Wie hier im Blog bereits erwähnt, bin ich in der vergangenen Woche von der Graduate Studies Group des Georg-Simmel-Zentrums für Metropolenforschung an der Humboldt-Universität Berlin zu einem Vortrag eingeladen worden. Der Vortrag hatte den Titel Phänomenologie, Stadt und das Abwesende. Glücklicherweise hat mit der Aufnahme alles soweit geklappt, so dass ich den Vortrag hier zum Anschauen und herunterladen zur Verfügung stellen kann. (Länge: 36 Minuten. Die Tonqualität ist leider nur mäßig, da ich kein separates Mikrofon dabei hatte.)
The end of the road. This was the name of the symposium that ended the research project that I was involved in beginning in 2009. The symposium reflected the contents and the atmosphere of the project in an excellent way and I was very happy to be able to present my contribution to the project as well. The presentations were done pecha kucha style, to keep them short but also visually rich. Since the material that I collected for my research has great visual strength, this format suited me so well that I decided to make a recording and put the presentation online. I hope you enjoy it!
(Thanks to Andi Schmidmeister and Kerstin Bornholdt for the company and the reflections that they offered during our trips to Hereiane and the Stegastein platform!)
Ende der vergangenen Woche habe ich an der 8. Tagung der Neuen Kulturgeographie teilgenommen. Auch wenn ich als disziplinärer Außenseiter etwas den Eindruck hatte, dass die Neue Kulturgeographie den Label neu vielleicht ablegen könnte, so heißt das jedenfalls nicht, dass die Tagung nicht allerlei interessante Perspektiven geboten hätte. Ich jedenfalls habe in jeder Sitzung, an der ich teilgenommen habe, mindestens einen spannenden Vortrag gehört, was mir gar keine schlechte Ausbeute zu sein scheint. Insbesondere bin ich dafür dankbar, dass ich – ohne dort wirklich Leute zu kennen – schnell Anschluss gefunden habe und freundlich aufgenommen worden bin. Ein paar Gesichter kannte ich zwar schon über die Konferenzen der Royal Geographical Society, aber so groß ist die Überlappung mit der britischen Geografie-Szene anscheinend nicht. Besondere Freude hat mir die Einladung zur Teilnahme an der von Martin Müller geleiteten Sitzung bereitet. Unter dem Titel Mittendrin statt nur dabei: Ethnographie als Methodologie für die Neue Kulturgeographie gab es vier verschiedene Präsentationen zum Themenfeld Ethnografie, die sich untereinander hervorragend ergänzt haben. Ich konnte mich in meinem Vortrag unter dem Titel Aufmerksam werden… Zur phänomenologischen Auseinandersetzung mit Dingen, Anderen und sich selbst mit der Rolle der Phänomenologie in meinem ethnografischen Arbeiten auseinandersetzen und dabei weiter über die Möglichkeiten reflektieren, die das Arbeiten mit Videoaufzeichnungen mit sich bringt. Auch die Diskussion in der Sitzung war sehr angenehm und produktiv. Leider allerdings habe ich es dieses Mal verpasst, einen Mitschnitt von meiner Präsentation zu machen, beziehungsweise ich habe den Mitschnitt aus Versehen gelöscht… Deswegen kann ich jetzt leider nur die Folien ohne meinen Vortrag als QuickTime Film zur Verfügung stellen. Der Film spielt sich nicht von alleine ab, man muss sich von einem Präsentationschritt zum nächsten klicken – was allerdings auch den Vorteil hat, dass man die Sache in seinem eigenen Tempo verfolgen kann. Hier also die Filmdatei im .mov Format: Aufmerksam werden… [27 MB].
Vorgestern hatte ich mein erstes offizielles Vorsingen, im Rahmen meiner Bewerbung auf die von der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg ausgeschriebene Stelle als Juniorprofessor für qualitative sozialwissenschaftliche Methoden. Im Rahmen der Bewerbung musste ich auch einen wissenschaftlichen Vortrag vor der Berufungskommission (und anscheinend auch noch einem Gast) halten. Wie auch sonst üblich, habe ich den zwanzigminütigen Vortrag aufgezeichnet und stelle ihn hier als Videodatei in zwei unterschiedlichen Formaten zur Verfügung: Ogg Theora (45 MB, für Firefox und VLC) | MP4 (28 MB, für Safari, Chrome und QuickTime).
