Robert Willim

Transcription and the Senses : Cultural Analysis When It Entails More Than Words

ABSTRACT Focusing upon the act of transcription, this article argues for a need to push sensory ethnography further into the realm of analysis, with a greater attention to the question of how the senses can be better included in the analytical process that ever includes the entanglement of methods, materials, and theory. This article problematizes the technology of the page and argues for a need for scholars to understand transcription as much more than an issue of transferring sound to paper. Throughout the article the authors argue for a need to rethink cultural analyses as compositional practices.

Broken data: Conceptualising data in an emerging world:

In this article, we introduce and demonstrate the concept-metaphor of broken data. In doing so, we advance critical discussions of digital data by accounting for how data might be in processes of decay, making, repair, re-making and growth, which are inextricable from the ongoing forms of creativity that stem from everyday contingencies and improvisatory human activity. We build and demonstrate our argument through three examples drawn from mundane everyday activity: the incompleteness, inaccuracy and dispersed nature of personal self-tracking data; the data cleaning and repair processes of Big Data analysis and how data can turn into noise and vice versa when they are transduced into sound within practices of music production and sound art. This, we argue is a necessary step for considering the meaning and implications of data as it is increasingly mobilised in ways that impact society and our everyday worlds.

Evoking imaginaries : Art probing, ethnography and more-than-academic practice

I discuss and argue for combinations of artistic practice and cultural analysis, for meta-disciplinary and serendipitous endeavours that can entangle art and ethnographic research. These combinations can be understood as practices that are more-than-academic. I define the artistic side of this combinatory work as art probing. Art probes have a double function. First, they can instil inspiration and be possible points of departure for research, and, second, they can be used to communicate scientific concepts and arguments beyond the scope of academic worlds. According to this point of view, artistic and scientific output should be seen as provisional renditions oriented towards different audiences and as part of an extended open-ended art of inquiry. When working with this more-than-academic practice, a number of stakeholders are involved, ranging from academic professionals to art institutions, museums and visitors of art exhibitions, and performances. I will discuss how I understand ethnography as part of this process and in relation to practices of art probing.