PhD Thesis: SNAPSHOT PHOTOGRAPHY: A PHATIC, SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED, MNEMONIC TECHNOLOGY - READ

Abstract

This practice related research study explores my cognitive response to a biographical snapshot photograph celebrating my first day at school. The experience triggered an exploration of the relationship between snapshot photographs and memory. The finding of a second almost identical snapshot photograph of my son taken twenty years later by me prompted me to question why my father and I should take almost identical snapshots.

I argue that the invention of photography was driven by the desire to capture the images created by the camera obscura by mark-making with the pencil of light as an aid memoir.

I argue that the desire to externalise memory using mnemonic technology is innate with primal origins in parietal art and lithic technologies. The discourse explores the cultural evolution of technology through Jaques Derrida’s theory of originary technicity and Bernard Stiegler’s concept of the cultural evolution of technology by epiphylogenesis and the notion of the externalisation of memory as prosthesis.

I explore the emergence of snapshot photography from the canon of photography through the theories of cultural evolution, technological momentum, and social constructivism, together with psycho-social notions of desire, ritual, performativity and intentionality in the establishment of snapshot photography as a ubiquitous ingrained social practice.

The research is informed by a studio practice element that uses the adventures of Lewis Carroll’s, Alice as a conceptual framework to explore a journey of agency, self and auto didactical knowledge acquisition. I discuss the search for an appropriate methodological framework for art practice based research.

My practice is a catalyst for enquiry; a project usually starts with an artefact that forms the locus of a question, the search for the answer to those questions, often leading epistemically, to unexpected places and relationships. The mode and manner of my enquiry are rhizomatous, pragmatic and serendipitous; the relationship between practice and theory is flexible, one informing the other.

Through practice, I explore the deconstruction and textualisation of the visual metaphor of memory through the rhetorical devices of ekphrasis and memory texts and a visualisation of the nature and originary technicity of snapshot photography and an exploration of self and place.

The thesis for this study is founded on the premise that snapshot photography is a socially constructed, phatic, mnemonic mark-making technology with origins in parietal forms of visual expression.

Thesis Download Links

 UPDATE: 23 August 2020

The former link to my Thesis is no longer available, here are alternative links to the completed Thesis and the Powerpoint Presentation of the exhibition that was part of my practice related research

Link the Lancaster University Research Directory page http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/snapshot-photography(82923ac2-44bd-4800-9be3-191d9f63f802).html

Link to the PhD Thesis PDF document file 
http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/services/downloadRegister/201945481/Parker2017phd.pdf

Link to the  Powerpoint Presentation of the accompanying Exhibition  
http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/services/downloadRegister/201945483/PhD_Exhibition_Presentation.pptx

PhD Thesis - Viva Voce

 Snapshot Photography: A Phatic, Socially Constructed, Mnemonic Technology

I survived my Viva Voce on the 13th March and was awarded a PhD subject to minor amendments and corrections. As soon as these have been completed I shall post a copy of the Thesis on the blog.

Poem: Fragments of Memory with Video

Fragments of Memory

Standing still
A special day
The place I know
The path beside the house
The coal shed
The house next door
Me, my face, my hands
My legs, my shoes
My book My cap
The gabardine raincoat
Keeps me warm and dry
Me ready for school
The path, the bricks along the edge
The shadows
Heavy on the wall
Me, my dad, together
I remember the place
But not the day


An element from my PhD Thesis Exhibition of Studio Practice

PhD Thesis Practice Based or Practice Led?

One of my concerns since starting my PhD is to understand how a Practice Based PhD differs from other PhD's particularly a Practice Led PhD and what format should my thesis take.  My thesis is split 60:40 between writing and practice. I shall expand on my findings in other posts but this Thesis by Erik W. Borg raises some interesting issues which I will expand on in future posts.

Update 5.10.14

I found an interesting series of papers from a conference hosted by University of Hertfordshire -  Research into Practice conference 2000 - in 5 volumes, follow this link. Volume 1  - The foundations of practice based research.

• Edward Bird – Research in art and design: the first decade 
• Neil Brown – The representation of practice 
• Fiona Candlin – A proper anxiety? Practice-based PhDs and academic unease
• Anne Douglas, Karen Scopa and Carole Gray – Research through practice: positioning the practitioner as researcher
• David Durling – Reliable knowledge in design
• Jill Franz – An interpretative framework for practice-based research in architectural design
• Sophia Lycouris – The documentation of practice: framing trace
• Katie MacLeod – The functions of the written text in practice-based PhD submissions
• Steffano Maffei and Francesco Zurlo – Designing as a competence: design process as the result of a 'learning by interacting' practice. Evidence from Italy
• Tim Marshall and Sid Newton – Scholarly design as a paradigm for practice-based research
• Jules Moloney – Studio based research in architecture: the legacy and new horizons offered by digital technology
• Terence Rosenberg – 'The reservoir': towards a poetic model of research in design
• Jane Webb - Research in perspective: the practice of theory

Scrivner or MS Word? - Updated

I am 9 months into my PhD and I have to say I am progressing better than expected on some fronts. But, and there is always a but, I am not without issues! One of my worst failings is the organisation of my research literature and associated writing and notes. I am on  my 7th essay of around 6000 words and in the process have accumulated a mass of reprints and books not to mention Zotero entries.  Do I just accept that I am disorganised or do I try to do something about it before it becomes an irreversible problem?

I was reading a blog update email from The Thesis Whisperer (TTW), one of my favourite sources of inspiration and advice. The post was titled "How to write faster" and one of the paragraphs was about Scrivener, to quote from the website, Scrivener is:

Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.

