Foster Reading for October 25

Dr. Gries
1. Doing visual studies in the digital age, in my eyes, means being able to embrace experimentation, and to take on risks to invent visual methods to help us confront our current research needs. As we begin to adjust to new orders of magnitude and work with larger datasets related to visual and media production, we especially need to be proactive in designing the methods and tools that can diversify our research practices so that our visual methodologies keep pace with our contemporary objects of study
2. 1. “Digital Visualization techniques are useful for extending datasets and deepening our knowledge of an image’s rhetorical impact, especially when a viral image’s story involves transnational circulation.”
3. 2. “Data Visualization techniques can help generate quantifiable evidence to substantiate new claims, and either confirm or revise past claims based on qualitative research
4. 3. “Data Visualization techniques can help us identify and give name to phenomena that become visible during our visualizations.”
5. 4. “Digital Visualization techniques can help us develop new modes of analysis that are needed to make sense of the growing amount of visual data that confronts us on a daily basis.”
6. I am especially concerned that our ways of doing visual studies have not kept pace with the proliferation of digitally mediated practices and the digital technologies at our disposal to study them.”
Review of STILL LIFE
1. shifting the focus of visual analysis from questions of what images represent to questions of how images coproduce the world
  1. Co? images + language?
  2. while we think of composing as a process, we still think of composed matter as static, stable things [. . .] As a consequence of this static model, we often refrain from accounting for the constant yet often-unpredictable change and movement that discourse experiences”
    1. rhetoric is not just a product and done: PARALOGY!!
2. Focus of book: the ways discourse both affects and is affected by the material world in which it moves
  1. 1. objects exceed both their creators and the rhetorical situations for which they were created and go on to circulate in different communities, affect other actants, and develop their own identities.
    1. 2. objects have agency
      1. 3 images (re)assemble the worlds in which they live and circulate
        Images act on humans who react to images who change images that then act on humans- is this heteroglossia? Parology? A mix?
3. methodology: given the dynamic movement of matter and the vital contributions matter makes to collective life.....
  1. theoretical new materialist principles: becoming, transformation, consequentiality, vitality, agency and virality
    1. following, tracing, embracing uncertainty
      1. embrace uncertainly suspending interpretation so as not to miss alternative possibilities
  2. 1. choose an object of study (object/image being the key word)
    1. 2. follow its nonlinear path through the world; track its changes as it interacts with communities
      1. 3. trace the effects caused by its various intra-actions with other actants in the world (not just humans!!)
        iconographic tracking:
        data-hording stage: find as many instances of the image and discussion of the image as are available- collect, record (suspend evaluation)
        categorize data- categories should emerge with the data (looking for patterns
        use categories to locate more instances
        close study of specific communities in which the image has intra-acted
        The processes, steps etc will imbricate
        attend to material process!!!: composition, production, transformation, circulation, distribution, collectivity, and consequentiality
        what allows the image to change; how does it change???????
  3. description: Gries argues that description is the best way to make transparent the complex, multifaceted, and dynamic contributions images make to collective life.
    1. does not presuppose solutions, belie complexity or undercut the agency: allows the image, network and associations to demonstrate their own complexity and agency (With as little projection as possible)
      1. analysis has its place BUT object is equal to researcher...
        TRUST the objects we study; let them tell their story without human interpretation.....
Material article: Define and elucidate
1. the matter from which a thing is or can be made
  1. Feminist rhetorical studies: the body is material- composition that involves material practices: needlework, cookbooks, journals, letters- girl stuff!
    1. the physical components of a subject have rhetorical power to at least the same, if not a greater, extent than language
      1. rhetoric’s materiality constructs communal space, prescribes pathways, and summons attention, acting on the whole person of the audience. But it also allows a rhetorical text to ‘speak’ by its mere existence
2. Material (adj.): denoting or consisting of physical objects rather than the mind or spirit.
  1. a focus on the body is central to women's rhetoric
    1. women = body, nature: oppression
      1. Because women have historically been excluded from public discourse, they have frequently adopted the available means to communicate, often taking advantage of the gendered body-mind dichotomy and focusing on the bodily forms rhetoric takes. 35
        Hélène Cixous notes that women should take advantage of their physical experience to explore their identity, famously noting “woman must write her body”
        emotional epistomology
        Studying the body, then, allows feminist rhetorical scholars to explore the productive power of rhetoric (35)
        HMMMM-> Connection??
    2. men = mental, culture: dominate
  2. Debra Hawhee:
    1. connection between rhetoric and physical training of original Olympians: Greeks!
      1. in ancient Greece, a persuasive encounter “is more than perception—mind meets (and masters) matter—instead, it is a bodily production, a mutually constitutive struggle among bodies and surrounding forces” (150)
        WAIT! Is this where the metaphor argument = war originates?
        privileging mind over body is a fallacy. Instead of working with this dichotomy, these scholars seek out and value studies of the body, embodied communication practices, and ways of knowing that reflect women’s unique knowledge about the materiality of daily life (Ebert 25). 35
3. facts, information, or ideas for use in creative a book or other work. (35)
