(What I wrote is not necessarily related to my research topic)
As everyone would have been experiencing, URT involves a lot of desk-oriented-work; we have to sit in front of the computer for a certain amount of time in order to input data we have been collecting. Moreover, my research required me to investigate online materials in order to get the most updated information about technologies that NYPD utilizes in their practices. I am not very good at organizing materials, especially when the materials are online. I simply stars them and put them in the folder named Urban Media Archeology. I know there is a bunch of good organizers, but I am reluctant (or scared) of adding them on my to-do-list. Because there are so many things to learn – including URT – and I am already spending a huge chunk of time for editing pictures, videos, sounds and sharing them online, and so on and on. (Oh, it of course includes the process of importing them into my laptop and organizing them according to my principles) I think it would have been better if I had structured my URT earlier so that I could have used it as my sort of dossier. I might eventually delete some of them, however, revealing the process of collecting information could be a part of holding ‘transparency in digital humanity’.
So, it was a fun activity for me to go outside and walk the neighborhood, finding surveillance cameras. Actually, I was getting better identifying cameras. It became a sort of hobby to me. I cannot stop searching them when I walk on the street. And even though it is nothing to do with my current research, I found it interesting to take pictures of storefronts – because many cameras are attached to the storefront. I am always fond of small independent stores in New York City and taking pictures of them inspires me. Maybe I will do a project about this in the near future. Maybe.
I’m sure you remember from our Libraries class last semester how the structure of the library or archive — even the “archive” we create on our hard drives — embodies a particular “episteme,” which shapes the way we ask questions and the ways we conceive of representing answers to those questions. Sometimes, we have to have gone through a research process — as you’ve done — in order to see how we might’ve shaped the archive differently to effect a different outcome. That realization is no less important, just because it comes after the fact!