 Like TTW I have used Microsoft Word (MS Word) for ever and despite still struggling to find my way around version 2010 on occasions, I am fairly comfortable with it. So the thought of having to start all over again fills me with dread. These were TTW's thoughts when she changed over in January 2011:-

This week I started using ‘Scrivener’ for writing my research papers. It’s a word processing program which has been on the Mac for some years, but only now is being developed for the PC.

It took less than 5 minutes to start loving this program. In a single morning I had a decent draft of a paper, which can sometimes take me weeks. I wasn’t at all surprised to read in the bio of the developer that writing this software was part of his “struggle to put together a PhD thesis” because I think it fits research writing like a glove. 

Well those words are encouraging. However these are the comments from TTW's latest post, September 2013:-

Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while will know this is the key reason I am a huge Scrivener fan. Scrivener is a different kind of word processor that enables you to write ‘chunks’ and move them around easily (you can read more about Scrivener here and download a free trial here).

Although I prefer to use Scrivener, it is not always possible, or desirable, to use it end to end in a given writing project. I often find myself collaborating with other MS Word users (ie: 99% of the writing world) and there are certain things Word does well (in particular tables). Luckily translating my text from Scrivener to Word and back again is very easy.

Since the productivity boost from Scrivener is in the drafting process, I stay there as long as I can before switching to MS Word. I overcome some of the problems of MS Word by creating subheadings and assigning styles to them. Then I make a table of contents so these subheadings become clickable links at the start of my document. It’s not perfect, but it enables me to ‘teleport’ around the text more easily during the final editing process.

Time and experience has obviously influenced TTW's initial enthusiasm for Scrivener, it is interesting to note that she has now found a working model that combines the virtues of both Scrivener and MS Word. I have downloaded the demo version of Scrivener and I will give it a go. Watch this space for my feedback.

UPDATE - 11th October 2013 - I downloaded the trial version of Scriviner with the intention of giving it a good try. Unfortunately after opening the programme and having a quick look around I closed it and have not opened it again. I decided rightly or wrongly that life is too short to start finding my way around a new piece of sofware on top of all my other pressing demands. I have reverted back to using Microsoft OneNote and expanding my knowledge of Zotero's ever expanding capabilities. Sorry Scriviner!

How NOT to write a PhD thesis

In a Times Higher Education article, Tara Brabazon gives her top ten tips for doctoral failure. As I complete my first, not very good essay, I am only too aware of how prophetic the advice in this article may prove to be.
From the article:-

...I understand the angst, worry and stress of supervisors, but I have experienced the other side of the doctoral divide. Examining PhDs is both a pleasure and a curse. It is a joy to nurture, support and help the academy’s next generation, but it is a dreadful moment when an examiner realises that a script is so below international standards of scholarship that there are three options: straight fail, award an MPhil or hope that the student shows enough spark in the viva voce so that it may be possible to skid through to major corrections and a full re-examination in 18 months.
When confronted by these choices, I am filled with sadness for students and supervisors, but this is matched by anger and even embarrassment. What were the supervisors thinking? Who or what convinced the student that this script was acceptable?

Therefore, to offer insights to postgraduates who may be in the final stages of submission, cursing their supervisors who want another draft and further references, here are my ten tips for failing a PhD. If you want failure, this is your road map to getting there.

1. Submit an incomplete, poorly formatted bibliography
2. Use phrases such as “some academics” or “all the literature” without mitigating statements or references
3. Write an abstract without a sentence starting “my original contribution to knowledge is…”
4. Fill the bibliography with references to blogs, online journalism and textbooks
5. Use discourse, ideology, signifier, signified, interpellation, postmodernism, structuralism, post-structuralism or deconstruction without reading the complete works of Foucault, Althusser, Saussure, Baudrillard or Derrida
6. Assume something you are doing is new because you have not read enough to know that an academic wrote a book on it 20 years ago
7. Leave spelling mistakes in the script
8. Make the topic of the thesis too large
9. Write a short, rushed, basic exegesis
10. Submit a PhD with a short introduction or conclusion     

The article contains very sound advice from an informed viewpoint. The follow up comments also contribute some sound advice and information...

Read more here...

Reference

Brabazon, T. (28 January2010) How not to write a PhD thesis. Times Higher Education. Available from: <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410208> [Accessed 9 February 2013].

Writing Skeletons

As an inexperienced academic writer one of the most difficult aspects academic writing is designing an appropriate skeleton or scaffold. Professor Pat Thomson offers sound advice in her blog Patter. She and her partner Barbara Kamler borrow paragraphs from Swales and Feak's book, Academic writing for graduate students a series of skeleton (i), which she uses in her academic writing workshops. I reproduce them here:-
Re-bloged from Patter

Why a PhD? Why not?

Well, why not? Having just completed an MA in Contemporary Art Research and I am poised to start on a PhD. The MA was an enjoyable experience but it served to emphasise my academic inadequacies. Hardly surprising when you consider that I dropped out of 6th form after 3 months because I believed I was not cut out for academia and found myself a job. As a very practical person with a scientific bent, I had spent most of my time trying to blow my self up or stinking out my bedroom What better career than to become a lab technician? As there were no vacancies in the stink bomb department I joined the Veterinary School at Liverpool University. I realised that if I was to make my fortune it would not be at the University so I moved on to set up a private laboratory for a veterinary practice. A few years later I was head-hunted, with an offer I could not refuse, to run what was one of the first private veterinary labs. The lab was subsequently sold and I was made redundant. So, together with a colleague, we started my own business, a Veterinary Pathology Laboratory.