DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

I have phases where I really like particular words or phrases.

For ages I liked ‘counter-intuitive’; I liked the sound and I liked the meaning. I liked the idea of something transgressing or challenging expectations and assumptions. I liked the way it is an unusual word, but possible to understand even if you have never heard it before.

When my daughter was about 5 she asked me what my favourite word was. I told her it was ‘incarnidine’ - just because I thought she wanted to know an unusual word. Anyway of course I asked her the same question back and she answered

“Hellandbuggeration”.

This is of course very rude and she heard it from my Mum. Anyway family traits aside ….

My favourite words at the moment are:

Palimpsest
Apophenia
Provenance

I like the words as I like the concepts they refer to.
They all involve an idea I am interested in at the moment.

In a way, ‘palimpsest’ refers to texts that have a visible history; the word originally was used to simply describe scrolls or parchments where original text had been scraped away and a new one written on the top. There would be tracings of the old script still visible. I like this idea of the old and new co-existing. The idea of layered histories, layered narrative and the present being suffused with the past.

There is even a palimpsest group on Flickr here. It is obviously something many people are interested in … and it seems that some are extending the idea of text as being something other than just words… like this.

I have contributed some pictures to the group including this one:

I am amazed it has not been painted over.

The next word’apophenia‘ is about the bringing together of ideas that seem disassociated. As wikipedia will have it: Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”.

Maybe I have apophenia but I do see a connection between apophenia and palimpsest - since it is so often the case that when history seeps through to the present (as in palimpsest) it seems alien somehow. Sometimes the way history jars with the present makes it seem unconnected - but may actually be closely connected in some way. We may not always know the derivation of words we use in daily life - but they often have a history of meanings that have adapted over time and then come to mean something new. They have travelled a journey of usage and come to signify something differently.

such as this:

Arranged into topics from business to war to flowers, the author explains the most likely origins behind everyday words and expressions. “Laconic,” for example, means brief and blunt. Its origins, more than 2600 years ago, take it back to the Greek Wars. The Laconians, when told by an ambassador that “if we come to your city we will raze the walls and kill everyone.” The Laconians reply? “If.”

(Taken from here.)

Finally I like the word ‘provenance’ ; it is a term originally used by art historians to refer to the ‘biography’ or history of an artefact, such as a picture. The provenance of something describes the sources from which something comnes - where the work of art has been, who owned it, etc.

I like to think about the ways in which things carry stories within them so that they are meaningful not just because of what purpose they serve now, but because of their history and previous uses etc. I like to think about the ways in which the past is inscribed in the present.

Strangely enough, I am interested in all these ideas in relation to social networking and online texts as we can now see connections being made across texts which weave meanings together and bring together ideas and sites together in many new configurations. We can easily link to other people, other texts and ideas. We can embed old texts into new ones.

On the Internet there is a criss crossing and patchworking going on that seems to defy boundaries and logic. One moment a text can stand independently and in the next minute it can appear in someone’s blog; or on a wiki; or even in many places all at once. And you can pull threads through the networks to trace the paths back, or to trace new paths ahead.

It is all very exciting and DYNAMIC.

I even found MY hands here on wikipedia.

Really great yesterday going into one of my research schools and seeing a teacher working wth his class on the critical lieracies project. Fantastic to see the kids so into it and working so hard. They have a formular PEE - make a POINT, provide the EVIDENCE, and give an EXPLANATION. And they are learning to ask questions to help them unpick the ideologies within texts.

Lovely to see the notices round Mark’s classroom and to see someone so talented and clever in action. The kids were really getting so much out of what was going on. RESPECT is a key thing in that place:

Ths was the text for the starter activity:

the kids were well into it and loving looking at the ‘rip off ad’ at the top of the page. they were really interested in discussing the business side and I think maybe that is a direction to take up next.

Or maybe Mark will be interested in looking at streetart and asking questions about that using a critical literacy frame….

Whose voices do we hear on the street?
What is streetart trying to do?
Where is the power?

Look at this pupil’s folder:

Do you think it belongs to a girl or a boy? (Why do you think that? Who is the folder aimed to please? What is it trying to do? What does it assume about the audience?)

Next I went to a City Learning Centre and heard Judy Robertson from Glasgow Caledonian University talking about developing kids’ storytelling skills through computer game design. She gets kids making ther own pc games and then looks at ways in which teachers can build on the skills the kids are developing.
She uses Never winternights. which I am going to buy and have a go.

Interesting that out of the 8 people who attended the seminar, one was a teacher advisor; one was me; one was the person who arranged it; two were PhD students; then there were three teachers. Two of the teachers said they did not think they would be able to use the ideas; one was already trying it at an after school club. This is going to be a long struggle to get people to be brave enough to use this stuff in school and to see that not all skills are listed on the National Curriculum. It is so hard for teachers these days as they hae to justify everything they do in terms of hitting pre-set targets - set by a givernment interested in developing literacy of the past century, but using technology from the current one.

In the meantime … I am going to watch BB tonight. All eyes are watching….

What you decide to call a photo can influence how people read it . Barthes called this ‘anchorage’. (His ideas are based on semiotics - the study of the system of signs - i.e. systems of meanings in text and other modes, such as images and music.)

