Hans Rosling is an international health superstar.  His TED Talk is probably the most amazing presentation of “boring” quantitative data in human history (the first five minutes alone are a tour de force).  Our quantitative project is the last major assignment due during our field study, but if this doesn’t inspire you to get working away on it, you may need to see a doctor about an adrenaline shot.  Go fullscreen and enjoy!

Blogging can be hard.  Sometimes you don’t know what to say or how to say it.  Some days you shoot a zillion images, and you just can’t bear to do something comprehensive.  Maybe, you just don’t know where to start.  You might just not be “feelin’ it” one afternoon.  Here’s five fun “blogcraft activities” that and that are pretty fun and easy to do when you’re stuck:

#1 Share Your Place

We’re all in different places right now.  Normally, we have the Evergreen campus as a place of reference, a common experience.  Use images to make your new place part of our extended, distributed “place.”  Are there LCD taxi horses, gender-segregated parking lots, or tetrapod beaches in your new hood?  Sharing even the tiniest detail can get you connected to your project and keep us all connected together as a learning community.

#2 Opinionate! Opinionate! Opinionate!

Consider this a relaxation/stress relief exercise.  Stretch your opinions a bit.

Say there’s a terrible piece of Andy Warhol-inspired street art in your Field Study site.  Let loose your irritation, people will relate to it.  Exorcise it and move on.  These should be short and to the point. Brevity is the soul of wit.

#3 Find a Goofy/Novel/Macabre Theme and Run With It

This is a good way to make a whole bunch of fun posts.  Early on in your Field Study you find some quirky thing about your museum and you post about it a lot.  This thing should evoke, and maybe be a little strange.

My theme for a while was “severed heads”.  Every time I find one in a museum, I shoot it, do a little research, write about it.  Little things like this keep people coming back.  They want to know what the next one in the series will be like.  Maybe you’re at a zoo.  Once a week, maybe you post an image of the weirdest thing from the cafeteria and review it.

This is also a good way to show how Flickr can work for you.  All my severed heads are in a set together.

#4 Peggy’s Musings

When I was on my ILC in Thailand, I kept sections in my notebook for musings.  Some were about language, some were about food, some were about insects, some were about music.  Let these things accumulate, like a hairball, and then unwrap the hairball and lay out the strands. Weave them back into something.  They don’t have to thesis, but they should illustrate relevant streams of thought.  Calling out a post as a musing is giving yourself license to think, publicly, to share those loose thoughts that you might have in the shower.  Stretch out your writer’s voice.

For example, I was inspired by a Thai art book I found in my friend’s bathroom to ramble about Thai and American curatorial/exhibition organizational methods.  It’s not a great piece of writing, but it helped me get past some writer’s block.

#5  Make a Movie Out of Something (An Object?) That is Not a Movie

A few years back art writer Tyler Green threw out a challenge to other arts bloggers to make their top five paintings into movies.  I ran away with it.  It’s some of the best fun I’ve had online.

This “blogcraft project” has two parts.

Part One.  present an image of the object and some background, maybe just a sentence or two.  If it’s in a museum, you can use the text from their site to get you started.

Part Two. “realize” the movie.  This part of the recipe has two ingredients.  The first one is presenting a short narrative based on the object, or featuring the object, or making the image contained in the object come to life.  The second ingredient is to contextualize the narrative.  Is it a noir film?  A documentary?  Is it a B movie?  Anime?  Horror?  Dramedy?

Put the pieces together and you’ve probably magnetized your readers with a good story.

Hopefully, the above creative blogging exercises might get you started, or get you out of a rut. Blog early, and blog often!

Courtesy of Cresny's photos via Getty Images

Weeks 5 thru 8 (February 1-29) will be Individual Museum Field Studies.

Feeds to student blogs will be available on the “Student Journals” page, located in the sidebar menu.

Assignments to be completed during museum field study and submitted electronically include: an annotated bibliography using Zotero and a research paper on the history of the museum; a quantitative assessment and visualization of data, an organizational diagram of the museum structure using Prezi, a material culture essay modeled on a similar chapter in Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, a field journal, and a log.  Back on campus weeks 9 and 10, students will create podcasts integrating audio and visual material about their field study and make presentations about the results of their museum-based field studies.

During winter quarter faculty and students will explore narrative objects and self-representation through six weeks of fieldwork in museums of their choice. Museums can be exhibitions of art, history or science; even zoos and botanical gardens can be considered museums. Students will document their research on their museum and will return to compile a multi-media presentation of their research project. In studios and workshops during fall and winter quarters students can expect to learn audio recording, digital photography, drawing with color pastels, ethnographic fieldwork, mindfulness practices (yoga, meditation), creative non-fiction writing, blogging and public speaking.

Links to student blogs will be available in February (located on the “Student Journals” page)