Approaching the research object: texts, images and sounds

Ian Biddle

Background

• 7 years ago: • I was asked to design a unit within the HASS

research PGR training programme, as part of HSS8004 [“Qualitative methods and critical analysis in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences”]

• Existing unit “Texts, Images and Sounds”• Laura and Robin asked me to redesign the unit

and give it a clear Arts/Humanities focus

Issues identified

• Had been delivered by ad hoc team• Sometimes, therefore, uncoordinated• Radically different teaching styles and

approaches (not necessarily a bad thing)• Tended (understandably) to reflect interests of

ad hoc team• Unit aims and outcomes sometimes unclear

My approach

To adopt an approach focussed on:1. Student’s own work (sketching relations

between paradigms, and understanding the relation of their work to those paradigms)

2. Ideas and concepts (rather than the usual [essential] ‘technocratic’ issues relating to research training)

3. (crucially, for me) the ‘research object’

The ‘research object’

• Flexible approach to modelling research, taken from a science-based orientation (term comes from bioinformatics)

• Models the identification, aggregation and exchange of scholarly information

• Unique identifier for large complex shared research domain• Useful model for thinking about research• Mitigates so-called British PhD over specialisation (a

syndrome well recognised in non-UK HEIs)• About identification, translation, communication• Bechhofer, Sean, De Roure, David, Gamble, Matthew, Goble, Carole, and Buchan, Iain.

‘Research Objects: Towards Exchange and Reuse of Digital Knowledge.’ Available from Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2010.4626.1> (2010)

THE UNIT

Brief overview of the unit

• Five sessions• Each designed to be accompanied by reading• Readings help contextualize and ground some of the

discussions had during the class• Classes consist of both lecture-like materials and

discussion-led sections• This unit is designed both to challenge and to inform• “Research object” approach not explicitly revealed,

but implicitly played out in the unit

Brief overview of the unitSession 1: Thinking texts • This session is an introduction to some of the ways the idea of the text

has changed since the Reformation. It also deals with some of the issues that attend the idea of 'textuality' as a construct within the Arts and Humanities: what do we mean by the term 'text'? How is thinking about the world as made up of texts different from thinking about the world as, say, a set of complex data? How does the notion of 'textuality' change the way we approach the object we want to make sense of?

• Set reading: Roger Chartier, 'Figures of the author', The Order of Books:

Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 25-59.

Text and testimony

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4EQcex2wrc

Brief overview of the unit

Session 2: Memory and the archive • This session, drawing on Carolyn Steedman's Dust (2001) and

some key work on archives, archivism and memory from such areas as Holocaust Studies and Memory Studies, will introduce some of the key ideas that enable us to make sense of archives (both 'analogue' and 'digital'). What does the archive stand for? Who determines what is included in it? Who has access to it and why?

• Set reading: Carolyn Steedman, 'Introduction', Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 1-16.

Brief overview of the unitSession 3: Visual culture and the ‘cinematic mode of production’ • This session will introduce the notion that different cultural forms are

also implicated in their own modes of production. In particular, drawing on Jonathan Beller's seminal work (2006) on the cinematic mode of production, we will look at how visual culture in particular makes particular kinds of demands on us as scholars: what kind of spectatorship does visual culture demand? How are audiences/spectators expected to take up a relation with the visual object?

• Set reading: Jonathan Beller, 'Introduction' to The Cinematic Mode of

Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (New England University Press, 2006), 1-33.

Brief overview of the unitSession 4: next Wednesday: Noise cultures and base/bass materialism • This session will introduce some of the ways in which sound has been

theorised within the arts and humanities. We will draw on a range of ideas from R Murray Schaffer's Soundscapes project in the 1970s through to Steve Goodman's notion of 'sonic warfare' (2009) and will address some of the key questions attending the study of sound and noise: how do attitudes to sound change over time? What are the key ways in which listeners distinguish between good and bad sounds (between, for example, music and noise)? How have listening practices changed over time?

• Set reading: Ian Biddle, ‘Visitors, or the Political Ontology of Noise’, Radical

Musicology Volume 4 (2009), http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/ (14th February 2011), 22 pars.

Sonic warfare

Brief overview of the unit

Session 5: The affective turn: or the new scholarship of the senses • This final session will draw together some of the key insights we

have discovered together over the past four sessions and will frame those insights within a discussion of what Patricia Clough (2007) has called the 'affective turn', that shift in some recent arts and humanities scholarship towards trying to make room for 'feeling', the body, the senses more broadly.

• Set reading: Nigel Thrift, ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial

Politics of Affect’ Geografiska Annaler Vol. 86, No. 1, Special Issue: The Political Challenge of Relational Space (2004), 57-78.

The five lectures

• Text – memory – vision – sound – affect• From storage and capture to infection and ‘becoming’• = a trajectory that maps on to recent developments in the arts

and humanitiesA shift from:• ‘classical’ cultural theory (in which culture and nature are in

dialectical and sometimes hostile relation – ‘ideology theory’ for example)

To:• theories in which nature and culture are profoundly implicated

in each other, as coupled and coupling, as always already in place before the other

The assessment

• Short essay, outlining the usefulness (or not) of one or more of the paradigms covered in the unit

• Encourages – writing about connections – relations– aggregated modalities for doing research

Some outcomes

• In emphasising connections, interplays and domains, the unit seems to have encouraged students to think about – Epistemology– Ideology– Methodology– Disciplinarity

• Demonstrable willingness of students to engage with domains not always explicitly related to their own field

• Demonstrable willingness, therefore, of students to think about the relation of their research to others

Student feedback

• Has been overwhelmingly positive (I’m sure most of that has to do with the emphasis on content rather than ‘technocratic’ processes of research)

• Enjoyed the reading materials• Felt the module was ‘relevant’ (although in many

cases it was not, strictly)• Enjoyed the discussions (‘invaluable’,

‘enlightening’, ‘inspiring’) – very keen on peer-assisted learning

Some conclusions

• Reasonable data set now: 6 full year’s of implementation and feedback data

• Students ‘turned on’ to epistemology (and an understanding of the nature of disciplinarity)

• Challenging materials, far from putting students off, seem to have encouraged discussion and exchanges of ideas

• Still proves very challenging for non-native speakers • Embedded ‘research object’ approach worth exploring

more rigorously for future implementations