A plethora of publishing platforms were introduced in the practical sessions of the Digital Anthropology course, including UCL's MyPortfolio and Wordpress. I selected the open-source blogging platform Ghost and Github due to the considerations below.

Open Source Technology

Projects such as the Linux kernel (MacKenzie, 2005) and Creative Commons are both technological and political projects. With this awareness in mind, I decided to stick to an open source technology to experience its political agency.

MyPortfolio is open-source and freely available to UCL students, but its functionalities are limited. There are very few customization options, particularly in theming. Its location on UCL servers also poses questions about preservation since I cannot be sure how long the contents will remain there.

Wordpress is one of the most popular blogging platforms on the Internet, and the self-hosted version is open source¹. Still, I thought it would be fun to experiment with a lesser know open source platform—Ghost.

Ghost

I have been following the development of Ghost for several years. Ghost was a crowd-funded project² in 2013 with emphasis on composition in Markdown³ and easy content management system. The support of Markdown writing was the main "selling" point for me since I am very accustomed to writing in the light markup language.

Markdown makes it easy to mark different sections in a post with different hierarchies of headings, and this affordance has influenced the way I compose posts on this blog. Hopefully, presenting words in different chunks also allow the reader to choose the sections of interest and devote different levels of energy to them.

In order to run Ghost on the local machine, the prerequisite is to install node.js first, and the official website has detailed documentation⁴ on how to set it up.

Github

Github is mainly used by programmers to host software projects, to collaborate with other programmers, and to perform version control. However, it also provides the service Github Pages which users of Github can use to host their personal websites.

Technical Difficulties

The natively supported blogging platform on Github is Jekyll⁵, and not having invested time in the Jekyll blogging engine previously, the only option for me was to look for methods to deploy Ghost onto Github Pages. I have benefited immensely from this tutorial⁶ by typing in the commands into the console.

Was it worth the hassle?

In a word, yes.

As scholars such as MacKenzie (2005)⁷ and Kelty (2008)⁸ have argued, software can be seen as the manifestation of sociality, and my experience of being involved as a user has been rewarding on a personal level.

C was someone who devoted much attention to creating an ideal home environment. When I paid the first visit to the flat, the living room was basking in the yellowish afternoon sun. The air was suffused with light fragrance generated by a burning candle placed on the wood floor. The heater was on, so the space felt warm and cozy.

By the time I paid my final visit, I noticed that the location of where the candle usually was had changed. C explained that a small fire broke out in one of her neighbors' flat the night before. While there was no casualty and the fire was distinguished immediately, her flat had smells of smoke. Consequently she placed the candle in the middle of the living room to disperse the burnt smell.

Instruments Not Used in Ethnography

It is difficult to describe the atmosphere of a place with only words and pictures. Pink and Moroşanu (2015)¹ argue that video tour with the participants in their homes can better capture the sensory dimension of the domestic environment.

Nevertheless, I decided not to propose this suggestion to C. I was introduced to her by a mutual friend, so I felt that creating a video recording of her home would have been out of bounds. In addition, even though videos can provide more modes of engagement for the audience, it is still not possible to elucidate the smell of the place, which had been a compelling sensation I picked up during my visits.

The Visual Impact of Photos

Having studied visual culture before, C designed the interior space with care. Her home hence was aesthetically pleasant. In spite of my limited skills and old camera model, in the end I felt that the photos can convey the appearance of the space, further eliminating the need to use video recording.

In Marcoux’s (2001)¹ ethnography on people living in Montreal, one of the features of life in the city is the need to move houses every year. In the process of moving, people are faced with the need to sort out the things they possess and choose which to stay with them and which to discard. Some things are retained due to perceived values of functionality, and some are kept for their roles as memory tokens. While people look through their collections of things, they are also granted the opportunity to recreate their sense of self and rewrite the story of their lives.

In our casual conversations, C told me that the flat in London was her home away from her parents’ home in Taiwan. Therefore, she had total control of the arrangements and the things to incorporate in the home. She was also more motivated to clean the flat every day to reiterate the kind of self she wants to be.

C’s home, however, was located in London, a city where she did not arrive until commencing postgraduate studies as an adult. There was still an element of displacement in her life in London. As I took glimpses of the collections of books and DVDs she had on her shelves, she explained how some of the objects had helped her through difficult times.

