Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past: Brainstorming

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Topic for Discussion: General Brainstorming

Please add your comments to this topic using the 'Post your comments' area found at the bottom of the page. Make sure you've read other postings before adding your own!

Posted at Sep 12/2005 12:03PM:
David Platt: I've set this space aside as a place where we can throw ideas together/ chat generally. Feel free to suggest new projects, ask for help, and so on. Does anyone have comments on the reorganization so far?

Posted at May 12/2006 08:42AM:
Angela Piccini: We've not done very well, have we? This surely has to do with the proliferation of collaborative work spaces and the continuing institutional barriers to collaboration?

But if any of us are out there listening...it would be great to initiate further projects. I note Dan Hicks and Claire Doherty's Material Cities Arts Council funded project with interest.

I and another colleague attached to Bristol University's Performativity | Place | Space research theme we have applied to the Arts and Humanities Research Council to fund a Network, based on a series of location-based transdisciplinary workshops paired with reflective symposia. But in trying to get people involved in this as a broader project, I find colleagues just don't have the time. So how to progress? This, particularly at a time in the UK in the run-up to the RAE. Now that I am located in a Drama, Film, TV department these kinds of 'fuzzy', creative activities aren't seen as central to my research-active role. Yet, I am keen to explore how collaboration might work in this context - to find a way where research doesn't have to be 'owned' by one or other of us.

So I repeat the question: how to proceed in this context?

Posted at May 17/2006 03:01PM:
chris witmore: Hi Angela. We definitely share your frustrations associated with the institutional barriers to these collaborative environments. It takes allot of pushing and screaming to get places with colleagues; especially when collaboration suffers because of a focus on the myth of the 'individual and freestanding scholar.'

Indeed, our greatest successes are occurring in the context of cocreative and project based learning. Still there are excellent collaboratory models such as The Presence Project, which involves scholars within the British educational system and Archaeography.

Regarding your project, one way forward which we have found to work well is to integrate the wiki into the structure of the workshop. We have done this with, for example, the Critical Studies in New Media workshop series we run here at Stanford.

In CSNM we literally run our visual presentations and discussions through the wikis. We also post images of the whiteboards after brainstorming sessions. This allows us to manifest the process of these engagements. Further conversation treads continue on the wiki after the event. Indeed we often center correspondence here instead of through e-mail as we are now doing.

Indeed these are just examples of our successes and are but oblique responses to your question. We would love to hear more of your concerns and perhaps continue this as an ongoing conversation.

Posted at Jun 09/2006 03:01AM:
Angela Piccini: No concerns, vis a vis traumwerk. More a 'call to arms' to those of us who became very excited about the possibilities offered here. Interesting that you mention integrating this space into the workshop. Since I last wrote, that's exactly what a group of us here will be doing following a location-based workshop in an 'empty' churchyard in Bristol. Watch this space.