listening to repeating

Here we go again with geolocation and the like.

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve been working through the limits of location—how to undo, in a sense, a lot of the work I did for two years on the politics of location, longitude, and latitude.  The reason for this switch, I think, is that I’m realizing how an emphasis on location and position largely ignores movement and assemblage.  It’s not that I want to toss out location altogether; it’s that I want to account for, as Matthew Fuller writes, “how this becomes that.”

Enter Alfred North Whitehead and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.  That is, don’t mistake the abstract for the concrete.  Fuller writes a bit about this fallacy in Media Ecologies, and I just want to expand upon that writing a tad here.  It seems that misplaced concreteness is largely attributed to the naturalization of space and systems in order to render them homogeneous.  And as Fuller points outs in his chapter, “How This Becomes That,” this homogeneity breaks down when objects AND their systems resist isolation—when objects become processes and when systems conjoin with other systems.

Fair enough.

It seems to me, then—and this is likely obvious to most people in, say, geography and science studies—that the objectification or neutralization of latitude and longitude and their status as data is one way of making the abstract concrete.  “I am standing EXACTLY right here.”  This claim is not to say that longitude and latitude are simply relative.  Rather, the question is how you got EXACTLY THERE in the first place.  Or, perhaps, how the abstract BECAME concrete.

That said, I’ve come to realize that, in teaching a politics of (geo)location through something like geoblogging, I’ve been pretty solid at prompting inquiry into the context of any given media form and situation.  For instance: When, where, and from what position did you take the photograph, and how does that context influence your (and others’) interpretations of the photo?”  Such questions often lead to more questions about representation.

What I haven’t prompted are inquiries into how media forms and situations come to be—the “how did you get there?” and, ostensibly, the “where and when did you go?” questions.  In other words, I’ve been treating media such as digital photographs as stills and, indeed, as isolated in time and space, able to be fixed and geolocated.  This is the serialization of movement.

What’s next?  Re-reading Cinema 1, it seems.  And then re-prompting, adding movement to location.

More soon…

In the winter quarter at the UW, Matt Wilson and I will be designing a digital humanities curriculum that will incorporate, among other things, modules on geospatial metadata and the use of a collaborative geoblog.  I’m really looking forward to working with Matt on this project; and I am also looking forward to mobilizing the curriculum in the spring quarter, when I will be teaching “Project-Based Approaches to the Digital Humanities.”

Despite all of this looking forward, what’s difficult to look around is the fact that a GPS-enabled or GPS-ready camera is difficult to come by and will run you at least $450.  Ideally, Matt and I want to get one of these things, namely because it would allow more precise geospatial metadata to be attached to or embedded in the digital photos that he, the students, and I will be taking.  Plus, I’m already drooling over a super-nerdy, Latourian class conversation on the distinctions between “readymade geolocation,” where the device captures the data for the photographer, and “geolocation in the making,” where the photographer is the agent who interprets location.

But I digress.

This is a call of sorts.  I’m not expecting many, if any, responses.  Still…

To any of you who stumble upon this entry: Do you embed geospatial metadata in or attach it to digital images?  And if so, then how do you do it?  What works, what’s cheap, and what’s on the horizon?

Thanks!

Kairos 12.2 is now online, and there you will find “Geolocating Compositional Strategies at the Virtual University” by Curtis Hisayasu and me. Per the co-editors’ comments:

In “Geolocating Compositional Strategies at the Virtual University,” by Curtis Hisayasu and Jentery Sayers, the authors contend that when composition instructors learn to include new information technologies in their coursework, they expand the writing classroom beyond its traditional borders. Using “geoblogging” as a means, they argue that a pedagogy based on the virtual university can be used to construct writing scenarios that both include and go beyond the academy—that, in essence, address the impact of context and location on student writing. They intend to “disrupt the very terms that create distance between the official and the everyday” and to show how geolocational approaches, as through the interactive maps presented in the webtext, can provide students with “complex, process-based writing situations” that contexualize analytical thinking and writing “by mapping them as practices onto a larger socio-cultural landscape.” Located at the University of Washington, the Geoblogging Project is in its early stages, yet it offers a rich theoretical discussion and practical prompts for student writing in both the outlined mapping strategies and the geoblogs themselves.

Also included in issue 12.2 is my review of “Digitial Media Studies in Detroit,” a panel at Comptuers and Writing 2007.

Enjoy!