Researcher: Were the DVDs you brought to London films in foreign languages (i.e. not in Mandarin Chinese)?

C: Yes.

Researcher: Did you buy them in Taiwan?

C: I bought them here actually [during MA studies], took them back to Taiwan, and brought them with me again to London. I bought a lot of DVDs back then, and I only brought a portion of them here, including a film by a French director I really liked. They provide solace to me, and I hardly ever watch them. If I become really upset someday, I get to watch them.

Research: How many have you actually watched?

C: Just one DVD.

Researcher: Just one after you moved in?

C: Yes.

As mentioned in the interview, DVDs were acquired during periods of displacement and “lived” with her in migration. When it comes to her book collection, they were understood depending on when, where, and how she had acquired them.

Researcher: Were the books you have now purchased in London?

C: Most of them, yes.

Researcher: The Mandarin ones were brought from Taiwan?

C: Yes, or sent to me by my mom. Sometimes when my mom sends things to me from Taiwan, there would be extra space in the packages. The post office charges packages according to the area and weight, and it would be a waste of money if the extra space isn’t fully used, so I would ask my mom to send me some books.

Researcher: Do you read them after you receive them?

C: Rarely.

Researcher: So they are solace to you as well?

C: Yes, since they are here... (laughs) This sounds bad.

Researcher: Of course not!

The books sent from Taiwan therefore carried emotional weight in this new domestic space in London. As mentioned in the interview excerpt, she chose the books herself to be relocated to London, so she had exercised agency to place them in a new context and at the same time performed "active management of one’s own externalized memory" (Miller, 2001, p. 8)². Once they arrived in London, they were placed alongside the newer books she bought on the shelf, mingling together as a PhD student's book collection. Her collections thus mediated her memories of the past as well as her aspirations for the future.

My discussions on technology at home would focus on reading devices. Below is an infographic¹ that compares the three reading devices C owned.

Three Devices for Reading

As a user of technology, C's perceptions of the devices may have been different from what they were intended for. For instance, the laptop was created with robust features so that it could be an ideal personal computer, but those features became distracting during reading, which is an activity that needs concentration.

In contrast, the mobile phone was more limited in terms of functionality, but this limitation facilitated focus in C's case.

Kindle is another device with limited functionality, but the issues in performance and data portability were deemed as weaknesses by C, making her almost abandon the device altogether.

The Tactile Dimension of Usage

Another aspect of C's device usage which I had noticed was her tactile engagement with devices. The ability to swipe the touchscreen was one of the reasons why she purchased the particular laptop model. As for the mobile phone, its smaller size and touchscreen allowed her to better adapt it to her bodily practices while reading.

By the same token, she preferred reading journal articles (and books) in the print format instead of the electronic format because the former permitted more bodily engagement on her part. On the print format of articles, she could easily highlight certain texts in different colors, make notes on the margins, and even attach post-it notes if necessary; while most of these methods of interacting with the reading material is possible in the electronic files with modern-day PDF readers, the bodily practices to perform these tasks are not quite the same. Her preference echoes the findings of Taipale's (2015)² study on the bodily dimensions of reading and writing practices, and the respondents reported more freedom in body postures when interacting with the print format.

It should be noted that C and the respondents in Taipale's (2015) used paper as the primary format in childhood before switching to the electronic format as young adults. For people who grow up using electronic texts, they may not see the less flexible bodily practices when reading and writing on devices as a limitation.

Ethnography Could Provide Insight for Better Product Design

All of the three devices had been with C for some time and were not brand new. The novelty effects have worn off, so what I had observed was more normalized, authentic usage. As Fink et al. (2013)³ had shown in their ethnography on Roomba the cleaning robot, ethnography of long-term product usage would reveal patterns unknown until users have tried to learn and adapt the product over a period of time. If the ethnography was aimed at user experience and was done with more focus and perhaps with a larger group, the findings could be used in the design of these devices.

I shadowed C's reading activities on a weekday afternoon in November, 2015. Participant observation was carried out for about two and a half hours.

Background

During the initial interview, C explained to me that her research process contained four or five stages. The stage I had the opportunity to observe was the reading/note-taking stage, highlighted in red in the following diagram.

