourism
Aniko is working on post-Communist tourism. Here are resources relevant to her project:
Hoffman, Lily F. and Jiri Musil. 1999. Culture meets commerce: Prague and post-communist tourism. In The Tourist City, eds. Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Light, D. 2000. Gazing on communism: heritage tourism and post-communist identities in Germany, Hungary and Romania. Tourism Geographies 2 (2): 157-176.
Priban, Jiri. Reconstituting Paradise Lost: the temporal dimension of postcommunist constitution-making.
Hofer, Tamas. Construction of the 'Folk Cultural Heritage' and Rival Versions of National' Identity in Hungary. Wilson Center. Request a copy from ees@wwic.si.edu
Stalin Museum, Georgia
Stalin World, Lithuania
Posted by BKG at 11:50 AM
City Brain
"After Lights out for the Territory, a man sent me an X ray of his brain tumour. He'd superimposed it over a map of London and was trying to heal himself by walking out its routes through the city." Interview with Iain Sinclair, an avid walker and writer about walking.
Posted by BKG at 10:13 AM
October 5, 2005
Research methods
For research guidance, see:
Pavis, Patrice. 2003. Analyzing performance: theater, dance, and film. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. On reserve.
Katz, Jack. 2001. From how to why: On luminous description and causal inference in ethnography (Part I). Ethnography 2, no. 4: 443-73.
Katz, Jack. 2002. From how to why: On luminous description and causal inference in ethnography (Part 2). Ethnography 3, no. 1: 63-90.
Performance Studies Methods syllabus. See especially the sections on interviewing (#1, #2) and participant observation (#1, #2).
An excellent case study is one of the books ordered for the course and on reserve, Susan Davis, Spectacular Nature. Watch here for other examples.
Posted by BKG at 8:30 PM
Immersion
Immersive experiences have a long history. Several people expressed an interest in reading the work of Oliver Grau, who has been exploring the relationship between high tech virtuality and older media.
Oliver Grau's webpage
Oliver Grau Interview. 2003. The Image--from Real to Virtual. Switch 18.
Grau, Oliver. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Grau, Oliver. 2000. History of Telepresence: Automata, Illusion, and Rejecting the Body. In The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology on the Internet. Ed. Ken Goldberg. 226-246. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Posted by BKG at 8:06 PM
October 2, 2005
Her Long Black Hair
Click on the thumbnails. The Cardiff walk is one of several interesting interventions using mobile digital technology, many of them focusing on the sound of the environment. Other interesting projects include: eRuv: A Street History in Semacode; Talking Street: Discover Where You Are; Soundwalks; Pedestrian: A Walking Tour for Multiple Voices and Portable Phones; The Walking Project: Desire Lines, Walking and Mapping Across Continents; Walk and Squawk performance project; Walking as Knowing as Making: A Peripatetic Investigation of Place; Generative Psychogeography project; Yellow Arrow; Superimposed City Tours; Center for Land Use Interpretation; and Mapping Sex in America. And, many others. Please add any interesting ones that you discover! Foundational text: "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography" by Guy Debord.
Posted by BKG at 10:13 PM