Our website is coming along really nicely. Imogen has chosen a reat theme and colour palette and we have a nice logo now. Bec’s photo looks really good, even if we haven’t got all them together yet.

I think this is the most fun I’ve had working in a group. We get along really well and somehow there have been no arguments. I think its because we don’t feel forced to be working together. While we do have a deadline, we’ve done so much work already nobody is at all stressed.

The presentation is looking good. Hopefully we’ll be able to make it clearer and more cohesive as we work out what exactly is going in it.

Abigail Belfrage sat in our class today and offered us advice on how best to use historical sources in our work.

When I sat down with Abigail she mentioned that the State Library has a great online database of old newspapers. Unfortunately, many of these newspapers pre-dated the Russell Street bombing. There was an exception however, in the Canberra Times. This newspaper reported on the bombing extensively for about a week after the event, and then continued with smaller updates. It was interesting to read about the event as it happened, as there was very little information surrounding the circumstances of the attack.

Abigail also lent me a book on interview techniques. I found this very useful in editing my interview questions. It also covered really basic stuff, like where to sit and how to address a person.

While my project does not really require much historical research, Abigail was still helpful in pointing me in the right direction to best understand the event I am focused on.

As we already know what [place] means, it is hard to get beyond that common-sense level to understand it in a more developed way. Place, then, is both simple and complicated.
                                                                                                                                      – Tim Cresswell

In the introduction to his book, Place: An Introduction, Tim Cresswell attempts to define place in a simple way. This proves difficult, and I am left wanting to read more of his book to understand place.

As Cresswell says, we use the word place in everyday life without think too much about its meaning. A place is somewhere we go, somewhere we are, or somewhere we have been. It is a physical space, but at the same time its boundaries are invisible.

How does a place become a place? Why draw the invisible line that divides one country from another, therefore forming two distinct and separate places? Politics plays a role, culture plays a role, and collective consciousness plays a role. And so even though we use the word place al the time, the word is complicated and undefinable.

Cresswell talks of how a place can become significant, drawing on a park in New York, previously bland and uninteresting, but transformed after the Occupy Protest took it up as a base. He says that a couple of hundred protestors made this park into a place. Some trees and benches became the home of a movement. But I have never heard of this park. The peak of the Occupy Movement was years ago. Even after having stayed in New York for two months, the name of this park means nothing to me. So even though a place can be made significant, it can also be made insignificant.

Cresswell’s introduction to place serves as a good starting point for this semester. It has got me thinking about place, about what it is and how we can explore it. Place is simultaneously physical and imaginary, significant and insignificant. Place is interesting.

Our first ‘excursion’ from RMIT was to the State Library today.

On this visit we were talked through how to use the libraries vast collection and what sort of things we’ll be able to find. It was interesting hearing about the newspapers, photos, and plans kept at the library; it is not just book upon book upon books.

I had had no idea that you could request things be brought in to the library from their warehouses, and was impressed at how quickly they can do it.

I am always blown away by the amount of knowledge librarians have about their collections. Even the at the small library at my high school, it’s always good to know that there are people that know every book on site.

While hearing about the collections was interesting, I did struggle to keep my eyes open when we were learning how to best use the search system. It was just one of those days where you can’t avoid sleep.

So a couple of weeks ago I finally got around to booking my New York trip. Now my life has become an agonising wait to December 5th, when I can finally hop off a plane at JFK with my dreams and a cardigan.

So last week was the cut off date to receive five bonus marks for handing in a draft of the final creative essay. I was going to submit a draft, until I found out that it would not be read by my tutor and no feedback would be given. I then said, ‘what’s the point?’ and continued pursuing other interests instead.

The point, apparently, is to give us an incentive to write a draft. This is perplexing to me. As university students, we are constantly being told that we have to take matters into our own hands, be responsible for ourselves, and do the work we need to in order to achieve what we want to achieve. Why then are we being persuaded to write a draft essay with the allure of five bonus marks? I always draft essays. My first draft is always completely demolished by the time I’m ready to hand it in. I believe that most other students wishing to achieve above a pass do the same thing. We are capable of pushing ourselves and getting things done, we don’t need 5 extra points for trying. Good on the students who finished a draft and handed it in. For me, working to yet another deadline, adding that pressure to my already stressful timetable just didn’t seem worth it. I write this draft, I hand it in, and I get no feedback? Great. I’d rather write it on my own time, ask my tutor how it’s going, and continue on my merry way towards week 12.

40+ pages about databases, how exciting!

The main point I gathered from the Manovich reading that websites are databases (who knew?) and that databases are collection (wow!).

This will suffice as my notes on the readings for now.

I don’t remember much from this week’s symposium, and my 3 lines of notes haven’t been much help in jogging my memory. I do however remember a discussion of blogs as ecologies, though I’m unsure of how much detail it was covered in. Here’s my take.

Ecologies are systems of beings, through which each being interacts with another, either directly or through various degrees of separation. In the case of out Network Media blogs, this is true. We each link to other student’s blogs, with each person linking to different people than those who linked to them. This creates a chain, or more of a complicated series of hubs (some people get linked to a lot more than others), nodes and links. This series functions much like an ecology, with a blogs popularity (or life) dependent on other blogs in the chain. If a blog is not linked to enough, it loses popularity (gets lower search results in google). This occurs in much the same way that an animal in an ecology dies if it does not have enough food to eat (is not linked to enough other animals that it could survive on). In this way, blogs act as ecologies.

For another take on last week’s symposium, visit Kiralee, who talks about networks and their restrictions, or Mia, who remembered three interesting things, and finally Kenton, who looks in to Cowbird.

For some dumb reason, I decided to study biology right up to the end of year 12. I had a proven track record at being awful at it, but I soldiered on, worried that I might revisit my childhood dream of being a marine biologist and need a science pre-requisite for university. So if studying biology taught me anything, it’s that I while I’m awful at science exam, I can appreciate a clear, formulaic and scientific book extract.

This course has been about going beyond the regular, the boring and the easy to understand. It has focused on broadening horizons and making a lot of people confused. And while I appreciate reading and learning about new ways of thinking and doing, I also appreciate a bit of good old science. Science writers, or science text book writers, know how to make complicated and congested ideas and thoughts make sense. Barabasi’s writings on the 80/20 rule, Pareto and water molecules made sense; even when I thought he’d maybe lost track a little and none of this related to networked media.

In his introduction to the reading, Adrian mentions that the notion of links, nodes and hub is why you probably shouldn’t talk about people behind their backs, even if you think you’re safe. I was recently telling a girl at work about something another person I know said. My work friend is 6 years older than me, from the other side of the city and goes to a different university, and yet she knew the person I was talking about through her boyfriend. Luckily my work friend and I had the same views about the person in question, but I was still a little shaken.

I think that the 80/20 rule, while maybe not known in name to many people, is quite common knowledge. We know that there is a chance two seemingly separate people are connected to each other, but we choose to ignore it. How often do people use the phrase ‘it’s a small world’ when they run into someone that they’ve known for years, with similar interests, possibly even in the same city as they’ve both lived in their whole lives? We are just like H2O molecules, sometimes sticking together, and sometimes bouncing off each other, but remaining in the same small container, destined to one day, in all probability, meet again.