This is the title of the presentation that I gave last week. I was very kindly invited to present my work on the Norwegian Tourist Route in the research seminar of Uppsala University’s Department of Social and Economic Geography. As usual, I recorded the presentation on my laptop and I have now uploaded it. If you have a modern web browser like Firefox (3.5 and up), Safari (3.1 and up) or Chrome, you can watch the video right here.
The whole presentation took about an hour – it was very nice for me to be able to talk about my work with enough time to allow for the inclusion of a substantial amount of what some people call data (there are five video clips and a lot of photographs included in the presentation). The discussion after the talk and later in the evening was really productive and the whole atmosphere of the visit was very welcoming and nice. I extend my heartfelt thanks to the great folks in Uppsala!
In the course of the last month I have recoded all of my pages with video content to conform to the current working draft of HTML 5. The nice thing is that there already is a code validator for HTML 5, so that I found some things that have changed from HTML 4 to 5 that I would have overlooked. (For example the fact that the <acronym> tag isn’t part of the standard anymore and that <abbr> should be used instead.)
The main reason for me to switch to HTML 5 was the new <video> element. Until now, I have used different hacks to embed video into the website without breaking standard conformance or having to use Flash. Or I have used the official standard implementation, which left users of Internet Explorer in the cold anyway. So I was never really content with the way that I offer video because it would either be really hackish code, or it would not validate, or it would break in one or another browser. (Opera for example did not allow some of the officially validating hacks to work…) So now I am using clear and clean HTML 5 code. The only obstacle that I had to overcome was to get Firefox to display the video. I thought this wouldn’t be a problem since Firefox officially supports the video tag beginning with version 3.5. The first code that I wrote looked something like this:
<video controls src="passage.mp4"> <a href="passage.mp4" title="right click to download the file">video file (24 MB)</a> </video>
This worked perfectly fine in Safari (version 4), but in Firefox I would only get a grey field with an X where the video should be. I did not mind at first, since I was happy to get things running, my code was validating and it was built on an example that I found on the pages of the W3C itself. After a few days, I was bothered by this solution, since about half of the visitors of my website use Firefox and I certainly did not want them to be left in the cold. So I searched a bit and finally found the corresponding bugs on Mozilla’s website (435298 for the Mac and 435339 for Windows) and a general discussion of the issue. In all of these places, the Firefox developers clearly state that they won’t be supporting MPEG codecs and also won’t hook the video element up with the plugin architecture of the respective OSs. Instead, Firefox is implementing the open source Ogg Theora video codec that is not plagued by licensing issues in the way the MPEG-4 codecs are. (There is a pretty thorough discussion about this on Ars Technica.) Well, I never used Ogg stuff for anything so far, but I read that the quality of their video compression improved greatly over the course of the last year. It is open source, which I like, and Mozilla decided to try to push it, so I finally decided to give it a shot. Of course, offering embedded video support to all my visitors using Firefox was a pretty big incentive too… After a lot of experimenting, fiddling around with different encoder settings and comparing encoding results with QuickTime X’s h264 encoded files, it became clear, that the quality of Theora is indeed worse than what h264/mp4 offers, but that it is still certainly good enough for presenting video on my website – only very few people will notice the difference between the two formats (but they will notice that the .ogg files are bigger).
I had to change the code a bit to offer both video formats. I chose to use Ogg Theora as the fallback format because of the better quality (smaller size at same quality) of the h264 encoding. My current implementation looks like this:
<video controls> <source src="passage.mp4" type="video/mp4"> <source src="passage.ogg" type="video/ogg"> Video file: <a href="passage.mp4" title="right click to download the file">MP4/.264 (24 MB)</a> | <a href="passage.ogg" title="right click to download the file">Ogg Theora (47 MB)</a> </video>
This way, Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 show the embedded video with controls, while all other browsers (I tested Camino 1.6, Opera 9 and 10, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8) fall back to displaying the direct links to the video files. After doing some more testing, I must say that I prefer Firefox’s implementation of the video element to Safari’s, because Firefox will only download the video file when it is actually activated by the user, whereas Safari will start the download of all embedded video files immediately, thus clogging my internet connection as soon as I open the website.
If you want to check out how I implemented things, you can visit this page, where I also used HTML 5’s new <audio> element: Pacification by Design.