Since she had printed out the journal articles she wanted to read before my shadowing, I observed her reading process of several journal articles. She did not mention using any device while reading journal articles in print, so I did not expect to witness much of her technology use.

Findings

My observations are summarized as follows.

• Bodily engagement with journal papers
  • She highlighted the passages of importance with yellow or orange markers.
  • She paraphrased some of the authors' ideas in the margins of the papers with a blue pen.
  • She wrote down her own thoughts in the margins with a pencil.
  • She used different colors of post-it notes sometimes. When I asked her if she had color-coded different ideas with different colors, her answer was negative. She chose the colors randomly, and even if she had meant something when she used a certain color of post-it, she would have forgotten about the original intention when she returned to it.
• The mobile phone
  • While never mentioned in the prior interview, she used her mobile phone very often while studying.
  • She mostly used the dictionary app to look up unfamiliar words and went back immediately to the reading after reading the results.

Usefulness of the Method

Participant observation was useful in this study. Even though I only observed her in one stage of her reading cycle, I gained insight on her mobile phone use, which was not revealed during the interview. I also witnessed her tactile engagement with the texts at hand.

An article titled On the Materiality of Writing in Academia or Remembering Where I Put My Thoughts¹ was published in the LSE Review of Books recently. Meier (2016) discusses the scattered nature of reading notes. Full articles are often consolidations of bits and pieces written in various places and contexts, and the processes of idea generation are inherently messy.

This feeling of messiness was very palpable when I did ethnography in C's home. First of all, texts were transformed to different formats and relocated constantly². Reading materials were processed in different locations and settings, and it was difficult to develop a systematic approach to organize these texts.

Secondly, it was impossible to contextualize some studies into a single category. C dealt with this hardship by copying the same electronic file into different folders on her laptop, but she did not employ the same strategies to process materials in the print format.

Researcher: Do you separate the [print and electronic] articles that have been read and haven't been read?

C: Not really.

Researcher: So do you place them in random locations?

C: I know how they should be ordered in my mind. I categorize them by subject [on the computer], but I can't pinpoint some articles to single categories because many themes are associated with one another. I just process them based on my intuition.

Researcher: How can you tell if a paper has been read then?

C: I can see the difference.

Researcher: Oh, the highlights and notes!

Instead of coming up with a system to tackle the various reading materials and notes, C recognized her own engagement with the text by the visual traces. Regardless of the format, there would be cues which indicated cognitive practices.

The need to record and organize reading notes is actually shared by the humanity for centuries. Intellectuals in the past, such as Marcus Aurelius, Petrarch, and Montaigne kept commmonplace books, which are collections of ideas, observations, and quotes acquired in various contexts³. Moving to the present age, there are a plethora of knowledge databases which people can employ on their computers and other devices. Debates over which knowledge management system is the most effective one usually generate vibrant discussions.

Instead of fussing over clear organization methods, C identified the materials of relevance by bodily engaging with it, leaving highlights and notes. In a different article written by Meier (2016), she mentions marking the key passages in Hannah Arendt's On Revolution (1963) with yellow post-it notes. Whether or not she has collected these notes and created visible connections in a different place is not revealed, but leaving physical traces of reading notes has enhanced her understanding of the book and helped her draw connections with ideas presented elsewhere.

The method of leaving visual cues in the reading pieces does not apply to everyone's reading and note-taking practices. Some people may prefer tagging and categorizing notes in a comprehensive system. Still, it is fascinating to observe how an academic like C read and take notes.

In addition to diaries, the time-tracking app RescueTime was installed on C's laptop to generate research data during my second visit to the home with the promise to uninstall it after the research if she desired. The app was designed for users to monitor their own productivity when using the computer by categorizing applications into different purposes, such as work and play.

My concern, however, was not with productivity. With reports of applications used at various time of the day, I thought RescueTime could be useful in identifying the application combinations C used while studying and the amount of time she spent on each application.

Below is an example report on my own application usage on my laptop.

The Application Gone Awry

By the time I arrived at the flat to conduct the concluding interview, C and I discovered that RescueTime could not be launched on her Windows 8 machine. Therefore, no data was generated from her two-week usage of the computer.

Due to the mishap, I could only ask C about her assumption of the tracking application. Her response was that she did not check how RescueTime was functioning on her computer at all and had no knowledge that it was not functioning.