  1. woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”
    1. historical hostility towards women writers
      1. More chores than men
        reproduction and the joys therein
  2. The issue of the material roadblocks women face is central to scholars of women’s rhetorics.
    1. bindings, sewing, expression via dress
4. important; essential; relevant.
  1. women's living conditions are rhetorical
    1. historiography
      1. connections between a woman's body and her agency
5. conclusion: studying women's rhetoric involves careful attention to the various ways rhetoric can be made manifest
  1. women: speak up: don't transcend the body: CLAIM IT (37)
Digital Materiality matter without matter matters
1. material is practical instantiation and significant
2. matter is stuff
3. MAIN IDEA: moving away from linking materiality to notions of physical substance or matter may help scholars of technology integrate their work more centrally with studies of discourse, routine, institutions and other phenomena that lie at the core of organization theory, specifically, and social theory more broadly.
  1. can digital artifact have materiality?
    1. What is materiality:
      1. stuff tangible and intangible
        facts, data
        Pinch: materiality is the world of objects and things
        material artifacts are transformed and transforming via sociological practices
      2. properties that provide uses with the capability to perform some action
        things that cannot be reduced to human intention or action
        calling something material focuses on its performativity: it provides people with capabilities they don't have without it (Must it be about people?)
        perhaps what matters most about an artifact is not what it’s made out of, but what it allows people to do.
        everyone can see the physical stuff of an object- materiality comes from those who know how it can be used (?)
        when we look at an object, we see affordances more than physical qualities
        good designers purposefully build affordances into artifacts to suggest how its material properties might be used
        it does not HAVE to be about people over material: it can be an imbrication
        materiality exists independent of people, but affordances do not. Because people come to materiality with diverse goals (Pickering’s useful operationalization of human agency) they perceive a technology as affording distinct possibilities for action. For Hutchby, the affordances of an artifact can change across different contexts even though its materiality does not. Similarly, people may perceive that an artifact offers no affordances for action, perceiving instead that it constraints their ability to carry out their goals. (6)
        a way to define material: provide capabilities that afford or constrain action (7)
4. organizations are an amalgam of people and artifacts material and not
  1. the materiality of those artifacts is consequential for our understanding of the organizing process. This notion of materiality seems to separate the physicality of artifacts like bodies, chairs, staplers, filing cabinets and drill presses from the more conceptual nature of discourses, routines, and institutions.
    1. physical matter
      1. something inbetween
        software programs
    2. conceptual matter
    3. matter
      1. with this definition of materiality, digital matter does not have materiality
        the physical matter of the artifact begins to matter only as one utilizes it to achieve a particular goal
    4. practical instantation
      1. with these definitions of materiality, digital material does have materiality
      2. idea made material: theory into practice
        to give an idea material is to instantiate it (9)
        exploit some type of social practice that compels people to follow.... (10)
        Sooooo materiality has to do with instatianion .....
        Only some artifacts are material, and it is not necessarily those with matter.
    5. significance
      1. importance
      2. pertinent to the task at hand
        material = can make a difference
        researchers should ask, when examining practices of use, which features are “material” (significant) for this user and how those features become significant for the type of work she does, for whom she interact with, or for maintaining control. (10)
        This third definition reminds us that a digital artifact, or its features, may be material in some ways, but not in others.
        page 12/13 Only material when in use (?) (Can there be potential materiality?)
    6. Why focus on different definitions of material?
      1. technology was treated either as an occasion for people to enact new patterns of organizing (Barley, 1986; 1990), or as something that changed organizing practices and was changed by them (DeSanctis and Poole, 1994; Orlikowski, 1992). Both approaches allowed technology an important role in the organizing process while emphasizing the contingent and socially shaped nature of the changes it wrought. (12)
        if materiality were to be defined in terms of practical instantiation or significance, voluntaristic theorists would likely have few qualms with it for ‘material’ would refer not to inherent properties of the artifact, but instead to the way that the artifact exists in relationship to the people who create and use it. 12
        these definitions imply that materiality is not a property of artifacts,but a product of the relationships between artifacts and the people who produce and consume them (13)
        why does any of this matter? (ha ha). When people study organizations, they leave out the material and just focus on the social (people); missing some vital stuff (he he)
        Phillips, et al. (2004) argue that talk, or discourse with a “little d” brings ideology, or Discourse with “big D” into practice. That is, our everyday talk produces and reproduces ideologies that constrain and enable human action. While ideology exists in the world of theory, it can be practically instantiated in activity through the way people communicate. In this sense, discourse is “material” in the second definition in the same way as artifacts. (13)
        What may matter most about “materiality” is that artifacts and their consequences are created and shaped through interaction

Next up

Foster Reading for October 25

Description

Resource summary

Similar

	Created by Jennifer Wilhite about 7 years ago