The Digiplay seminar provided a wonderfully open and discursive space for ideas at their most delicate - the research project in process. There was an eclectic and rich mix of papers about the use of mobile phones in clubs, websites as a form of interactive travel, the methodological challenges of observing people observing animals in zoos, sonic landscapes and the ipod user and my paper on wireless application systems. It was really interesting how each paper almost introduced the next one and so created a really tightly defined seminar. My paper was about my experience as a core member on Urban Tapestries, and the weblog comments from the public trial in December in relation to de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' (1988). I recently blogged about it on the UT blog . It was a great day and I will use many of the ideas for further work in this area.
Now I am just getting ready for the "TechnoCulture Knowledge and Innovation Summit" in Vancouver next week, where (in contrast to other opinion) I aim to be quite well behaved.
-kat

Katrina Jungnickel, our own Kat, will be dispersing herself widely and well.

First, here: DigiPlay 2: Mobile Leisure and the Technological Mediascape, where she will be giving a paper entitled Urban Tapestries: Sensing the City and other stories

Then here, in Vancouver, Canada: Virtual(ly) Research: The (re)Mediatization of Culture, where she will be intelligently heckling and sometimes raising her hand to speak in turn and with characteristic blink-twice creativity.

And Nina Wakeford, likewise, who will be at the Vancouver conference, above, and just prior to that, she'll be here:
Banff New Media Institute summit: Simulation and Other Re-enactments: Modeling the Unseen.

I'll be in Banff as well, talking about my collaboration with Ben Coode Adams.

We arrive in pairs; we return with reinforcements. Creepy.

-kris

Blogging in the news (when isn't it?); blogging in the Guardian (when isn't it?).

"Blog All About It"

-kris

I met Dr. Jennie Carroll yesterday. She is a senior lecturer from The University of Melbourne, Department of Information Systems. She is in Europe doing work on youth and mobiles, which is convenient, as Nina and I are currently writing a paper about photomessaging and 17 year old boys. I'm looking forward to talking with her more extensively. When I caught her out at Surrey yesterday, she had serious meeting fatigue.

-kris

Our friends Sean Smith and Nicola Green at RIS:OME put on a good show. Their conference Life of Mobile Data: Mobility and Data Subjectivity last week was great. I speak from first-hand experience of the first day and reliable second-hand accounts of the second.

-kris

Jenny, Kate and I got our panel proposal accepted to AoIR (Association of Internet Researchers), which this year is called AoIR Internet Research 5.0: Ubiquity?. Our panel is titled "The Role of the Ordinary in (Online) Research." So we're each, with respect to a particular body of research, looking at research phenomena like boredom, fatigue, ordinariness, the (un)exciting, the (un)interesting, the old, the familiar, and asking what role these play in our work. Kate will draw from her PhD research on online education, Jenny from her work on MOOs (or hypertext novels, one or the other), and I from my work on photomessaging (MMS). Fun (or, (un)fun).

-kris

On the theme of star circuits and public talks, Mary Ebeling and I also caught Manuel Castells speaking at City University, where he received an honorary doctorate. I was struck by how impassioned he is about his work. In other respects, it was what you might expect if you know Castells' work: his ideas about networks applied to the topic of universities, addressing the question of what role universities play. He ended by proclaiming that universities are the last remaining place of absolute freedom (!).

-kris