I wasn’t sure if Kait would see this if I just commented on her project post so I wanted to post a little note here for her.

The New School’s Memory group (a group of grad students mostly in psychology and sociology) has weekly seminars and I heard one of their presenters (Kimberly Spring) speak about her research last spring and I thought you might want to get in touch w/ her. Her work is primarily focused on photography but I remember her briefly mentioning blogs as well. Here is the info I have… The seminars meet during our class on Wednesday but you could probably email her… here is the email for the group (who would probably give you her email): nssrmemoryconference@gmail.com

Here’s the info on her seminar lecture:

October 7:
-Kimberly Spring (Sociology, New School for Social Research) will present a paper titled “Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator: The Role of Photographs in U.S.
Service Members’ Testimony Against War”
Abstract:

Since Mathew Brady first documented the life and death of soldiers in
the U.S. Civil War, photographs have become central to the collective
memory of war. However, whereas the visual recording of war has
traditionally been the purview of journalists, today the images of war
are increasingly presented through the lenses of those most directly
involved – military service members – to the extent that the photographs
taken by soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison have arguably had a greater
influence on the collective memory of the Iraq War than any other image.
This paper examines how some U.S. veterans of the Iraq War have
integrated this practice of taking pictures into a critique of the
military. The analysis considers how the veterans attempt to fix the
meaning of photographs through the problematization of their use in the
military; how the photographs serve as a mechanism for remembering; and
the ways in which the images, as analogons of reality, bring the past
into the present. Utilizing Roland Barthes’ concept of a photograph’s
“third meaning,” I examine how the presentation of the photographs
reveals the disguised meaning in these types of images, which lies in
the human capacity to find triumph in the suffering and subordination of
others, in order to affect social transformation.

After my discussion with Peter and Amanda today I’ve been thinking about Rosenzweig’s Collaboration and the Cyber infrastructure: Academic Collaboration with Museums and Libraries in the Digital Era.

In introducing his 4 points on collaboration Rosenzweig provides a little anecdote: Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks, and he replied, “That’s where the money is.” Similarly, one could answer the question of why historians should work with museums and libraries by saying “that’s where the past is.”

 This may be a bit of a response to one of the earlier questions (Why are we working on our projects individually?) but aren’t we, by working with multiple organizations and collecting documents from multiple sources, working collaboratively? Our projects may not be collaborative with others in the class but for most of us it seems like most of us will be working with some museums, archives and librarians just to get our materials.

My question is, if we consider the work of gathering these archival projects as collaborative in some way, how should we credit and recognize the shared work done by those who kept the materials we want to use? Should we, the bank robbers, credit the banks in some way further than acknowledgements and citations? Or maybe a better question is how can we work to not just “rob the banks” but to copy the material and maybe give back to the banks in some way with lesson plans and exhibits which highlight material from their collections?

For my research topic I want to look at the documentation surrounding New York peace efforts  in reaction to  9/11 within the first month following the attacks (possibly just up until the first troops arriving in Afghanistan of October 7th).  I spoke with Amanda about narrowing the topic further to the events in Union Square but I think it might also be interesting to look at online activity; and I too am struggling with how narrow or in what way I really want to approach this online archive. I am trying to work in an event, or a short time period, where I can explore the collective memory of a failed antiwar efforts in this case; specifically I’d like to look at how the initial peace efforts were documented and reported when they were forming and then possibly work in some original work of interviewing members of the communities that organized rallies, protests and gatherings for an oral history component to see how they remember putting events together…

I’m really intrigued by an article I just read: Protest, Cyberactivism and New Social Movements: The Reemergence of the
Peace Movement Post 9/11

Help me if you have any suggestions or ideas!!!