A few months ago, the book Video Interaction Analysis – Methods and Methodology, edited by Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann has been published. Since this is my first purely methodological publication, I am really looking forward to see how it is received. The opening paragraph of my chapter reads like this:
Filming is an encounter. The person wielding the camera, the camera itself, and the people and things around them enter a dynamic relationship. This relationship unfolds itself according to the rules set by the social, spatial, and material features and practices that constitute it. These features and practices constitute it, but they do not determine it in a linear way – too many contingencies enter the interaction process, disrupting, changing, or reorienting it. […] In this essay, I will focus on the surprising, unplanned side of doing video research, pointing out both the risks and the opportunities that are part and parcel of filming non-staged everyday life in public settings.
After discussing how I am located in the social field as a researcher – in connection to Bourdieu’s discussion of the social field – I switch dimensions and start to discuss my position in the material field:
But what about the position in the material field? Is that not the same thing as the geographical location? In the way that materiality is conceptualized for this essay, there is more to this position than physical location. Drawing both on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, 1968) and on works published in the wide field of science and technology studies (Garfinkel et al., 1981; Latour, 1987; Pickering, 1995), I want to propose that the position I take as a bodily actor in the material field at least temporarily becomes that of a hybrid of man and machine: a camera-researcher. The way I position myself is guided by the way I observe with and as the camera, by the way the camera observes with and as me.
These are the two main conceptual vectors which propel the discussion forward: a focus on the open-ended encounters that constitute the field work itself, and an STS focus that helps the analysis to not take the camera itself for granted, making it disappear behind the hand and the eye of the researcher. Equipped with this two vectors, I try to thrust into some problematic aspects of ethnographic research in general and of video-based research in particular.
After leaving the conference on creative destruction in Leipzig, I had to take a night train to get to the next academic event, the conference ‘Twixt Land and Sea: The Beach in Literature, Film and Cultural Theory, which was hosted by the University of Berne in Switzerland. I was really saddened that I missed the first two days of the conference, but somehow my e-mail address got off the list for the beaches conferences so that I assumed that it would not take place at all and submitted an abstract for the overlapping conference in Leipzig. The confusion created a Lars that felt a bit ruffled when he arrived in Berne the next morning, having only an hour to get himself straightened up – which succeeded only partially, so that the talk that I gave there was really, really flooded with ehms and, even worse, more than a hundred (no joke!) kind ofs. However, since I otherwise think that the content is worth the while, I got myself reacquainted with my video editing software (Final Cut Express) and edited out most of these annoying fillers. I really hope that the audience did not think I am totally stupid/deviant during the presentation… Whatever. Here is the abstract of the presentation.
The encounter with the beach opens up a new, wide horizon. The eyes can roam over dunes, the shore line, the waves and the many or few bodies of others. Should the temperature allow for it, shoes will be tossed and toes can dig into the grainy sand. The physicality of the beach merges with the corporality of the body. Looking and walking around people perceive themselves in concert with their surroundings. This act of perceiving is not a passive observation, to the contrary, it is a sensual and emotional involvement; it is acting towards yourself, towards material things, social ideals and corporeal others.
In this presentation I will use video and audio recordings to analyze and display how the beach is constituted in human interactions. Usually, “living the beach” is cast as holiday experience. However, in times of climate change another layer of complexity is added to the multi-dimensional experience of the beach. The heart is not only moved by sunsets and flirtations, or the scare of drowning in the ocean, it is also faced with the possible submersion of the landscape in which it thrives. If perceiving the changes created by global warming in everyday life is connected with the experience of your own corporeal self, then it is interesting to examine how climate change enters the sensual relation to the world around you – instead of existing only in the media, on maps and scientific reports. I will try to get a grip on this relationship between the bodily self, climate change and everyday experience to open up a new perspective on the effects of global warming and rising sea levels.
Am 18. und 19. Juni konnte ich erfreulicherweise auf der wirklich spannenden gemeinsamen Tagung der Sektionen Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung und Umweltsoziologie der DGS einen Vortrag halten. Zum Glück habe ich während des Vortrags die Verwendung von Füllwörtern wie sozusagen,halt,eben und so weiter einigermaßen im Griff gehabt, so dass es mir nicht zu unangenehm ist, die Aufnahme des Vortrags hier im Internet zur Verfügung zu stellen. (Üblicherweise nutze ich die Möglichkeit mit meiner Präsentationssoftware, Apples Keynote, einen Vortrag aufzuzeichnen. Nicht immer ist die Qualität gut genug zur Weitergabe, aber in jedem Fall ist es genauso schmerzhaft wie lehrreich, sich den eigenen Vortrag mit etwas Abstand noch einmal anzuschauen.) Hier jedenfalls das Abstract für den Vortrag und im Anschluss der Verweis zum aufgezeichneten Video.
