This blog will comprise a collection of ephemera, mess and miscellaneous artifacts reflecting on the writer's life.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Across the scales of time


I am fascinated by the timescales attached to artifacts and have written about this here and in here.
The title of this post comes from a marvellous paper by Jay Lemke which you can find here.
Stanton Wortham also has a brilliant new book on identity and timescales, in particular on how one girl's identity was built up over a period of time, using the idea of micro meso and macro timescales.

What is interesting about blog writing, is the way in which timescales have been disrupted.
After a week of blog writing (seems an eternity) I can now manipulate time.
This post is being written when I have time, at half term, but won't be put up until next week. (Dr Joolz showed me how).
This is like the work of Jeff Wallwho may take months to shoot one photograph, which looks as if it is in one moment.
Lemke links the notion of time to the notion of affordance.
Semiotic objects have particular timescales and affordances attached to them.
One person who has written about affordance is Theo van Leeuwen who has sadly moved to Sydney where Anya is.
Anya has written a marvellous paper about digital affordances here (p. 24) and I am very interested in what she has to say as I am exploring the affordances of blogging.
One of them is time.
I have just been to Dorset and to the Chesil beach (above)
where the pebbles are older than anything to see my oldest friend Christian (that's her actual name not the religion oh no). Christian and I lark about because in our heads we are just 15 and still giggly although ofcourse we are practically old ladies.

4 comments:

Joolz said...

I loved reading this. A tour de force rush through lots of exciting work about time and space.
I adore the end when you say that you are both fiteen years old as well as ancient.
Very clever structure here DrKate.
One of my problems is that I think time is rushing past and I cannot ft in all the things I need to. What do you do when this happens DrKate? (My answer is that I prevaricate.)

Kate said...

I don't know either.
Today my head is spinning.
The thing is I thought I would be organised by doing posts ahead of time, and putting them up when I am busy,
then I keep thinking of more and laughing to myself meanwhile the ethical reviews are just not getting done.
ah me.

Anya said...

Thanks for the mention kate :> I think you will like the spatial and temporal affordances I mention in my paper. But at the time of writing it I was not aware of Lemke's stuff, thanks so much for pointing me in that direction!!!

Clare said...

Am particularly interested in Stanton Wortham's book. Thank you!