Category Archives: AGMS Dissertation

When first entering the webpage for Words and Photos by Iñaki Bonillas, you’re met with the below screen. You are invited to enter a word and along the bottom of the screen there are two lines of seemingly unrelated words. I enter the word ‘thunder’ and nothing appears, but the word thunder moves to theContinue reading “Iñaki Bonillas, Words and Photos (2014) Dia Web Projects”

I often like to research my family history using the Ancestry website, I have dipped in and out of it for years but put the most work into it in around 2014. I asked my Grandad and my mum to send photographs of my ancestors; I’ve got a particularly memorable one of my Grandmother asContinue reading “Workers Leaving Gossage’s Soap Works, Widnes (1901)”

This blog post will describe the ‘epiphany’ that inspired this research – what Lorraine Daston describes as the life-changing moment that causes one to question other aspects of life. As stated in previous posts, for me this occurred when interacting with physical (non-digital) objects and having a visceral reaction as a result. Daston articulated thisContinue reading “Epiphany Moment”

 “They [the artists] have to get somebody as a progenitor so as not to look as though they invent it all by themselves.  But art will be sunk or drowned by technology. […] Technology will surely drown us. The individual is disappearing rapidly. We’ll eventually be nothing but numbered ants.” Marcel Duchamp. Yesterday I startedContinue reading “Harold Cohen”

I am preparing to set up a Facebook page for my dissertation research. Below I’ll briefly summarise 2 key pieces of literature that will help me to design the page, consider the challenges, ethical considerations and different uses of the platform. The first text is an article titled: Facebook as a Research Tool for theContinue reading “Developing a Facebook page as a research tool”

After re-reading a number of texts about digital materiality, I now have a much clearer idea of the range of theories surrounding it, and have formed the plan for my literature review. Whilst reading, I attempted to identify definitions and ideas of it that were relevant to my research questions. I questioned how one couldContinue reading “Digital Materiality”

Yesterday I read Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (2018) by Sarah Anne Carter. I planned to read this mainly in preparation for Geismar’s Object Lessons; I thought learning the basics of the technique (as it was used in the physical world) would be foundational to how itContinue reading “Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi – Object Lessons”

In preparation for the literature review which I’ll be writing over the coming month, I have re-read the introduction to Things That Talk (2008), a volume edited by American historian Lorraine Daston. In the introduction, Daston explains that the approach of the essays included in the volume is to take for granted that things areContinue reading “Things That Talk – ‘some process of reciprocity’”

This marks my first autoethnographic blog entry as part of my masters dissertation. I have read the book pictured above to get a better understanding of the origins of the method, the ethical issues surrounding it, the different styles and purposes for using autoethnography and how to get started. Before I read the book IContinue reading “Introduction to Autoethnography”