Aufbauend auf einer Studie über besonders eindrucksvoll gestaltete Aussichts- und Rastplätze auf der Norwegischen Tourismus Route (routes.no) will ich in dieser Präsentation die Wirk- oder Handlungsmacht des Natürlichen thematisieren. Im Vordergrund steht dabei weniger eine Diskussion des Natürlichen als Kategorie, sondern vielmehr die agency, die sich an diesen Orten entfaltet. Der Norwegische Tourismusverbund und das staatliche Verkehrswesen präsentieren diese Orte als Modellhaft. Hier zeigt sich die norwegische Landschaft in ihrer vollen Pracht – und zwar gerahmt durch spezifisch skandinavisches Design. Diese Orte sind in der Tat beispielhaft für die Kategorie des Sublimen – Natur zeigt sich hier genauso schön wie schrecklich. Was bedeutet dies jedoch im Alltag dieser Orte? Im Zentrum der hier präsentierten Untersuchung steht sowohl die langsam zerstörende Wirkung der Erosion wie auch der plötzliche Eingriff eines Wetterereignisses. Im Sinne einer Phänomenologie des hier untersuchten Ortes begrenzt sich die Untersuchung des Natürlichen aber nicht auf das Natürliche ausserhalb des eigenen Körpers. Die eigene Natur ist mit eingeschlossen und sie ist in sehr konkreter Weise ein entscheidender Anlass für den Halt an einem Ort. Die Erschöpfung einer längeren Reise im Auto, der ordinäre Druck der Blase – auch diese natürlich-leiblichen Prozesse treten hier zu Tage und prägen den kreativen Umgang mit der Materialität und sozialen Normung dieser Orte. Anhand von Fotografien, Videomaterial und ethnografischen Aufzeichnungen wird in dieser Präsentation des große Potential einer offenen Auseinandersetzung mit technisierten Räumen der Mobilität aufgezeigt – einer Auseinandersetzung in der die prozesshafte und oft unerwartete Verquickung von Handlungen, Wahrnehmungen, Ereignissen und Routinen in ihrer ganzen Spannungsgeladenheit thematisiert wird.
Videoaufzeichnung des Vortrags (30 min): Ogg Theora Video (49.4 MB, abspielen mit VLC) QuickTime Video (62.2 MB, abspielen mit QuickTime)
It might seem strange that one can have a PhD degree for two years and still not have published a single peer-reviewed article. Strange especially to those who are used to the social science biz in the English-speaking world. Well, things are different in Germany. You will find lots of highly successful and respected people who publish almost exclusively in book form – either by writing complete monographs or by contributing chapters to edited volumes. I do not find anything wrong with this culture (except for the fact that publications will usually be German only and that only little non-German debate will be acknowledged in many of these publications). But, as everybody that is on the academic job market these days knows: those darned international peer-reviewed articles are what job descriptions and scholarship programs request with growing force.
Because of that pressure, I decided to overcome my reservations and prior frustrations regarding peer-review. As always, once you have jumped on a new ship, you like it and think it is the best thing in the world. So now I am happy to be able to say: I am one of them! A real scientist with a peer-reviewed publication in a well ranked international journal. So, this is a cause for celebration for me. In addition, getting this published also showed some of the good sides of peer-review, since I got really useful and encouraging feedback, which definitely improved the article.
The article is called Space, materiality and the contingency of action: a sequential analysis of the patient’s file in doctor—patient interactions and it has been published in the June 2009 issue of Discourse Studies. This is the abstract:
Focusing on the multi-dimensionality of interactional settings, this study analyzes how the material world is a significant factor in the sequential co-production of the video-taped doctor—patient interactions. The analysis shows how a material artifact, the patient’s file, is relevant in two ways: a) as a device which is employed in the sequential organization of the interaction. The patient’s file is being used in the contexts of topic development and topic change. b) The file with its specific physical and symbolic features is being co-produced and contested by both actors as a knowledge reservoir. Further inspection of the interactions in concert with theoretical reflections of the role of space and materiality suggests that interactions should be interpreted as happening in spatially arranged constellations of material objects and actors. In these both rigid and flexible constellations boundaries are established, access is distributed, and meaning is solidified.
