Being really interested in phenomena that engage their audience in their mode of production (e.g. Open Source Software, Flickr, generative production, net-art, etc.) I spend most of my time at college contemplating software and online communities. I often get a lot of grief for this practice and I’m still not quite sure why, maybe it’s because it reminds people of the course’s old name - Computer Related Design. So imagine my delight to discover that for my latest brief I had been paired with Kris Cohen, a research fellow at the University of Surrey’s Sociology Department, Incite. Kris is currently researching photography on the internet, in particular photoblogs and Flickr and was effectively looking at my research (and dissertation) topics from a different angle. It was hard for us to stop talking during the 4 day project but the expectation that we would present something last Friday pushed us into quite an interesting experiment.
We spent most of our time looking at the difference between successful and unsuccessful attempts at making creative production more open or public and decided to create an experiment designed to extract people’s aversions to things like public publishing and Copyleft. Choosing Sociology as the test field for it’s strong academic ties and history as a peer-reviewed science we transferred a 1970s sociological study (including coding) from an impenetrable online archive to this Flickr account. We then interviewed several sociologists to see how they felt about the process of tagging (which is already common practice for many sociologists), interlinking and then publishing their data in a public space. We also wanted to get some feedback from the Flickrati to see how they felt about Flickr being used to tag text in this way. There are some comments over at Flickr and some on Kris’ blog and we have started to collate the responses for further study. Hopefully when we’ve both had time to digest last week’s conversations and interviews you’ll hear from us again.
I’d also like to give a big thank you to Kris for upgrading my Flickr account to a Pro account - I’ll be moving my old photo archive (colour and black and white) over just as soon as I get a chance.
