Tag Archives: Perth

Not all grim in little ol’ Perth

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I’m in the midst of a frustrating, and very late, night of research. I’m writing my thesis introduction and trying to find supporting sources for a section of my introduction in which I contextualise my research project by discussing why I’m focusing on Perth, Western Australia. The main reason that this is proving so frustrating is, it seems, that Perth hasn’t been of enough interest for many people to write about in academic literature.

No great surprise there.

As I’ve said many, many times before, I like Perth. Even if I’m not in the minority in feeling that, I’m almost certainly in the minority in admitting it. If you ask someone from Perth what they think of Perth, you’re almost certainly met with hesitation. Perth is Australia’s – and possibly the world’s – biggest country town. There are one and a half million of us, and yet we only just seem to be beginning to nail that Big City feeling. And, when I say ‘big city’, I mean like… moderately sized, internationally-overlooked big city.

New York, London, and Paris: Perth is not any of these.

It’s better than lots of places, though. Many people will concede that it’s a nice place to live… if you’ve got kids, or you’re retired. Or you love the beach; Perth does a spectacular beach. (In fact, it does an entire coastline of them.)

cottOh, hai Cott. (I don’t even like Cottesloe Beach, but I’m including it because it’s iconic and people think it’s good. I just think there are too many damn people. And sharks.)

 

beach

This is more my kinda beach, five minutes from my parent’s place. No big deal.

It has, until recently, been a little bit culturally devoid. There’s a big push at the moment to bring the culture to Perth, and it’s awesome. All kinds of events and places and bars and restaurants and goings-on are popping up, and some time in the not-too-distant future, Perth is going to be a pretty damn awesome place to be.

Probably Certainly the best thing to have come out of a recent spate of openings-up in Perth, however, is this:

toastfacegrillah

Go on. I dare you to try and tell me that a toasted sandwich shop named Toastface Grillah isn’t the best thing you’ve ever heard of. Reasons why Perth is getting awesome: here is one.

Best songs ever: edn. III

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When I was in late primary school and my early teens, there was a band from Perth called Ammonia.

I think I must have seen them at an all-ages gig in 1997 or 1998, because I knew all their songs and all the words. They used to get a lot of airtime on Triple J, too. This was my favourite of their songs – ‘You’re Not The Only One Who Feels This Way’.

Extra points in this video for the singer’s classic late 90s jumper.

Ammonia really epitomise the sound that was coming out of Perth in the mid to late 90s. There were so many great bands gigging around town and around the country, and although I was too young at the time to go to many shows, I would go to many underage concerts when I could, and voraciously hunted down the music of bands like Ammonia, Red Jezebel, Jebediah, Eskimo Joe (eeaaarlly Eskimo Joe. If you haven’t heard it, listen to it), and so many others whose names are escaping me right now. Perth indie music in the 1990s was poppy and guitar driven, a really fun sound.

The sound quality on this video is absolutely terrible, but I’ve included it because I was at this show! Right up the front against the barrier. I was 14.

Crazy how much better digital video technology has gotten in the past 14 years!

This was Ammonia’s last ever show in Perth, at the Big Day Out in 1999. I suppose posting this has some significance as the 2013 Perth Big Day Out was held today… but I didn’t go. I think I went to every once from 1999-2009, and then 2011, before retiring. I can’t do BDO anymore. I experienced so many wonderful BDOs when I was young, but these days they’re never fun. The last one I went to I saw so many young guys getting hit and security doing absolutely nothing to help them, and it’s too distressing.

Anyway, ’You’re Not the Only One’ was the last song that Ammonia ever played to their home crowd, and the entire audience was singing along, and it was very moving. 14 years later, it sticks in my mind as one of my fondest musical memories.

(As a special bonus, below is the clip to another of their big songs, Drugs. Such awesome Perth pop.)

Mapping Perth’s tweets

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Following on from my previous post, another fun tool to have a play with is One Million Tweets. Whilst the apps I demonstrated in the previous post mapped Instagram images, this web-based tool plots – you guessed it – Twitter posts in real time:

onemilliontweetworldview

For me, it raises a whole lot of questions about privacy and how much information users really want to be sharing when they’re online – and whether users know how much information they actually are sharing when they post content. I monitor the location data I share with the network; sometimes I’ll turn it on (for example, if I’m at a restaurant and have eaten something fantastic, I might post a photo to Instagram that is geotagged so that anyone searching that restaurant can see it; another way that I use geotags is when uploading holiday photos to Flickr, so that I can keep track of where a particular image was captured), but most of the time it’s off. I’m not even particularly concerned about privacy or security – I just believe that part of being an engaged digital citizen is being aware of the contributions you are actually making.