It is a real conversation analysis (CA) piece, something that I am quite proud of since I really enjoy CA even though I do not have the opportunity to work in this field as much as I would like to.
Last week I had to leave the post-graduate college’s summer school Technologies and their Environments: The Circulation of Materials, People, and Knowledge at the St. Jakobsberg monastery early – to my regret, because there were quite a few people who were as charming as they were clever. However, the lure was big enough to make me leave: I was accepted as a participant who can show a video presentation for the conference InEvidence, hosted by CRASSH and the German department of Cambridge University. The conference was a big success – many excellent presentations by both big names and people working on their PhDs, and, in addition, we also had some art going on, in particular the very impressive and well done performance of the duo Martin Nachbar & Jochen Roller with mnemonic nonstop. A cartographic duet. The atmosphere between the participants was very relaxed and open, too.
The only drawback was the density of the program – the pauses were short. Too short for people to actually be able to take enough time to watch the video presentations that were offered. Therefore I decided to upload the video that I showed during the conference. It is called subtle. Evident. Encountering the materiality of the Potsdamer Platz. The video is almost 12 minutes long, the file 180 MB big and formatted as .mp4. It can be played using recent versions of QuickTime Player, VLC, Real Player and probably also a few others. I hope you enjoy watching it.
Next week I will participate in the workshop Video Interaction Analysis – and how to do it (program (PDF)). Here is my abstract:
In this presentation I will put the actual presence of researcher and camera in the field into focus. After positioning the actant bundle researcher-camera in the hierarchically structured social field of the railway terminal, I will present several video sequences. These sequences demonstrate techniques employed both by the people in the camera’s perspective and by the researcher-camera – techniques in which distance and the controlled normality of the terminal are maintained. However, other sequences show how this normality is frequently broken and challenged. People are getting closer than is expected, they approach, inspect, conspire with, and question the bundle researcher-camera. Taken together, an emergent set of practices is being analyzed: strategies and tactics that make video research in the open an exciting but also ambivalent process.
The workshop is organized by the DFG research project The effect of computerized knowledge in the operating theatre, from a gender perspective, which is based at Humboldt-University Berlin, Institute for Social Sciences.
On May 11-12th I will participate in the workshop Video Interaction Analysis – and how to do it (PDF) which is organized by Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann. As she writes: The aim of the workshop is to bring together video analysts with different methodological backgrounds and to discuss how their approaches differ. For that purpose, the presenters have been asked to make the stages of their analysis as transparent as possible. I will try to dive into the transparency or openness and offer those video sequences for discussion in which people display their stance (scepticism, interest, evasion…) towards me and my camera. The title for my presentation is Video research in the open – researcher, camera, and others. I am really looking forward to the workshop and I am confident that the atmosphere and setup of the workshop will be allow for fruitful, non-defensive discussion of methods in practice.
Am vergangenen Freitag habe ich im Rahmen des neuen Graduiertenkollegs das erste Mal mein zukünftiges Forschungsprojekt vorgestellt. Vom Vortrag habe ich mit Hilfe meines Laptops einen Audiomitschnitt angefertigt. Diese Tonspur habe ich nun unter die gezeigten Folien gelegt und die Übergänge entsprechend synchronisiert, so dass der Vortrag jetzt als Film zur Verfügung steht. Die Gliederung des Vortrags und ein Link zum Film finden sich auf der dazugehörigen Seite: Gezeiten und Ströme, Erholung und Erosion – Motivationen.
Frers Productions is proud to present: Perception, Aesthetics and Envelopment a video recording and the outline of my talk at our post-graduate college’s concluding conference. Thanks to Lars Meier for recording it – and of course for co-hosting the session, thanks to the rest of the grandiose organization team of the conference and thanks of course to the other participants of the Larses’ panel Urban Spaces and Private Quarters for a good and constructive discussion.
I was made aware of a two people who developed similar ideas to the concept of envelopment: Georg Simmel (could have thought of that myself, since I read and even lectured about the relevant essay on Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben several times. The other hint was on the term personal bubbles which seems to be used quite frequently in the anglo-american world – I am still looking for more info on this term, but it seems that it carries some different connotations. Furthermore, I don’t think of the envelope as something that can burst or pop like a bubble. It is more like a field or sphere or a ball of cotton. Nonetheless, good to know about it. Another idea came back to me later: Richard Sennett, of course, has also talked about a sphere of comfort that is produced in city of today in the book that still has the most pivotal influence on my current work: Flesh and Stone.
