Data workshop

'Images are everywhere' (Sarah Pink, 2007)

This was the title of a presentation I did today. Well it wasn't really a presentation as such - rather an opportunity to share and explore analytical frames for data. So I took along some 'imagined' visual and multimodal data for comment and exploration. I think I'm the only person really working with such visual data in the group, so people didn't really have much to say about the images and artefacts I presented. There comments were around issues I wasn't that worried about anyway - like pointing out how I could pick up literacy practice constructs in assessment briefs or suggesting how I might want to order the different types of data I collected into some sort of hierarchical structure (typical of Linguists and Linguistic Ethnographers) - interactional data takes precedence and then other data like fieldnotes, curriculum documents , photographs have a secondary role in helping to provide background or contextual information about the spoken data. Hmm, No I say - I'm interested in practices, texts produced as part of practice cannot be seen as separate or subordinated to practice - I don't see a distinction between the two. Well why not try 'talk-around-text' they said - but that's still suggesting that texts are foregrounded above the context within which it was created and that the practice to produce it is separate from the textual product. Nobody said much about the actually images, I would have liked to hear them comment about that. 

I've been coming to these workshops for the past year and its meant to be a space where you can bring data in any stage of analytical processing and hear what other people have to say about it. I prepared some slides and didn't really put much effort into it because I thought - hell I really just want to hear what other people to have say about this data. However when I stepped into the room and realised that it was filled with roughly more academics than students - I was a bit thrown. The feedback was 'Great! that was really interesting' but that's what everybody says about presentation here anyway so how the hell do you know whether they actually think its a good one or not. Listening to myself speak or rather mumble/fumble my way through the slides and then deal with the questions thrown at me - I wasn't really impressed. Not very polished to say the least. I wish I could be more articulate, use the right words and in the right order and sound as intelligent as I know I am.

Reflecting on these past two days - the seminar yesterday and the workshop today - there is a clear way of doing academic presentations and engaging in academic conversations here. Its a certain kind of literacy practice, that relies very heavily on vocabulary, logic in the construction of your argument, succinct analytical descriptions, all mixed in a with particular kind of English humour that borders on self deprecation. I struggle with the vocabulary and the succinct analytical description - the two feed off each other anyway - and lack cultural familiarity to pull it off anyway. This of course is my interpretation of my academic presence, which might not be how others view me - but how they view me isn't half as important as how I view myself. I don't know whether this 'microscopic' inspection of myself is helpful, it more likely has had the opposite effect - making me more self conscious and more reliant on various crutches, like full presentation scripts, rather than intuitively expressing myself as best I can. I did a little recording of the presentation so when I have a listen to it again, I'll have to consider whether any perspective on my own performance can be gained or not.

Aluta continua mense!