Today was day 3 of my stint at the ICCR (the International Centre for Classroom Research) my hosts at Melbourne University. The ICCR is based in a converted row of terraced houses on Barry Street, clasped in the encircling arms of the mighty and modern ICT department. The historic nature of the houses means my office is blessed with both plaster work cornices and an impressive iron and marble fireplace. My office is also equipped with an iMac, a social science standard out here. Something of a culture shock in itself.

Shortly before leaving for Australia, I attempted my first international remote interview with a participant in New York. We Skyped whilst attempting to apply Techinline (a web based remote deskyop viewer) and Camtasia (to capture onscreen and audio activity), only to fall at the first hurdle as Techinline imploded at the thought of a Mac to PC view. Fortunately my participant was understanding about it and even helped me bottom out some alternative approaches. All the same, I’ve discovered my data collection strategy is allergic to Macs, just as I realise that Macs rule some of the large swathes of international academic territory I was hoping to glimpse. Techinline hope to have Mac compatibility within the next 6-9 months, but I’ll be investigating alternatives in the meantime. Reviews here as this progresses.

At the start of the year, I won the Universitas 21 Travel Prize to support a visit to the University of Melbourne.  Some six months later, (nearly) everything’s booked, and I fly out next week.  This will be a great opportunity to access an otherwise distant research community.  Fingers crossed I’ll return with new insights, and hopefully a chapter or two of my Thesis under my belt.  Expect images and sounds posted as soon as I have them…

I’ll be back in the UK for the 4th Disability Studies Conference in Lancaster, which I’m also looking forward to.  As with the ALT-C, the conference programme has been recently announced.  Several presentations have caught my eye: Nicholas Cimini’s ‘Struggles online over the meaning of disability‘, promises to open a window on Dialogic perspectives of Disability and Technology, a window that I’m increasingly seeking to climb through. The Sheffield Hallam Disability Research Forum is well represented, and it’s hard not to eye other titles with anticipation.  I’m already looking forward to Michael Shamash’s paper ‘Anything Can Happen in the Next Half Hour‘.  Can Michael convince us of the place of Captain Scarlet in the lexicon of the Social Model?!

Saturday was the 3rd LiveSociology workshop at Goldsmiths, London, focusing on ‘the way we use sound in the context of research’. We were a slightly depleted group due to the holiday season, but it was a good session, continuing a stimulating attack on the notion of sociology (‘the science of the interview’) as a text-only discipline of figures and words. I was particularly struck by several issues raised during the day.

The first is the notion of the ‘ambulant interviewer’. Prof Les Back discussed this in terms of a researcher physically interviewing on the move, and the place of sound in this. In my own research I realised this described my own use of the Internet during a (seated) interview in an alternative but useful way. Informing an interview with a Internet-enabled computer allows me and a participant to wander together online and respond to the onscreen environments we find ourselves in. Taking-the-computer-for-a-walk. I imagine that mobile technologies have already pushed ambulant research in different directions, as might immersive online environments, but I’ll certainly be looking at the methods literature in this area to discover how I can better inform my research.

Another issue raised relates to how research materials are assessed. Whilst some journals recognise the ways new media allow research to develop (I’m thinking particularly of Sociological Research Online here) I’m aware that I will be submitting my thesis as a book. This can account for a photo essay, diagrams, tables, maps, drawings. It is a flexible medium (very high resolution, strong internal/external reference systems with a battery life of several hundred years! etc. etc.), but the thesis does not replicate hypermedia, video, sound or temporality in the way a blog can. Should it? And what happens when you turn a blog into a book? Blurb offers such a service, and is reasonably priced. I love the idea of adding all this ephemeral material to a shelf as an artifact (proof I’m doing something?!), but what is lost? Could this qualify as an appendix for academic submission?

Save the Date!

Some details for next years Nordic Network on Disability Research (NNDR) conference has been slated for April 2nd to 4th 2009 in Nybord, Denmark.  The title of next year’s conference is ‘Challenging Positions in Disability Research – normativity, knowledge and praxis’. A preliminary timetable, programme and list of keynote speakers is available here: http://www.dpu.dk/site.aspx?p=11887 on the website of the School of Education (Danmarks Paedagogiske Universitetsskole) at the University of Aarhus.  There are some interesting speakers cited, including Tom Shakespeare.  If you are a student and hoping to attend or present, it’s worth noting that this conference is usually very reasonably priced, and last year they offered bursaries to student delegates (something I only discovered after the event!) so do contact the organisers in advance with any funding queries. 

I recently heard the sad news that Australian academic Christopher Newell has died at the age of 44.  Many tributes are being paid through the Society for Disability Studies lists and elsewhere, and Beth Haller has pulled together obituaries and a full collection of references to Newell’s work at her Media-dis-n-dat blog at http://media-dis-n-dat.blogspot.com/2008/06/australia-loses-top-bioethicist.html.

I knew very little about Christopher Newell, having only read his publications in the field of disability and communication technologies. I now discover this was only a fraction of the important work that Newell constributed to Disability Studies and wider academe. 

For me, his book 2003 book Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media, written with Gerard Goggin, is still the seminal text for those examining this digital divide and was the first concrete text I could find that distinguished disabled experience against more generic socio-cultural critiques of embodiment in virtual spaces.  It is still a landmark in understanding regarding the intersection between disability and new media.