Back to the title: I have embedded the video into the new page using valid XHTML code without any fiddling & CSS tricksing. That means that the embedded video won’t be displayed in all browsers though. I would be very happy to hear about the cases where it does / doesn’t work – please write a comment (if you have been a lurker until today: you can write a comment by clicking on the ‘x notes’ link below) and tell me about it. In case the embedded stuff does not work, one can just download the .mp4 file and then play it. I would like to hear about the minimum requirements for playing this, too (for example, I have no idea what version of Windows Media Player is required for playing this file).
After finishing the introductory chapter of my dissertation I am now diving into the video and photographic data which I collected in the course of the last two years. Not an easy thing. Photos are not a problem. (I am fully satisfied with GraphicConverter’s abilities and make extensive use of IPTC entries to add keywords to my image files, which then get indexed by Apple’s Spotlight search.) However, tagging movie clips in a way that allows for convenient search and analysis is much more difficult. I decided to use iDive by Aquafadas software since it got some really good reviews and seemed to be nicely integrated to Mac OS X technologies (Spotlight again). It was a good choice! Although I am not able to tag arbitrary stretches of clips (overlapping would be best), I can split my clips into multiple parts and can tag those. This is not what makes me really happy about choosing iDive though – the really good aspect, as with all software, is the developer. I sent him feedback (bug reports and feature and enhancement requests). I got an answer only a few hours later. And: he is planning to implement almost all the things that I asked for. Most excellent! Superb! I am looking forward to work with a program that will slowly grow into the tool that I really need. Hail small, responsive developers!
Heute habe ich eine neue Seite ins Netz gestellt. Unter dem Titel Automatische Irritationen – Versuch zum DB Fahrkartenautomaten kann eine kurze Vorstudie zu Interaktionen am und mit dem Fahrkartenautomaten der Deutschen Bahn AG gelesen werden. Zum Text gehören auch zwei kurze Videoclips, die ich am Darmstädter Hauptbahnhof aufgenommen habe. Über Rückmeldung würde ich mich natürlich freuen…
Die Vorstudie habe ich für meine Vorstellung beim Graduiertenkolleg (im Wintersemester 2003/2004) und für einen Verlängerungseintrag meiner Drehgenehmigung bei der Bahn angefertigt.
Die Seite ist unter der Creative Commons License ins Netz gestellt – ich werde wahrscheinlich in der nächsten Zeit alle meine Arbeiten im Netz unter diese Art des offenen Rechteverwaltung stellen. Ich schließe damit kommerzielle Nutzung ohne mein Einverständnis aus, ermögliche aber die Wiederverwertung und Veränderung meiner Arbeit unter der Bedingung, dass die Weiternutzung den gleichen Richtlinien folgt (es gibt einen erklärenden Comic zu den Rechtsmodellen des CCL Projekts – allerdings auf Englisch).
Ich habe grad mal eine vorläufige Galerie mit Bildern des Leipziger Hauptbahnhofs und des dazugehörigen Einkaufszentrums online gestellt. Die Bilder sind mit meiner Videokamera aufgenommen und noch nicht weiter bearbeitet, deswegen ist die Qualität nicht so riesig – ich habe auch einen Haufen Dias gemacht, die ich aber noch einscannen muss. Aber einen Blick kann man schon mal riskieren…
For the next weeks my schedule will be pretty straightforward: finish the article that I am currently writing (a rewrite of the conversation analytic paper on doctor-patient interaction that I wrote while I was in Bloomington), preparing a session for the college’s class on the disciplinary boundaries of sociology and where in and out of sociology I and other sociologists in the college locate ourselves, and preparing my project presentation for the college (in which I will probably throw out some hopefully provocative theses on the significance of materiality and the overemphasis on language and discourse in the social sciences and humanities). I also have to finally prepare the report that I want to send to the Deutsche Bahn to apply for a new license to make video recordings in several train stations. And I have to grade a bunch of papers of last semester proseminar. Well, well. After doing all these things I will go out into the field again and make some new recordings, for which I have several promising settings in mind. Yay!