Here is Chandler on the topic:

Roland Barthes introduced the concept of anchorage (Barthes 1977, 38ff). Linguistic elements can serve to ‘anchor’ (or constrain) the preferred readings of an image: ‘to fix the floating chain of signifieds’ (ibid., 39). Barthes introduced this concept of textual anchorage primarily in relation to advertisements, but it applies of course to other genres such as captioned photographs, maps, narrated television and film documentaries, and cartoons and comics (’comic books’ to North Americans) with their speech and thought ‘balloons’. Barthes argued that the principal function of anchorage was ideological (ibid., 40). This is perhaps most obvious when photographs are used in contexts such as newspapers. Photograph captions typically present themselves as neutral labels for what self-evidently exists in the depicted world whilst actually serving to define the terms of reference and point-of-view from which it is to be seen (Chaplin 1994, 270). For instance, ‘It is a very common practice for the captions to news photographs to tell us, in words, exactly how the subject’s expression ought to be read’ (Hall 1981, 229). You may check your daily newspaper to verify this claim. Such textual anchorages can have a more subversive function, however. For instance, in the 1970s, the photographer Victor Burgin exhibited posters in the form of images appropriated from print advertisements together with his own printed text which ran counter to the intended meaning of the original ads.

Kress is keen to see the image as more potent than that; he feels that neither language nor image are more important than the other. (If you go to my link on Kress you can see a video of him.)

I think that while the visual image has a very strong impact, it is hard to see alternative readings once you have been given a caption or title. The word ‘marriage’ draws attention to the ring. The word ‘marriage’ only brings attention to the ring if you decide that the ring symbolises that a wedding has taken place. The image is dominated by what seems to be blood. Thus we can read ‘blood’ and marriage vows as being closely associated. It is not made explicit, but this seems to be symbolic.
Cultural knowledge may make you think of religion or of Lady Macbeth. And of course cultural knowledge was needed to suggest the ring symbolised marriage. Many of the meanings are inscribed in the visual, rather than the linguistic; however the linguistic suggests which aspects of the image are significant. The visual meanings are as culturally defined as the words.

I wonder what alternative readings one could come up with?

Actually this is red food dye and TT was about to wash his hands and the plates after doing this:

(Putting two ice cubes on a plate. Coloured with red food dye.)

Following on from yeterday’s post I have just read an interesting paper by Jan Blommaert, James Collins and Stef Slembrouck. (It came from here but is no longer available as has been published in Language and Communication.) It looks at

One of the sentences that popped out at me, was where they say:

‘….space in itself demands closer investigation if we intend to analyze the way in which multilingualism operates in and across societies nowadays. Every communicative event develops in a particular space, and this space may influence the event in non-arbitrary ways’.

Although this paper is about different languages being used in different ways in a world where travel and cultural exchange is more frequent, the way they talk about language as ‘an ideologoical object’ is relevant to me in looking at ways in which language is used in online spaces. It is about the idea of language being invested with social and cultural interests, not just a vehice for denotational, neutral meaning. I want to look at the way in which language is used in specific ways in online spaces, so that in a particular online space, meaning becomes imbued with specific cultural and social messages in that space. In this way the words beging to work differently in the space and help to define that space - so that words are both constitutive and agentive.

Spaces of multilingualism: Blommaert, J., Collins, J., Slembrouck, S. (2005)Language & Communication 25: 197-216

But if you think this is all a bit OTT this may be more up your street - about reading shop windows.

This is a nice illustration I found:

p>When I was a kid my Mum and Dad used to sometimes have ‘visitors’ for tea on a Sunday. Sundays were actually VERY boring when I was a kid - there was nothing to do, EVER.

This was OF COURSE pre everything. No tv on in the day (that started in about 1981 in the UK I think); no Internet of course; we did not even have a tape recorder till I was twelve (and then it ran on batteries that my Mum and Dad could not afford to replace).

My sister Jane had a record player which we played 45s on - Blackberry Way by The Move was Jane’s first single. Mine was Crackling Rosie by Neil Diamond (don’t know how I can admit that.)

Anyway it was the olden days OK? So when we had visitors my Mum would cook cakes from Good Housekeepings Cookery book - maybe cheese straws, maybe butterfly cakes; maybe date and walnut cake.

( I now have my own copy of Good Housekeepings - bought off e-bay. It’s fab.)

And we always had to Look Nice. So after Sunday dinner, ( a proper roast - I always hid the meat in my serviette and then chucked it in the coal bunker immediately afterwards), we had to go upstairs and get changed with clean clothes on.

Weird, huh? Seems so OLD.

Then the visitors would arrive and we had to go downstairs for a while to be polite. But it was always boring so we would usually go back upstairs, play, and then come down for tea - sandwiches and cake. Sometimes we sat in a line on the settee and someone (usually if Stan came, with his ‘proper’ camera), would take our photograph. This would appear in a frame later if we were really unlucky.

But anyway they always did this boring kind of talk as if they were on a special conversation display. And it was called ‘being polite’ I think. You had to act like a proper family which was weird as we already were a proper family. What reminded me of this was when I read about Vygotsky who had observed two little girls who were sisters and they said to each other ‘Let’s play sisters’.

Fantastic.

I knew what those little girls meant. And I felt like when the visitors came, my whole family played families. And it was as if we were in a pretend house with special visitor food. And we had to wear itchy clothes.

There is something in here about the relationships between space, language and identity. And about how there is a push-pull relationship amongst them all; they all influence each other so that you change in the space, or the space can change, and you change your language to change the space, but the space changes your language. And you end up being like a visitor in your own house.