Working our way along

I took a hit from the first real taste of autumn last week, but now the heating is on, everything is gloriously warm, there is soup and tea and duvets and so I’m back on track.

 

Before we jump into Things 7 & 8, I had another thought on Accessibility from last time around, which is how we hail new technology and digital learning as amazing and making it more accessible – when mediums like film or audio recordings of lectures can actually make things less accessible.

That problem obviously also exists outside of academia – I remember getting very excited about a German educational video and trying to find a way to give it English subtitles so I could show my friends. As far as I can discern, youtube has no actual way of officially submitting subtitles, instead one has to presumably work with the individual video creators themselves. Which works for some accounts but won’t for others and is a general barrier. Of course you don’t want every random troll adding captions or subtitles which will show up unchecked, but a service by youtube to look over subtitles would go a long way (also for working against the stories I have heard about jokingly captioned videos – think Monty Python’s moose joke – which can make the actual video totally not understandable to those requiring captions).

So I did a little digging and there is an excellent initiative to caption videos organised by Rikki Poyter under the hashtags #LIGHTSCAMERACAPTION and #NoMoreCraptions. She has some good videos about how to make video more accessible for deaf and hard of hearing people.

Right, on to the meat of things after that tangent!

 

Thing 7: Twitter

I only started using Twitter this spring, both in a personal and a professional capacity. For the latter I became familiar with analytics, while my personal account is not really big enough to have much of an impact, though it’s interesting to see how using popular hashtags – like #23Things! – make a huge difference in how many people see it. I’m happy to tweet to my handful of followers, but it does make you think twice when a single hashtag suddenly means several hundred people read your ramblings.

My internship this summer used Hootsuite for managing their social media accounts, so I got some experience in organising tweets, but really the first time I wish I did it for my personal account turned out to be the 23 Things twitter conversation! I felt like I was missing parts of the conversation, following the hashtag directly on twitter was awkward and my own feed cluttered with other tweets that weren’t relevant – so I shall be trying tweetdeck, see how that goes, and possibly report back later.

In general, I was surprised to see how good a tool twitter is to find opportunities from organisations, get ideas and inspirations both for hobbies and more professional pursuits and just to have conversation. I swerved a little bit, unsure of how personal or professional I ought to present myself, so the Guardian article linked this week (though specific to job hunting) really helped solidify my feelings on that.

 

Facebook

While I’ve only been using facebook since coming to university I’ve had a shorter run with it than most people, but I think I still have a pretty good grip on its functionalities. I got my lists down to post only to specific people, keep an eye on my privacy settings – so I will count myself as an Intermediate user and talk about Groups.

Now, I’m definitely less excited about groups than Eric Ravenscraft. Maybe it’s because I’m generally a rather passive user and like to organise things in group chats (or am lucky enough to see people fairly regularly in person). Which can be incredibly annoying on facebook, seeing that if you start a conversation with a group of people that you have previously had a conversation with, it will still begin a new thread, clogging up the messages tab and making information hard to find. So maybe I should give the groups a try. But really, they’re useful for keeping tabs on a specific group of people, for organising, and for local selling and buying, but personally I don’t enjoy interest groups. Since I use facebook more for personal things and not for experiencing content (I know friends who follow many artists etc. and so have a much broader news feed) and a tumblr account for art, fandom and hobbies. A main reason for this is that I’m simply annoyed by getting lots of notifications if there is an active discussions, but if I switch off notifications chances are high I will forget that the group exists. So I am a quiet lurker in some groups, but am happy to leave it up to facebook’s (questionable) algorithm to show me glimpses of them only occasionally.

 

A short one for this round, if I’m lucky I’ll get Things 9 and 10 in this week before Samhuinn and university assignments (not necessarily in that order) will require more time and I’m likely to take a wee break on these blogs, or upload some of the overdue travelogs/image posts instead.

