And were off! Early this morning, Ellie, Leslie and I braved the weather, hopped in Meg’s car, and splashed our way to the airport en route to CSCW. Lilly just texted to let us know about the swimming pool waiting for us — ah, Savannah in February. Glad we’re not on our way to DC.
So cookies basically helped me make it through my thesis. As Margarita and I madly typed, sitting across from each other at her dinning room table, she buttressed herself against the pain with power smoothies while I sublimated it with coffee and cookies.
During a recent dissertation defense, a colleague joked that she was tempted to dedicate her dissertation “to tea.” While every laughed at the ridiculous and endearing joke, a mild horror crept over me as I realized that I, in fact, had mentioned cookies in the acknowledgements section of my thesis. (more…)
Those who have known/tolerated me for at least a year probably know this story. It’s the same one I told last year. As children my dad would make us play a game — guess what the local news thought the 10 most notable stories of the year were, and then try creating a list of our own news.
Top 10’s were popular this year, perhaps inspired by the end of a decade: Top 10 LOLCats, Romantic Comedies, One Hit Wonders of the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s and so on.
One might almost think top 10s passe, but as one friend of mine explained: “I’ve been loving it! I have been looking at all these top 10 movie lists, revisiting favorites, and catching the ones I never got around to.”
Last year was particularly important for me. Particularly with my graduation from Georgetown, and a move to UC Irvine, a lot has changed. How funny — I just realized that a decade ago (1999) was the year I graduated from high school and moved away to college. New beginnings, new opportunities, I suppose.
Well, without further delay, 2009 in 10 bite size pieces. (more…)
Looks like I am going to Savannah! I received word a couple days ago that my paper on PatientsLikeMe was accepted for the “CSCW Research in Healthcare: Past, Present, and Future” workshop at CSCW 2010. The paper, co-authored with Caitie Lustig and my advisor, Gillian Hayes, is the start of some research engaging with issues around the representation of patients via PatientsLikeMe’s health data system.
http://www.jedbrubaker.com/patientslikeme/
In the meantime, any thing I just can not miss while I am in Savannah?
Quick and crazy factoid for the night:
Upon his death, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) (of Panopticon fame) asked to be permanently embalmed and kept at the University of London, where his corpse “now fitted with a head made of wax, is regularly wheeled into college meetings, where it is duly recorded in the minutes as ‘present, but not voting’” (Hijiya, 1983, p. 356)
Talk about persistence. A-mazing.
I am currently sitting in a lecture on ubiquitous computing, and sensors is the name of the game.
I have recently been thinking again about the engineer’s role in reinforcing essentialized notions of identity. This is particularly relevant in the ubiquitous computing space where the focus on sensors explicitly aims to sense the body.
There is a complicated theoretical argument to be articulated, but honestly, I am writing final papers, and Derrida has been keeping me up at night. So, for today, I will summarize my thinking with the following comic from ThreePanelSoul, lovingly sent my way by Daniel.
Enjoy. I’ll see you next week.
I have a strange habit. When things get really stressful, I start fantasying that I am somewhere else. This is nothing unique, but in my case, studying technologies that actually allow people to be somewhere else, it expresses itself in slightly strange ways.
When writing the literature review for my thesis, for example, and having spent so much time researching virtual communities, I decided that I should do more than read about them — I should live in one too! And so off I went to LambdaMOO, one of the most famous text-based virtual communities.
Sitting in my DC condo, I would slide my LambdaMOO existence off to one of my screens, while continuing to typing away in Word. A quick glance to the terminal with its black screen and white text was enough to remind me that somewhere else, some portion of me wasn’t enduring the pain of writing a thesis. This worked, kind of, but not for very long. (more…)
When considering “What is an author?”, Foucault describes writers as hollow shells destined to shuffle around drafty apartments, stare vacantly across town squares, and presumably come into the unknowing ownership of a large number of cats.
Alright, some of that is me. He does say:
..it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer. Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author.
Given the number of papers I am writing this week, I might be putting this to a literal test. However, I just received some exciting news that is deserving of an interruption: Digital Technologies of the Self is out, and along with it, my chapter on craigslist Missed Connections.
Image courtesy of Yasmine Abbas's hand, and the helpful birds on Twitter.
You can find information about it on the publisher’s site, and it has even shown up on Amazon, where you can (as I have – tehe) sign up to be notified when they have it ready to be shipped to your eager hands!
What is the book about, you ask? (more…)
Tonight Judy Olsen presented in my research methods on what she calls “the ten questions.” Apparently originally deployed on PhD students at the School of Information and the University of Michigan, these ten questions are designed to structure your research and (apparently) make graduation day arrive sooner. While they do structure research into a certain type of academic work, I do like the narrative they create. Without delay, here they are:
I am not exactly how this might map on to my attempts to problematize identity (ahem), but I am curious to try. Hold on, this might be a bumpy ride…
Driving away from UC Irvine’s campus, you only have to take a couple quick turns onto Newport Coast Drive before you find yourself racing down a hill towards Laguna Beach. Within seconds you will come around a bend, and the hills will open up to reveal an ocean so blue it is sometimes hard to see where the water stops and the sky beings.
This is where I live. Apparently this is my new home. With images like these, so stunning they are almost trite, the whole thing is hard to believe, but this is what it looks like. It is surreal. (more…)