Researcher: RescueTime wasn't installed successfully, so we can't tell if it had any effect on your studying habits or not. Before you learned that it hadn't been functioning, you did not check its tracking reports.

C: Right. It had no effect on my studies. Well, maybe a little bit. I tried to be careful with the contents I'm looking at while browsing online.

Researcher: Did you? How?

C: Well, I had this thought, but I don't think I really changed my behavior.

Much has been discussed about self-monitoring applications and how they potentially change how we understand our bodies and selfhood (e.g. Viseu & Suchman, 2012¹; Nafus & Sherman, 2014²). In Foucauldian perspectives, new subjectives under discipline emerge out of practices of measurement and quantification. C clearly expressed such tendencies in the interview, but it was difficult to tell if such mentality is actualized in her studying habits since we did not have the opportunity to review the breakdown of her application usage in the app-generated reports.

Reflections

In hindsight, the decision to introduce RescueTime to C was not a good one. Even if it had functioned properly and generated usage reports, it would have been difficult to associate the data with digital reading practices and to make further connections with the holistic reading experiences at home.

I also realize that introducing RescueTime to C was similar in practice to introducing "Smart technologies" to the home environment. The technology may have been developed with the ambition to have positive impact on its users, but users may have trouble integrating it into their daily routines (e.g. Fink et al, 2013³).

RescueTime is still potentially useful for studies concerning tracking technologies, productivity, and users' habits, but it did not contribute much to my ethnography.

The map of the flat was created as soon as I arrived home after the first visit to C's home. After about 20 minutes, I created the following map.

The map was created by the app HouseDesignFree, which was fairly easy to use. The built-in icons allowed me to roughly outline the furniture in the space.

Apps with advanced features, such as SketchUp, were available, but it had a steeper learning curve than HouseDesignFree. Since the flat I visited only had two rooms, I decided not to spend too much time on crafting the map and instead focus on other aspects of the research.

During in-class discussions, a common anxiety shared by the students was how to make the map interactive. Specifically, a few classmates struggled to find convenient ways to zoom in and zoom out particular portions of the map. Tools such as Prezi and ThingLink were suggested. After evaluating the data I collected, I decided to use an old fashioned technology—GIF animations, to present the findings. Please refer to the post on diaries for the details.

When I visited the flat for the first time, C introduced to me how she allocated books in different locations in the flat according to their relevance to her studies. Below is the floor plan of the house with annotations of different book categories.

Physical Books

Since C was a PhD student, she had to do a lot of writing on her laptop. The laptop, therefore, was placed on the table where she did most of her studies. She preferred using the dining table to the desk provided by the landlord because of its position next to the window, from which sounds from the street could be heard¹.

C put the books in different places of the flat according to their relevance to her current study. The books and papers she was reading at the moment were on the dining table. The shelf opposite the table were books of relevance to her. Interesting, those books were all borrowed from the library since she found that books on that shelf gathered dust.

Recent purchases and books of possible relevance were put on the desk or the shelf next to the desk.

There was another shelf next to her bed in the bedroom. The books on that shelf were what she considered books of no immediate relevance. They were mostly fictional works.

Electronic Books

C had a Kindle e-reader with hundreds of e-books, but it was no longer her primary reading device². Originally it was placed on the desk, but she relocated it to the table when I asked her about it. She purchased many theoretical e-books in the past but had stopped acquiring new titles. Thus, Kindle was only used when she wanted to refer to the books stored within.

Papers/Articles

As a PhD student, C was constantly searching for relevant papers to read for her research. Her main searching tool was Google Scholar, and she found out about articles both at home, at school, and during commute.

No matter where and when she discovered the articles, the electronic copies would be categorized and saved to her laptop³. However, she preferred reading articles in their print format much more than their electronic format, so she would take the electronic files to the school library to print out the physical copies and then read them at home or at cafés. Only when time did not permit her to print out articles first would she read electronic documents.

Articles were, thus, the materials that traveled the longest distance among all of her materials. They also took on different materialities in each reading stage.

The printed articles were piled up on the desk and on the dining table during my first and second visit to the home. During the final interview, I noticed that a new box was placed in the middle of the library-cum-living room to accommodate the print articles.

Researcher: Has this box always been here? I don't remember seeing it before. And has it always stayed in this location [in front of the desk]?

