Salmon-Grizzly: Design, Regenerating Multimedia Generation, Harbin

Design ahead for the discipline of anthropology? See Paul Rabinow's, George Marcus' and Tobias Rees' "Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary."

One conceptual, digital approach to design in the academic discipline of anthropology is "regenerating multimedia generation, " (a term Paul, a teacher of mine, suggested I trademark the other day).


Wiki technologies are one example, where the regeneration comes from ongoing developing edits, that make possible a group knowledge generation process.


Regenerating:
Active wikis are always changing, forming, constructing, and creating anew, especially in an improved state.


Multimedia:
brings media elements, including words and text together. Here are some characteristics of it:

Integration, Interactivity, Hypermedia, Immersion and Narrativity

Packer and Jordan (see Randall Packer and Ken Jordan's "Multimedia" 2001: xxx) argue that integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion and narrativity characterize novel communication processes resulting from the development of information technologies.

Integration refers to “the combining of artistic forms and technology into a hybrid form of expression” (Packer and Jordan 2001: xxx).

Interactivity refers to “the ability of the user to manipulate and affect [his and] her experience of media directly, and to communicate with others through media” (Packer and Jordan 2001: xxx).

Hypermedia refers to “the linking of separate media elements to one another to create a trail of personal association” (Packer and Jordan 2001: xxx).

Immersion refers to “the experience of entering into the simulation of a three-dimensional environment” (Packer and Jordan 2001: xxxi).

Narrativity refers to “aesthetic and formal strategies that derive from the above concepts, and which result in nonlinear story forms and media presentation” (Packer and Jordan 2001: xxxi).

These technologies shape narratives, incorporating the above processes, which have the effect of creating hypertextual (nonlinear) story lines and multimedia shows.



Generativity:
Openness ~ this process gives rise to ongoing idea production, and information technology production, where innovation is continues.

The ability to create new wikis freely for any area of inquiry is an example. Programming languages creating programming languages are like this, too. See MIT Professor and Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms Neil Gershenfeld in this Library of Congress video: http://www.c-span.org/congress/digitalfuture.asp {March 28, 2005}.


{Paul Rabinow's "Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment" (Princeton 2003) and Bruno Latour's "We Have Never Been Modern," (Harvard 1993: 76-77), are particularly relevant here anthropologically, but digital technologies are new}.


Ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy {I trademark this name, too:} is one, good example which these authors have not yet explored, {because I'm creating and developing this method}.

Webnographers.org is another.

What are others?


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To the Harbin pools soon, in the rain, as a guest ... :)

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_run

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_bear

...