So for today’s class, we were initially asked to reflect on our experience over the last 5 days attempting to annotate our surroundings at home. Initially I found the experience of trying to annotate my surroundings at home to be quite difficult – it’s such a familiar environment to me that I wasn’t able to put aside my biases in trying to distinguish sounds I’d perceive to be more abstract than what would be more “safe” or at the forefront of the environment. What I was getting results wise were observations such as “dog barking” or “wind blowing” and not being able to annotate much deeper than that. I was hoping that through today’s class I’d be able to get a deeper understanding as to how to annotate in more depth.

Thankfully that happened. After a brief discussion of our findings, we headed out to complete the same task as last Thursday’s annotating exercise, the difference being that instead of auditory listening we were to be focusing purely on our sight and/or other senses. This was significant for me as I really began to describe the surroundings with much more detail.

We first traveled to the same spot as our first stop last Thursday, around the corner from our classroom. I was immediately able to be more detailed about what I was seeing, as it was at the forefront of my senses as opposed to the auditory senses. Here was what I annotated from there:

We next headed to the Victorian State Library and this was where I really began to shine. I had a conversation with Robbie inside the reading room and I expressed something along the lines of feeling the weight of a sense of history with the room. Robbie helped me understand the nature of what the essence of the task was by helping me extrapolate the idea of history through the lens of pieces of eraser debris, which was lying around on the desk I was situated at. This made me realize that instead of describing what I can observe, I should be trying to understand how they all fit in collectively and interweave texturally into the environment. Below are my findings for the reading room in the Victorian State Library:

I feel like today has been a significant breakthrough for me in understanding what the goal of the annotating exercise has been. It has shifted my thinking, I believe, into a more multifaceted understanding, and makes me excited in going forward. I feel like I now have the tools I need to expand upon things, and I now must try to use these in order to help better evaluate the surroundings I had originally written for homework.