C: I placed the box there last week, and it has stayed in the same location. It's quite heavy, so I can't move it elsewhere.

Researcher: How did you organize articles before the box was there?

C: Quite messily. I just put them on the table and the desk.

Researcher: Such as this pile [on the table]?

C: Yes, on the table, in drawers, on chairs. There were too many of them. I thought I needed... a box to easily pick out the ones I want. If they pile up on the table, it's difficult to take out those at the bottom.

Organizing scattered items in boxes is a common practice in domestic life. C collected academic reading materials were collected in a box, and these materials mediated not mediated her own personal memories but also her relationships with the academic communities. The box as well as other objects in her home thus contains her cultural memories (van Djick, 2007)³, and they open a window to analyses of how memories and identities are constructed, which I will address in another post.

C's living room of the home I visited also served as her personal library (See this post for her spatial plans for book collection). Since she did not acquire additional furniture when she moved in, the tall and short bookshelves must have been used by the previous occupant of the flat as well. There is ample historical evidence that the library in the house was used as the living room from the 16th to the 19th century.

According to Wainwright (1991)¹, the library in the house was never just a room with shelves of books, but curiosities the host had collected from all over the world were also displayed there. Bibliophiles who took pains organizing books, artistic pieces, and various curiosities in the library naturally spent a great deal of time there, so it became the de facto living room (p. 15-16).

The Library as a Place Where Guests Congregate

Wainwright (1991)¹ explains the increasing importance of the library in a house for social purposes. Country house parties became popular with the construction of the railway, and guests to these parties needed a place to entertain themselves during idle hours under adverse weather conditions.

In my fieldsite, C disclosed in an interview that a friend once came to stay with her for a month in mid-2015. Her friend usually sat in the space between the bedroom and the library-cum-living room. The affordance (Gibson, 1977)² of the step between the bedroom and the living room may have invited the guest to sit there, but it was also possible that she considered the library a more appropriate place to stay in during the day.

I also stayed in the library-cum-living room when I conducted interviews and ethnography. Apart from books, C adorned the walls with visually striking posters. She explained that the messages from the posters inspired her in her own studies, but their presence in the room captured my attention and elicited reactions from me, as I imagined the curiosities in private libraries in the past would have to the house guests.

Reading as a Solitary Activity or a Group Activity

Historically, the library was also used as the living room for families. Communal reading was a common activity among English families in the 19th century. For instance, in the diaries kept by Emily Shore (1819–1839), she described how her perception of verses and texts were heavily influenced by her father's and cousins' readings and interpretations (Colclough, 2011)³. The image of reading as an activity among family members or groups of people is preserved in the present age. To provide an example, in studies envisioning domestic library systems, family usage is always taken into consideration (Jeyaverasingam & Yang, 2008; Wu, et al., 2009)⁴⁵.

Scholarly reading, in contrast, are traditionally seen as a solitary activity. Cook (2011)⁶ gives a detailed account of how Victorian scholars consecrated their libraries, where the book collections represented their essential selves. These scholarly libraries operated by exclusion of everyone else so that the scholar could engage in their own intellectual pilgrimage. However, Foucault (1986)⁷ theorized the library as an amalgamation of materials gathered from all places and all times. Not only can the materials be processed in contexts out of their origins but they also resembled the messiness of our everyday living experience. Following this line of thought, people are never truly alone even when they are reading by themselves. With a piece of text in hand, readers are transferred to a different place in time, taking in the messages transmitted by the text.

I will explain in detail how technological devices facilitate this transition among different places in C's reading practices. Here I will only mention how she read in her library and her attempts to create space in which she did not feel alone despite reading by herself.

Alone, Together

There were large windows in her living room where ambient noises from the street could vaguely be heard. C explicitly said that the noises were comforting to her as they created an atmosphere which was similar to that of a café.

She expressed her preference of reading in cafés during an interview.

Researcher: There are noises in cafés. Wouldn't you think they are disturbing?

C: I just need some ambient noises. I feel more comfortable with people around me.

Nevertheless, she did not think reading together with a friend creates a better reading experience since it hindered her productivity.

Researcher: Do you often read by yourself? Or do you find someone else to read with you?

