Self Evaluation, Fall 2011
“It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.”
–Marshall McLuhan
With this independent study I proposed to explore various forms of how “culture” is rendered, looking at the different ways of presenting, storing, sorting, searching, and perceiving types of cultural data. I started by defining what I meant by cultural data as the presentation/perception of a culture within a certain geographical and/or historical context. I then explored the theoretical significance of various storage and search architectures, both archaic and contemporary—analogue and digital—for rendering cultural data. Although I proposed to root my study between the historical contexts of the Romantic era and the present day, I ended up focusing more on the present day. I found that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Occupy movement generally offered an excellent case study for the rendering of culture.
I am thankful that my independent study wasn’t confining. I couldn’t have predicted how OWS’s actions would offer such a fertile case study for my work. Looking at, which is to say reading, OWS in conjunction with working on various archiving projects (some scholastic and some in a more professional context) has led me to become increasingly interested in the work of archiving, and how it is that through the collection, curation, representation and display of data, stories can be constructed and understood. Likewise, I have become increasingly interested in looking at how a particular representation of data (which is to say the manner in which a certain media is able to render any given data) effects our perception of that data. Because of my work this term I am interested in further exploring archiving, and how it is that principles of archiving and representation can be used to tell stories—particularly in the contexts of eduction and journalism. It is my belief that this not only entails looking carefully at archivism, but also at how it is that people are able to read an archive’s contents.
I feel that I completed the Fall term of my first year of graduate work at College of the Atlantic right on track to continue my studies—I went into this term with a vague sort of understanding of my interest and am leaving it with a solid one. This independent study was structured around the other two courses I was enrolled in, Reality Effect and Nature of Narrative (which I was the TA for). These two courses occurred simultaneously so I was only able to attend one class session of each per week. I found this to be an incredibly frustrating state of affairs. I feel that I wasn’t able to do my best work in either class because I wasn’t present for half of every week. I also feel that I wasn’t ever able to fully articulate to either myself or my advisors what exactly I was doing. This was partially because I did not yet know exactly what I was doing, and partially because my advisors and I never sat down at the very start and spelled out what our expectations of one another were. All in all this term was one of progress and learning—both about the workings of the institution and my academic interests.
“Gnothi seauton,” or “know thyself,” was the inscription at the Temple of Apollo where the Oracle of Delphi professed. This is the goal of my education: To learn to better know myself, and in that way to better know the world that I perceive. It is my opinion that the obligation of a teacher is to generate, hold and to preserve spaces for learning, and to do so in a manner which is both compassionate and unconditional. By “compassionate” I mean something like an awareness of the interconnected nature of learning—that it is worth studying one thing closely, or a million things broadly because there is something telling about a “whole” (which is to say “the self” and in turn “others”) when either is done, which perhaps is also to say “human ecology.” By “unconditional” I mean that the ultimate misstep or treachery a teacher is capable of fecundating is to say that they cannot teach something.
Perhaps this has been to loosely stated: “…to say that they cannot teach something.” It is not the obligation of a teacher to teach, per se. Rather, the obligation of a teacher is to generate, hold and to preserve spaces for learning. A teacher is a space-maker. A teacher is a curator. A teacher is a presenter. A teacher is a performer. A student, like Indiana Jones, is a scholar and an explorer—spending equal amounts of time in the library and in the “real” world. A student wanders and searches within the space built, maintained and protected by a teacher. In this way, it isn’t the obligation of a teacher to be an expert on everything necessarily, rather, it is the teacher’s obligation to be aware of their students and the space in which their students learn (which is perhaps, to say the “real world”). A teacher doesn’t hand to students knowledge like Moses was the commandments. A teacher builds a space wherein through carful presentation, distillation, exaggeration, repetition and pattern (which is to say “pedagogy”) students are able to take up what they have experienced and store it away inside of themselves—making their interior spaces a mirror of the ones created by their teachers so that when the students venture out into the real world (which is to say “uncurated space”) they have within themselves not only a template with which to understand the world, but a personal mechanism for learning within the real world itself. Ultimately, what all teachers teach is how to learn outside of the classroom—how to be a human.
It is my opinion that the obligation of a journalist is inline with that of a teacher. A journalist, however, rather than generating a particular space, presents elements from the real world to readers (“students”) in order to help these readers understand the world. I think that the best of journalism is an artistic function, like that of a photographer: to assemble the elements of the world in a composition that speaks truth. Of course, a lot of journalism doesn’t exactly do that—it presents someone’s personal take on truth.
