Research/Creation, Again

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Models of Research/Creation: Click for PowerPoint Slides
Yesterday I presented at OCAD on Research/Creation: State of the Art. I was surprised at the anger in the audience with this SSHRC program. Some were there to learn about it, but some where there to question the program and how it has been run. We didn’t have a full airing of the grievances, but I think some of them are:

  1. The Canada Council is sending university artists to SSHRC and SSHRC is saying we only fund research/creation (not art)
  2. The adjudication panel was not made up of practicing artists
  3. It isn’t clear how research can be woven into creative practices
  4. There is an emphasis on teams and training of graduate students which disadvantages artists whose practices are solitary

How to respond? One side of me was surprised at the sense of entitlement behind some of the questions, as if SSHRC should be funding art. On the other hand, if people are telling university artists to use this program and not to apply for Canada Council grants, then we have a problem. Perhaps it is fair to say that SSHRC tapped into a need which they couldn’t meet with just one program and without the Canada Council. What they are doing is great, but we need a greater variety of programs and more funding. (Then again, who doesn’t feel they need more programs and more funding?)
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Satellite Radio

Jack Kapico of The Globe and Mail has an article (“update”) on satellite radio coming to Canada, The radio war (Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005). He asks how traditional radio will survive the two satellite services that have been licensed, XM Canada and Sirius. His conclusion is that local radio that includes local talk shows, local news and, yes, local advertising, will not be affected, but stations that just play lists of tunes with ads will suffer because satellite radio offers the tunes without the ads. So, for example, he sees CBC Radio 1 surviving and Radio 2 suffering.

We’ve lived in a world of local radio for so long we have little idea of what a universe with (inter)national radio might be like ‚Äî even the CBC breaks away frequently for local content. We might in fact be surprised by how many people want local news, local sports and its accompanying boosterism, local weather conditions and on-air personalities’ happy talk (we’re all part of a huge local family). This will be the first real test of how wedded we are as a market to local interests.

A second point he mentions, but does not follow up on, is how people are paying not to listen to advertising. The iPod generation now has affordable alternatives to ad-heavy radio and they are voting 99 cents at a time just as they subscribed to ad-free movie channels. Are we revolting against saturation advertising such as found on commercial radio?

Online courses for campus students

The Globe and Mail has an Associated Press article by Justin Pope, Classes without the commute (Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2006) about the growth in people taking online courses, including con-campus students. The story points to a Sloan Consortium survey, Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005. (The free PDF of the complete report is available.) This report concludes that there is still significant enrollment growth in online courses, though Chief Academic Officers still believe that it takes more effort to deliver online and students need to be more disciplined to succeed.
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Google: Where is it going?

A common thread of discussion here is where is Google going? They seem to be very good at what they do, but what is there larger plan, if any? Google going after Microsoft and Apple is an article by Mike Langberg of the Mercury News (Sunday, Jan. 15, 2006) that suggests that Google’s plan is to go after Microsoft and Apple. Very ambitious, and possibly doable.

Thanks to James Chartrand for this.

The Wire

In the 6th episode of the first season of HBO: The Wire the camera moves from a dead boy to follow a jury-rigged wire across the street through a broken window into the house where Wallace, a teenage drug dealer, and other kids live. Wallace wakes up and hustles the kids who are sleeping on couches and mattresses off to school, handing out a juice box and bag of chips to each that everday morning.

The wire in both the episode, the show, and the cable, is about the connections between people, connections between institutions like the police and drug gangs. It is about the ways they tap into each other’s lives, listening in and learning about the other. The wire the camera follows looks like an illegal tap into the electrical system – a long extension cord providing power to an apartement of kids who sleep in their clothes with Wallace as the closest they have to a parent. This family wire taps illegally into the electrical system, while the police tap into the beepers and phones Wallace and others use to deal. The wire is also a connection between Wallace who called his boss the evening before, when he recognized Brandon, the dead boy, starting a chain of beeper calls, all logged by the police, that led to Brandon being picked up by the enforcers of the gang, tortured and left dead outside as a message everyone in the projects could see.

I noticed that the chidren, as they left for school, all had transparent backpacks. When I lived in Viriginia our children’s public school board was recommending (though not enforcing) transparent backpacks so that children couldn’t smuggle drugs and weapons into middle school. What has become of us when everything is watched and for the convenience of surveillance? I was appalled at the presumption of criminality, the implied fear, and the priority of security over education in what was otherwise a great school in a wealthy town. Why does war and security trump everything?
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Research/Creation: State of the Art

I am presenting on the 19th at the Ontario College of Art and Design on the SSHRC /Research/Creation Grants in Fine Arts with Craig McNaughton, the program officer. It should be an interesting discussion about the pragmatics of research/creation which is an emerging concept for the sort of hybrid research and art that many of us do.
In an earlier post on Research Creation I talked about what I think are the primary criteria. Also of interest are issues around Ethics and Art
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Engagement and the Professoriate

SSHRC in their Transformation added the new value of “interactive engagement” to what social science and humanities research should involve. At McMaster we discussed how researchers can engage the broader public better and more. It is not as easy as it sounds. Intellectual Entrepreneurship: The New Social Compact by Richard A. Cherwitz (Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2005) is a short opnion piece that nicely sets out the challenges. He argues that professors are becoming (should become) intellectual entrepreneurs – something I have heard in other contexts regarding intellectual property and research. Cherwitz believes,

Public intellectual practice is a noble quest – one that doesn’t inherently or automatically require us to choose between a commitment either to research or service or between disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge.

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Digital Posters at the MLA


TAPoR Poster (Click for large image)
Michael Groden of Western organized a session at the MLA Convention on “New Technologies of Literary Investigation: Digital Demonstrations.” I presented on TAPoR at the session which was a great success. Essentially the session was a poster session where the seven presenters each had a table and posters on the walls. Poster sessions are common in computing – they are great way to demonstrate computing projects – we were worried they wouldn’t work with the MLA audience, but I was busy talking the whole hour and 15 minutes. If we had been presenting papers there would have been fewer presentations and less time for discussion.
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MLA Language Map

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French in the North East of the USA
The Modern Languages Association has a nice Language Map that you can use to see the distribution of different languages by county in the US. It uses census data from 2000. They also have tools for getting data for states and cities to compare language use.