C: I only look for someone when I need help with statistics. Otherwise I don't usually read with others. I tried to find a friend to work together before when there were close deadlines, and I couldn't calm down or concentrate. My friend was a journalist with deadlines. We were both anxious, so we met once or twice.

Researcher: Did you meet in cafés?

C: Yes, but I didn't think it was very helpful. Originally I thought we could get some emotional support from each other, but we ended up chatting during our meetings. I felt so guilty after that.

The ideal environment for C, then, was somewhere in which she could be alone and also together with other people. She made sure that her library at home bore this spatial feature. Learned people in the past also constructed their library in a way that it juxtaposed the public and private. For instance, in Sir Walter Scott's writing, he noted that the library in his house was right next to the drawing room so that it could accommodate guests when needed (Wainwright, 1991). When he desired a place to study alone, he could close the door between these two rooms for quietude.

The Ideal Studying Place for a Scholar

Despite her penchant for reading at cafés, C considered her library the ideal place where she could do serious writing.

C: I spent more time at home before November since I had a manuscript deadline.

Researcher: Don't you have essay deadlines now?

C: Yes, but there is still plenty of time. The schedule for that manuscript was tight because it had to be done within a month, no actually within three weeks since I had to deliver early. Now... I don't need to deliver writings of a serious nature, so I don't have to stay home all the time where all the books I need are beside me.

As an aspiring scholar, C's vision of the ideal studying place had historical precedence. It needs to allow for both public and private usage, and materials needed should be at disposal.

My fieldsite was a one-bedroom flat near King's Cross, London. The flat was located on the second floor of a four-storey residential block on the quieter side of a high street.

The floor plan of the flat is as follows.

The area one encountered first when entering the door was the bedroom. There were walls that separated the bedroom and the living room and kitchen. The living room area was transformed into a personal library.

The Participant

The occupant of the flat was a first-year female PhD student in a social science department at a university in London. She was originally from Taiwan and studied her Master's degree in the U.K a few years ago.

C (psyeudonym) identified herself as a bibliophile. As she went back to Taiwan for several years after completing her Master's degree, she had sent her book collection to her parents' home back then. Some of that collection and the materials she acquired during her life in Taiwan traveled with her to London again after she commenced PhD studies, and her current collection in the London flat had since grown with new additions.

Digital Devices in the Home

C had used the following digital devices for purposes of studying and casual reading.

• Laptop: Microsoft Surface Pro
• E-Reader: Kindle 6" Glare-Free Touchscreen Display
• Mobile Phone: Sony Xperia Z3

Research Period

• The first visit and the initial interview took place in early November, 2015.
• Participant observation took place in mid-November, 2015.
• The participant logged diary entries between mid-November and late November, 2015.
• The final visit to the home and the concluding interview happened in early December, 2015.

This blog will hold records of my ethnographic study of a household, or more specifically, a home library in a one-bedroom flat near King's Cross, London.

The research question for the home ethnography assignment was originally “how digital technologies help us understand the meaning of home”, and I think it would be interesting to focus on the home as a private library/study. With the digitization of books, movies, and music albums, I am curious about how people interact with digital media at home. If these forms of digital media are all “new media” and can be reproduced many times without degradation (Manovich, 2001), then what do people do to make digital media bear their personal touch at home?

The form of digital media I want to focus on in is electronic books or documents on e-readers or in the computer. Apart from my personal interest in reading, I think e-books and documents are fascinating because unlike movies and music, it is easy to leave one’s personal touch in e-books and documents with functions such as annotations and highlights. Some people might not modify the files per se, but they might keep reading notes somewhere else if they are serious readers.

How people build and use their personal libraries at home also fascinates me. According to my initial findings, most discussions on e-books are devoted to their different reading experiences from physical books and the positive and negative implications, the ways physical books can be digitalized (and vice versa), how public libraries maintain their digital collections, and even whether public libraries are still relevant or not. Little has been discussed about how people incorporate digital books in their personal libraries and how physical books (if any) and digital books contribute to the idea of the private library/study.

Apart from the materiality of different reading formats, this blog will also address the following issues.

1. The ways in which digital technologies extended the private library to space outside of the home.
2. How memory was mediated by technologies.
3. Different methods of ethnographic data collection.
4. The choice of the platform to present the ethnographic materials.

Reference

Manovich, L., 2001, The language of new media, MIT press, Cambridge, Mass, London.