Today I presented the provisionary first results of my fieldwork. The thing went reasonably well. The technological setup worked, the projector projected, the PowerBook booted, the external harddisk revolved and the video clips that I recorded at the Darmstädter Hauptbahnhof (main station) and cut during the last weeks stuttered over the screen. My trusty old Pismo Powerbook is a bit underpowered for this kind of high-quality DV movie material presentation, and I am hoping to be able to upgrade its processor during the semester break. Getting back to the point: what kind of video clips did I present though?
The first half of the session was to be about my involvement as a participant observer in the field, or, to be more precise, my impact as a DV camera wielding researcher on the people walking through the station. This went quite well and got a few laughs (I hope to be putting some of the sequences online as soon as I have figured out a way to hide the identity of some of the people that could be identified). The only thing that irritated me was that several people asked me what the sequences which I presented have to do with technology, since we are in a post-graduate college with the title “technology and society.” Well, as I said before I started the presentation, technology in the form of ticket selling machines would be the focus of the second part of the same presentation that they currently witness. Mpf.
I had less time for the second part than I would have liked. Quickly scratching trough the two remaining clips I wanted to demonstrate the first (micro-)sociological result of my work so far: it appears that ticket selling machines generate some ambiguity after the transaction should be finished, that is after the tickets have been printed. I will be analyzing this in more detail, but I want give you some kind of hint of what is happening. After people extract their tickets (which in itself is not always an easy process) it seem to be unclear if the interaction with the machine is actually finished. People turn to leave the machine but then look over their shoulders, even going back to the machine (sometimes in spite of displaying signs of being in a hurry) to check if the interaction is actually finished. Why is that? A possible explanation would be, that the machine does not obey the rules of personal interaction that demand a recognizable token of completion of the interaction and/or a closing remark similar to a verbal or gestual good bye.
What does all of this have to do with baking bread you might ask yours truly. Well, as I was sitting in the local train from Darmstadt to Frankfurt I found a nice introduction for the letter which I have to write to the DB AG (German Railway) representative who has to grant me the right to make further video recordings at train stations: As the mills of science grind slowly I can not yet offer you much. However, I have produced enough flour to bake a small roll for you. With more time in the field I will be able to produce enough flour to bake a bread. Perhaps we can even add a cake as dessert. I am not sure if this is the absolutely appropriate form to address these people. Whatever.
Aber alles hängt davon ab, wie man den Fortschritt auffaßt. Man könnte ihn darin sehen, daß da die berühmten dafürs auftauchen: ein Säufer, dafür aber ein ausgezeichneter Spezialist, ein Wüstling, dafür aber voller genialer Ideen, ein Dieb zwar und ein Gauner, dafür aber ein erstklassiger Verwalter! Ein Mörder, dafür aber diszipliniert und der Sache treu ergeben… Man könnte den Fortschritt aber auch so verstehen, daß alle zu guten und ehrlichen Menschen werden. Und dann werden wir irgendwann einmal die Zeit erleben, daß man sagen wird: ein Spezialist ist er, das stimmt, und er hat auch wirklich viel Ahnung, aber es ist ein schmutziger Typ, so was können wir hier nicht brauchen. der schlafende Pfeffer in der Bibliothek der Verwaltung; in Die Schnecke am Hang von Arkadi und Boris Strugatzki.
Vorgestern hatte ich mein erstes offizielles 
A few months ago, the book Video Interaction Analysis – Methods and Methodology, edited by Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann has been published. Since this is my first purely methodological publication, I am really looking forward to see how it is received. The opening paragraph of my chapter reads like this:
After leaving the conference on creative destruction in Leipzig, I had to take a night train to get to the next academic event, the conference ‘Twixt Land and Sea: The Beach in Literature, Film and Cultural Theory, which was hosted by the University of Berne in Switzerland. I was really saddened that I missed the first two days of the conference, but somehow my e-mail address got off the list for the beaches conferences so that I assumed that it would not take place at all and submitted an abstract for the overlapping conference in Leipzig. The confusion created a Lars that felt a bit ruffled when he arrived in Berne the next morning, having only an hour to get himself straightened up – which succeeded only partially, so that the talk that I gave there was really, really flooded with 
Am 18. und 19. Juni konnte ich erfreulicherweise auf der wirklich spannenden gemeinsamen Tagung der Sektionen Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung und Umweltsoziologie der DGS einen Vortrag halten. Zum Glück habe ich während des Vortrags die Verwendung von Füllwörtern wie