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Recent Research on Audiences #sociology #media #cinema #museum
Over the past few decades there have been tremendous developments in audience research. Sonia Livingstone’s (2014) book chapter captures some the highlights of these developments. Unsurprisingly, Livingstone’s chapter includes Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding/decoding’ model that has been of outstanding influence in the field. Hall’s concept is closely related to ‘reception theory’ (Iser 1980) and Morley’s (1993)…
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Interaction #sssi #sociology
Across the social sciences as well as some of the technical sciences like CSCW or HCI there is great interest in “interaction”. Studies explore interaction between systems, interaction between human beings, often called “users”, and systems, interaction between two or more people and much more. In 2011, together with Will Gibson (UCL/IoE) I co-edited a Special…
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From Visitor Research and Eye-Tracking Studies to Research of Interaction in Museums #sociology
Last week, I have attended a fascinating workshop organised by Mathias Blanc at the Louvre-Lens and Meshs in Lille. The workshop forms part of a project Mathias runs in cooperation with the Louvre-Lens and their current exhibition “The Le Main Mystery“. As part of the project “Ikonikat” Mathias and the team developed an app run on…
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Ada Lovelace at the Science Museum in London #museum #technology
I noticed that I have not written here for a very long time. Maybe this short post will spring the blog back to life. On a visit to the Science Museum in London yesterday and walked into a fabulous small room devoted to Ada Lovelace. It provides information about Lovelace and shows letters she wrote…
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‘Authoritarian and Democratic Technics’
“There are large areas of technology that can be redeemed by the democratic process, once we have overcome the infantile compulsions and automatisms that now threaten to cancel out our real gains. The very leisure that the machine now gives in advanced countries can be profitably used, not for further commitment to still other kinds of machine, furnishing automatic…
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Phenomenology-based Ethnography: Special Issue Journal of Contemporary Ethnography #sssi #emca #sociology
Two or three years ago, I met Gary Alan Fine, the ethnographer and sociologist who wrote such wonderful books on restaurant kitchens, young orators in high school debating societies, mushroom collectors and many more. We came to talk about varieties of ethnography and one of its German variations: “Phenomenology-based Ethnography”. This form of ethnography pervades German qualitative…
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“The Illusionists” Elena Rossini’s film: The Emergence of a Global, Standardised Body Image
A couple years ago, I came across Elena Rossini’s Kickstarter campaign for a film titled “The Illusionists”. The film received sufficient backing and has been created over the past two or three years. Last week, Elena Rossini made the film available to backers and soon it will distributed more widely. The film is comprised of historic juxtaposition…
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Phenomenology-based Ethnography: Special Issue Journal of Contemporary Ethnography #sssi #emca #sociology
Originally posted on Dirk vom Lehn: Two or three years ago, I met Gary Alan Fine, the ethnographer and sociologist who wrote such wonderful books on restaurant kitchens, young orators in high school debating societies, mushroom collectors and many more. We came to talk about varieties of ethnography and one of its German variations: “Phenomenology-based Ethnography”.…
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Everyday Aesthetics, Practical Aesthetics
In sociology and in particular interactionist approaches there has recently been lot of interest in ‘everyday aesthetics’ and ‘practical aesthetics’. At the Participations 2015 conference in Basel in June a panel was organised by Saul Albert and Yaël Kreplak that explored how aesthetics and aesthetic judgement feature in dance (Saul Albert @saul; Leelo Keevallik), in the…
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On Selfies – Notes on Book by Jill Walker Rettberg
Jill Walker Rettberg. 2014 “Seeing ourselves through Technology” Palgrave Pivot. There is a lot of public and academic discussion about “Selfies” at the moment. When we uncritically follow some of this debate we could believe it is an entirely new phenomenon created by mobile phones equipped with cameras, and maybe selfie-sticks. Jill Walker Rettberg has…