This could just be my own interests  seeping into my breakdown of this weeks readings, but I’m wondering after reading Wright, if we can think of the transition from non-literate visual/oral culture to literate culture as a “trauma.” I’m struck by one passage in particular where Wright mentions…

“Where ever the printing press took hold, conflict seemed to follow. Shlain argues that the introduction of printed books seems to have triggered a kind of mass social pathology that may have stemmed from the jarring introduction of the linear, left brained communications mode of thought into what had previously been a predominantly oral and visual right brained culture. L. Shlain believes this cognitive disruption explains why printing and literacy seem to have spread in almost perfect lockstep with the rise of witch burning. ” -120

and then further: “The sudden shift from an oral, visually symbolic culture to an increasingly left-brained world of linear written texts may have triggered a deep shift in the European psyche that led, for a time, to a kind of mass psychosis.” 121

Freud defined a traumatic neurosis as evidenced by a “weakening and shattering of the mental functions,” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) and in Trauma literature there is often discussion of the traumatic events as causing a breach with or a fragmentation of one’s way of narrativizing and thinking. There is often mention that when a trauma occurs we are forced to question the very ways we have previously understood the world. A victim of trauma is sometimes described as being “unhinged” from his or her paradigm of how the world works. Wright’s quote seems to echo this violence against the mind; in transitioning out of a visual culture into a literate one (where “page numbers appeared, while illustrations dwindled” – 121) was one’s understanding of the world really shifted to the extreme that we could call this a cultural trauma?

following this line of thought, I am struck then by Levy’s discussion of ways of thinking and the distracting qualities of new technologies like the internet…

Are we in a new “traumatic era” where our now linear brains, which are the result of the previously mentioned visual-to-literate transition, are being retraumatized by the new ways we are forced to think in terms of hyperlinks, connections, cyclical natures, crossreferences, googleimages, googlevideos, googlebooks, endless blogs and shared authority where, As Levy suggests, “New technologies do make it remarkably efficient and easy to search for information and to collect masses of potentially relevant sources on a huge variety of topics, they can’t in and of themselves, clear the space and time needed to absorb and to reflect on what is being collected.”-244 ???

(what does it say that while writing this question I have four other tabs open: one figuring out if it is “breach from” or “breach with;” one with email; one searching (with not avail) for a performance artist who I recall last year created a piece about constant distraction and one with refworks open hoping that last fall I saved an article I remember thinking “I should save this somewhere” about said performance piece… again to no avail)
oh and my del.icio.us name is also meredith505dav

I’m intrigued by the bottom up creation of the internet that Rosenzweig points to in his discussion of Michael and Ronda Hauben’s book Netizens: on the History and impact of Usenet and the Inernet. Although it seems obvious that the military uses and funding spurred the development of computer networking and the Internet, examples like the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing games discussed by Friedman and Rosenzweig’s comment about email remaining the most popular use of the internet both seem to illustrate the way popular usage of technologies and consumer/user adaptations make them what they really are in the long run. Do you think it is possible to lay one’s foot down and say that the internet we know today is more due to military funding or more due to popular usage and development?

I’m also interested in the comment Rosenzweig makes in reference to computers and the internet as sites of Foucauldian power struggles. On the Wiki history of the internet site it cites a table by the UTI which illustrates the percentage of internet users across developed counties vs. developing countries. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Internet_users_per_100_inhabitants_1997-2007_ITU.png

What interests me here is the issue of accessibility to knowledge and ways of thinking.

Friedman’s example of the 1990’s Tetris commercial suggests that playing computer games (and perhaps accessing information though computers in general) continues to shape how one thinks and see the world even after walking away from the computer. He notes specifically that “The [Tetris] commercial captured the most remarkable quality of interactive software: the way it seems to restructure perception, so that even after you’ve stopped playing, you continue to look at the world a little differently.” 124

What implications does this effect have when the systems, computers, internet etc which are shaping the way we see the world around us are being accessed by specific social and economic classes?

Hi everyone, I’m Meredith.  I’m a second year grad student in the ever difficult to explain Draper Program. It looks like I’ll be seeing some familiar faces and I’m excited to meet those of you I haven’t had in classes before. My undergraduate background is in Art History and I’ve come back to school to focus more on Public History and cultural memory…

I’ve worked very minimally with HTML editing, played for about 30 seconds with Dreamweaver, and  read a few blogs but I often feel a step behind technological trends… I am familiar with many of the social networking sites but mostly in a surface level way. I’m looking forward to really diving into the material it looks like we are covering!

My focus within my program has shifted significantly over the last year and I’m working towards a thesis on the evolution of collective memory around national events like Septemeber 11th and the influence of the state and the media in this process. I’m hoping to work my project around some aspect of this for our class…

I look forward to seeing you all on Wednesday!