You can sit there and watch located tweets populated the map on a global scale, or you can manually drill-down to get a closer look:

onemilliontweetperth

 

Or even a bit closer:

onemilliontweetinnercity

Or right down to street level:

onemillionstreetview

The nosey creature in me finds this kind of thing absolutely fascinating, but the sensible human being in me is very cautious of information being geolocated right down to the street number. As I mentioned, it all comes back to what you’re willing to share – keeping in mind that, due to networked identities (i.e. distributing your online practices across a number of platforms and services), you’re often going to post content to one platform, but syndicate it to others.

This certainly isn’t an exercise in fear mongering but it’s worth thinking about.

On the other hand, I really love having the ability to see what people are tweeting about, and where they’re tweeting from. It adds to a rich digital landscape that ultimately makes the city more useful to me. The information we share contributes to a virtual network of information that could be said to lay over the top of our real world; that is, there’s much more to the places we occupy than buildings and services. At our fingertips, we have access to a world of information, from restaurant menus to user reviews and recommendations. This all adds to the effectiveness of the social map of our city that we perpetually refine.

Mapping Perth, socially.

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Today I’m working on some cool stuff to do with social mapping and geographic folksonomies.

Instamap Perth

Whuuuuut, you say?

To put it simply, when you upload content to the Internet – be it a tweet, a Facebook status, a photograph on Instagram, or any number of other ways of sharing content – you’re doing more than just sharing the information that you put out there. You’re also feeding other important information to ‘the machine’, as it were, about such things are your location, what kind of mobile phone or application you are using, and a whole range of other details – including statistics on who and what you engage with most when you’re online (keeping in mind that you have the option of turning off things like location data sharing).

At the same time, you have the option of adding information to your content. So, if you’re down at Cottesloe for a drink and a swim with some friends, you might like to add tags – such as #cottesloe, #cott, #OBH, #beach, and #summer – to your posts:

Photo 14-01-13 11 56 54 AM

Rather than just simply telling the network your location, this voluntary option to add information to your contributions does a number of things. It adds value to your content, makes it searchable (the tags act like keywords that users can search for) and embeds your content – and you as creator – in a network. For example, if I click on an image tagged #cottesloe, the app (this time it’s Padgram – an Instagram clone for iPad) will bring up the most recent images tagged as #cottesloe.

Photo 14-01-13 3 03 17 PM

Looks fairly straightforward. At this point, your images have become searchable, and they are part of a network. Cottesloe is useful as a tag as it’s very Perth-specific. It’s also a word that anyone from Perth, and indeed many people around the world will recognise, as Cottesloe Beach often ends up on lists of the city‘s and nation’s best beaches (although to a local, that might not be the case!).

Having clicked on an image tagged Cottesloe, I might see other tags, such as #beach.

Photo 14-01-13 3 08 15 PM

As a tag, #beach is less useful on a number of levels. First, there are many beaches around the world, so whilst tagging a photo with the term ‘beach’ certainly places that image in a wider network, it doesn’t necessarily add to the searchability of the image, especially if you are looking for something specific. (A couple of good articles that discuss folksonomy, tagging, and the usefulness of user generated content metadata are available here and here.)

An example of this is seen in clicking through the #beach tag:

Photo 14-01-13 3 03 33 PM

Not only does the #beach tag not return any location-specific search results, but – as you can see here – it doesn’t really return too many images that have anything to do with the beach!

There are various things that you can do to make your content more visible, and some of these are discussed in the articles I’ve linked to above. To bring this post back to my point, however – through this chapter I’m working on, I’m hoping to plot a picture of just a tiny segment of Perth’s online social media practices at this point in time. Social mapping is something that is only as good as the contributions that it includes. If people aren’t sharing data about a particular place, there’s a good chance that it’s going unnoticed by the people who occupy that space. Social media – blogs, social recommendation services, and apps like Instagram – are filling a void between physical space and virtual space, though, by injecting a dose of meaning into otherwise useful, but really rather meaningless, information.

At this stage, time really dictates how much I can explore Perth’s social map, but it’s something that I would really like to explore in the future, in the form of a project that pulls information in from across the Internet to generate not only a map of practices, experiences, and services – all bound together by user narratives – but a map that tells us something about the people of Perth and the way that they share content and information.

Well then.

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It’s a little bit hot in Perth at the moment.

We’ve got 5 days in a row forecast to be over 40 degrees celsius. That’s pretty stinking hot.

