This article appeared in RMIT’s news about an event held last year called “Surviving Genocide”. The premise of this event and the occasion of the event itself forms the basis of the research and Documentary narrative for the Honours project.
Koora Cooper (pictured in the article) and Julian Silverman (organiser of the event) will be working in partnership with me, which is fantastic news.
Overall I was impressed with past students’ work and definitely looking forward to having a go myself. The community for my documentary a Jewish community, and the doc will serve to expand and diversify narratives of history. While the Holocaust and post-war migration is an important well documented historical event but there are many other rich oral histories within the Jewish tradition. I will use this documentary to give voice to some of those.
1. I know how to make a simple webpage
2. I understand writing for the web
3. I have an understanding of online technologies
4. I have learnt about the art of hyper-linking
5. I have created a relevent resource
6. My project creates or adds to a community
7. Class participation and collaboration
8. My blog contains relevant data/research
9 I have expanded my knowledge and critique of online environments
10 I have created a fully functioning simple website
Unbeknown to many in Jewish, Indigenous & non-Indigenous communities, William Cooper, a pioneering Aboriginal rights activist, was the first Australian to lodge a protest with the German Embassy against Kristallnacht.
He saw a link between his own struggle for human rights and the genocidal persectution against the Jews in Europe.
Although this event was all but lost with the passage of time, a revival of the story among local Indigenous and Jewish communities has sparked the building of a relationship between these communities based on a shared experience of trauma and survival.
This story will be told through the medium of radio so that William Cooper’s achievements are recognised and the bridge between communities is celebrated beyond familial ties to broader Australian audiences.
Probably needs very little explanation, except maybe to mention that apparently they’ll be off to Greece to perform next year. A fab example of the creation of global communities and interactions through cyber space. I think this dance worked for audiences because it is brings together living traditional and contemporary culture, an unlikely fusion and a sense of humour. Humour is undoubtably a major element of much of the content which is seen and shared on the web.
My old housemate, back in WA after 6 months in Melbs. Would you let this woman near your children????
Camilla, believe it or not we do miss your sense of humour!
Recently on a blog I write for the foster care organisation I work for we’ve come up against the old debate of controlling how, as an organisation you control the content on the web from “outsiders”.
The context of this blog is that we’ve recently been denied permission to publicly state the organisation we work for from head office (at the moment its generically “Foster Care Victoria” but if you look hard enough I’m sure the frequent references to one agency in particular would give us away…). So apparently we write posts in our spare time as Joe Citizen, even though we have proof of 30% of our previous respondents to a campaign used the blog either as a primary resource or a secondary (eg, after seeing a newspaper article). Never mind I’m off the track.
The debate was resparked among us blog enthusiasts when we got a comment from a group called ‘legally kidnapped’ (as the name suggests, a group disgruntled with foster care and adoption systems). Not a particularly well articulated response to our article so it wasn’t hard to address with a swift rebuttal but the question was SHOULD WE BLOCK THIS MILITANT GROUP FROM EVER COMMENTING AGAIN?
Sure we could block them, but I feel it would go against the philosophy of the medium as the ultimate of freedom of speech and democracy. Plus, trusting the intelligence of the bulk of our readers (and, furthermore, our target audience) we know they would hardly give so much as a single passing click to content like this.
But this is the thorn in the side of head office. The net is a scary and threatening place for those who’re used to having control over the entire content they put their name to.
The best example I’ve seen of the net by NGOs like ours for publicity was by World Vision. I did an interview with them last year on Triple R and was relieved to hear that their success as accepting the web as a non-hierarchical media was not without a bumpy road with their own men at the top.
For the past two weeks I’ve been working with my group in pinning down the meaning of Pure Research. We began quite poetically with a quote, calling pure research pure vs applied research as “experiments of light ahead of experiments of fruit”, but though it seemed simple to begin with, the distinction has become more and more muddied the deeper we delved.
On top of basic distinctions- pure research as being about new ideas while applied research uses these ideas for new inventions- searching today around the web there are other factors thrown about such as an independence from any external forces, and the notion that applied research must build on pure research ”without which new knowledge would greatly atrophy“.
Our concerns were with grey areas and blurred lines, especially for example with experimental film, which may (for example) perform a feminist inquiery of the conventional norms of film through the medium of film itself (there is one in particular that I’m thinking of but I will have to slip the name in later).
But then, maybe this is putting the cart ahead of the bull, because if the question is of the practice of research, surely the form the result, whether its a webpage, book, film, or thesis is therefore irrelevant?
So, back to basics, pure research within the communications field is necessarily conceptual, new, and flows through to philosophy and theory, (examples are structuralism, semiotics). Pure Research works with conceptual frameworks and paradigms, questions/problematise in order to reframe, thus ‘creating’ new conceptual knowledge.
I thought I would start having a look around online at the types of media available and found this documentary. It interested me in lots of ways, one was that I have actually sought out this type of information at the Dhanya Centre and elsewhere only to find that this unofficial distribution (by that I mean that I’m assuming it hasn’t been broadcast on TV through traditional production means) is the most informative resource I’ve seen. Although its not an online documentary in the sense that we’ve been talking about in Transient Spaces (a good example is Us Mob) it is an example of You Tube changing the producer/broadcaster=power dynamic. Unfortunately in my exploration this morning I also found a disgusting response to the National Apology. I won’t put the link in here because I don’t want to support such filth, but i suppose democracy isn’t all roses.
I was also interested for other reasons, more to do with my major research project. I noticed that towards the end an interview with Lee Joachim was 4 minutes of unedited talking. I think its fair to say that this technique is not typical of TV production but i wonder if it relates to a framework of fewer edits in Oral History recordings, with the producer receding into the background of decisions over content.
I was also interested in Lee’s discussion of consultation. Consultative methods are part of my research area and even though he’s talking about land management consultation, i think the risk of tokenism he’s referring to is very relevant.
Finally, I have my finger on the wire of a story about Bill Cooper (William in this doco at 4:20), so I was excited to see that archival materials obviously exist somewhere, and it will just been a matter of finding it!
