Category Archives for Visualise me
Wearable devices for tracking baby
Benji is only four years old, but the wearable baby trackers I discovered this evening make his infancy look like the stone age in comparison. Sure, I used TrixieTracker to track Jessie’s napping six years ago, but I had to … Continue reading
Talk at MIT on Monday May 5
On Monday at 5:30 (in room 14E-310) I’m giving a talk at MIT’s Purple Blurb series, kindly hosted by Nick Montfort. This will be an extra fun challenge because Purple Blurb focusses on art and practice, so I’m going to be talking … Continue reading
From Quantified Self to Quantified Other (and back to the panopticon)
I quite like self-tracking. I loved my Fitbits and Shine activity trackers (but kept losing them, putting them through the dryer, etc) and using them really did help me stay more active. But self-tracking is one thing. Having other people … Continue reading
What is a selfie?
Did you see SELFEED yet? It’s an art project by Tyler Madsen, Erik Carter, & Jillian Mayer, that quite simply displays a live feed of the recently posted photos tagged #selfie that are posted to Instagram. Here’s an animated gif showing a random selection … Continue reading
Why people say they take selfies
I’ve been collecting reasons people say they take selfies, much as I’ve previously collected blog posts about why people blog. Of course, there are hundreds of media articles about why people take selfies, many derogatory – instead I wanted to … Continue reading
Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: My Talk at UIC
I’m writing a book this semester about how we see ourselves through technology, and today I presented the project to the Communications Department here at UIC, where I’m a visiting scholar this semester. Of course I forgot to press the … Continue reading
Upcoming talk on my book
I’m going to present my research on digitally mediated self-representation here at UIC’s Department of Communications on Wednesday March 12 at noon. If you’re in Chicago, please come! It’s in room 1169 in the Behavioral Sciences Building, the one that … Continue reading
Celebrities’ self-presentation (notes on a paper by David P. Marshall)
Notes on Marshall, P. David. “The promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as marker of presentational media.” Celebrity Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 35-48. Marshall has previously written extensively about traditional celebrity, and starts his argument by reminding us of … Continue reading
An online selfie course for academics
Terri Senft is also working on selfies, and started up a Selfie Research Network on Facebook the other day. The group already has 180 members and is a very active site of sharing and conversation. There’s a Zotero bibliography and … Continue reading
Automatic portraits and selfies
I got a pile of books about the history of self-portraits at the UIC library yesterday, and I’m particularly enjoying Raynal Pellicer’s Photo Booth: The Art of the Automatic Portrait (Abrams, New York, 2010; translated from French by Antony Shugaar). … Continue reading