I feel like I’m in an advertisement, all beads of sweat and ice-cold cans of (diet) cola being rubbed over perspiring brows… only far less glamourous. I’m sweating like a pig. Only pigs don’t sweat, apparently. I’m sweating like someone who finds this heat uncomfortable but knows she has no right to complain because she spends half the year wishing for summer.

My days are going to be spent doing this:

2012-12-27-13-31-00

And I’ve set up my computer in the only room in my house with a decent aircon system, because it’s just too hot to work anywhere else. I’ll possibly live in this room for the next week. There’s plenty of couch space for sleeping.

study

The idea of doing anything in this heat is just a little bit depressing, really. I might go make myself an espresso martini. That’s an acceptable study beverage, right?

Late night study tunes: edn. VII

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Tonight’s soundtrack comes courtesy of Tame Impala’s recent album release, Lonerism.

lonerism

Unlike (what seems like) most people, I didn’t love their first album, Inner Speaker… but then again I didn’t actually listen to it extensively, so I will probably go back and revisit it.

I’m enjoying it. My brain really didn’t want to kick into study mode tonight after the weekend, which will be my last weekend off until after my thesis is handed in. It was a doozy, and I’m in pain, but it was worth it because now it’s all work, all the time.

Speaking of which, tonight, for the first time in quite some time, I’m feeling very anxious that I won’t be able to get this project done… but it’s almost certainly related to the fact that I have just begun editing the first half of my thesis and am thinking to myself, what the hell was I thinking? Reading back on one’s own work from the past four years is, unfortunately, a cringe-worthy experience.

If you’ve ended up here via Twitter…

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Hi everyone!

If you’ve ended up here via Twitter, there’s a fair chance you responded to my tweet for Perth bloggers, so I thought I’d write up a little bit about what I’m doing.

I’m in the final stages of my PhD, and writing up the thesis is… an adventure, to say the least.

Basically, I’ve been observing a whole heap of Perth blogs for the past four years with varying degrees of commitment (often not much), but as I’m nearing the final stages of writing up I really need some hard data to back up my ramblings.

That’s where you come in.

In the initial stages I’m going to compile a list of bloggers (which I will make available here if anyone is interested). Then, I’ll be looking at which other platforms they’re using: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and so on.

I’m going to use a pretty snazzy open-source software called Gephi to plot the connections that exist between the people whose blogs I’ve been following. So I’ll track links between blogs, links between Twitter feeds, links between Facebook pages, etc. until eventually I should have some pretty awesome visualisations of what Perth’s online community looks like.

I will update here over the coming weeks with what is going on, but if you would like to know anything more please feel free to email me or leave a comment here.

A note about how I am using this information

I won’t be doing anything unethical with your information. Nothing will be made public that is not already public online. If you do not use your real name online, your name won’t appear online or in my thesis. I certainly will not be publishing anything like personal contact details.

If you would prefer not to be involved, just contact me and I will take you off the public list (and remove you from my research data altogether).

Researching networked, place-based identities

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(or: four years of work in a couple hundred words)

My PhD research is a complex thing. And by “complex”, I mean “super geeky”.

It started out as an exploration of place identity – that is, our sense of self that ties us to the places that we inhabit, and the places that we are from – in the context of blogging.

Over the past four years it’s changed a thousand times, but I’m now nearing the end and need the hard data to back up what I’ve been observing for the past few years.

I’m looking at the idea of re-placing the self online.

Once upon a time, in the 1990s, there was no room for place or bodies online: you sat behind your computer (no mobile Internet back then!), left your physical self behind*, and adopted a new identity. Slow connection speeds and clunky interfaces made it difficult to represent the real online, and as such the virtual world looked very, very different.

Now though, thanks to a number of factors (including mobile technology, social media platforms, and the general ubiquity of the Internet) place has begun to matter once again. When we’re online, we tend to replicate our offline selves, rather than adopting a persona. Indeed, this line between online and offline doesn’t really exist anymore. Our profiles tell other users what our name is, where we’re from, and show them what we look like.

My research looks at the way that physical place influences our online sense of self. Online, we re-place our “real world” place networks, through blogs and social media.

Through gathering information about Perth bloggers, the platforms they use, and the networks they share, I am trying to paint a picture of what Perth looks like online. I’m also interested to know how far these networks extend offline, and will be getting in touch with bloggers over the next month to see if anyone would like to participate in providing me with this information that isn’t so easily seen online.

If you have any questions, please just leave a comment or email me.

*to some degree. We never have quite reached that cyberpunk fantasy of being able to detach ourselves from our physical being and live online forever!