Week 11 – Holidays ahoy & next steps
Hello hello everyone,
how are you all? I hope you are holding up or even already done with the semester. And even if you are not – keep calm, the holidays are close. Christmas ahoy! 🙂 Since the holidays are coming up & the semester is wrapping up, I thought I’ll write a short wee “KIPP Blog wrap-up” & comment on a few recent ideas/discussions I’ve had and some steps I want to be taking going forward.
Steps going forward:
Online lectures:
Thanks to Rhi I am now tackling all these super interesting lectures under the series “Experiments at the borders of computational cultures” that I didn’t quite have the time to proper listen to & enjoy. This is such a great series which combines my undergraduate & postgraduate perfectly 🙂
Furthermore, I want to hunt for some interdisciplinary lectures/Ted Talks etc. talking about science communication, science art, ethics of AI etc.
Using my holidays
I will be going back home for Christmas and while there is plenty of snow & sport to do in the Alps (as I’m sure you can all imagine) I do also want to tackle a few of the books I bought for extra reading (most curious about “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning” by Karen Barad). Furthermore, I want to use the resources I have at home (canvas, paints etc.) which I don’t have over here in Edinburgh since they are a little awkward to transport. So I want to try some sketches of how I imagined the visual part of my final project to give me a better idea 🙂 And last but not least, as mentioned in previous blog posts, I just need to take a step back, have some interesting conversations and see whether I want to stick with the propsal I have so far or whether and how/to what extend I would like to change my current idea 🙂 I just need a lot of A4 paper and lists, pros & cons and write down all my thought and then spread it all out on the floor in front of me 🙂 I always need to visualise my options for decision-making.
Methods
Tackling what methods I want to use for my final project is what I find most difficult. However, I definitely found the group report we had to do in “Insights through Data” very useful. I really enjoyed using my coding skills to work on an actual data analysis project and extract information from it. I mean it takes me AGES to code, but on the other hand time always seemed to fly and I was very much sucked into the work and forgot all our me – good sign I’d say 🙂 So this is definitely something I think I would enjoy using for my final project and probably my biggest personal goal for this year: to be able to use my coding skills in practice and learning as much as possible about coding.
However, I also find it super interesting to inform myself about related research projects and see how they elicited information. For instance, Hannah Knox who did research on “The Language of Climate Data” (suuuuper interesting) did field work, where she observed and talked to a lot of people to elicit what information they took away from climate data. Field work is something that I haven’t considered up until now, but is super interesting too.
And even going back to what I enjoyed in my undergraduate; I really like doing ethnographic research. I did a group work on strip club culture (don’t judge there is a LOT of literature and it IS super super interesting when you look through some of the ethnographic studies). Remembering that module about ethnographic research and also a book I read in Summer “Crazy like us: The globalisation of the western mind” – it would be enriching to look at the cultural component of how science is communicated.
Have a lovely end to your semester!
I think these are the biggest pillars that I want to consider and reflect on going forward and I’m super curious to see what my thoughts on the final project are towards the beginning of SEM2 🙂 Until then – have a lovely time everyone! And thanks for all your insights & feedback. It was really valuable and appreciated!
#lilac
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