 

Things 5 & 6

 

Diversity

I was really excited for Week 3, Diversity and Accessibility. As a white European, cis, Middle Class, able-bodied straight presenting woman I’m pretty high up the privilege list, and because of that I can afford to not always think about these things. So I wanted to tackle this as a active recognising of privilege and opportunity to work on my shortcomings. And absolute disclaimer: I will never know what I’m talking about as well as any person of colour and should not be taken as any kind of authority.

The first thing I realised was that two out of three of the articles to read that week were written by POC, both of which focused on race, while the third, written by a white woman, focused on gender representation (but mentioned race). So yay for diversity!

Reading these was hard. On the one hand it’s of course extremely important to have the voices that are discriminated against voiced most loudly: Here, the voices of POC about skin colour in emojis. On the other hand it’s equally important to remember that these are individuals, and turning them into spokespeople (“every black woman thinks emojis are racist because one of them said so”) is also in a way reducing them to their race.

Being white means I am the default. I don’t have to think about race and ethnicity and skin colour. It’s a luxury people of colour don’t necessarily have in their life, and to take away that little bit of being neutral, of not being immediately judged, is definitely not a step forward. It reminded me of the way that many female players will stay silent when playing MMORPGS – it’s a way of protecting yourself, to pretend you’re the “default” white and/or male, as anything else often leads to harassment or worse.

It would be interesting to hear an Asian perspective on this as well, and to see if the “neutral” yellow emoji evokes notions of yellowface or similar racist practices, since that would make the use of it equally awful.

So racially defined emoji – no. Bitmoji then?

Immediately going into the avatar creator, I was greeted by the usual male/female binary. Not a great start. So I went through both, just to see what the differences would be.

The usual distinctions were made – facial hair for men, make-up for women. A nice touch though: The build category features a more masculine “wide shoulders narrow hips” option for women, and vice versa for the men. Neither has any sort of realistic overweight build, which is a shame. They also share some, though not all, hair styles, so it is possible to create a non traditionally feminine or masculine presenting avatar once you get past the beginning, but really in that case, why make the distinction? Why not have all options for everyone, and you can just skip what you won’t want? I also don’t particularly appreciate the addition of non-natural skin colours like blue or green – it shows (to me as a white person) that skin colour really isn’t all that important and we can play with it, while people of colour are literally being killed for the shade of their skin. Unsurprisingly, white skin is what you start off with -why not start with darker? White people have enough things that are easier in life, they’ll survive an extra click to get the skin shade they want. There’s also no possibility to change eye shape at all or lip and nose shape by much, effectively imposing white standards onto everyone. As Tutt puts it, “bastardized emoji blackface“.

Testing results for male and female models with my features (aided by my short hair and not usually wearing make-up)

In contrast to Apple emoji, which can be used like a shorthand to express emotions or actions quickly and succinctly, Bitmoji seem to me to be more of a celebration and identification of self. As Smith mentioned in their article, the Bitmoji is experienced to be slightly apart from oneself and so maybe is also removed from all the negative connotations of social markers like race and less visible ones like gender etc.

Speaking of gender: I think it’s very different to introduce different skin colours from a non-existent and as such neutral emojis and to introduce female emojis where male ones have dominated. Male people do exist, and so it was actively excluding people who are not male. Of course it would be most useful to have entirely non-gendered/customisable emojis, so the bitmoji idea of inserting yourself into your scene of choice seems like a good step in that direction – although they themselves are not as diverse as they could be.

 

Accessibility

So much for diversity – there are so many facets to it that there is always more to write about, and I gotta get on to the next Thing eventually.

I know that accessibility is an issue, but wasn’t quite sure how to tackle it, so the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool is a fantastic resource. However, I found that I couldn’t find the one error it flagged, and while exploring the website occasionally stumbled into error messages that required reloading the page.

Additionally, it seems that many of the alerts it flags are built in by wordpress so I will see if there is a more user-friendly blog layout available.

Just for fun, I also put through a website made as a project in secondary school that was fully programmed by a group of us. We learned a little bit of HTML and CSS for it, but accessibility wasn’t much of a concern at the time. Interestingly enough, the main issue is having no alternative texts – something I’ve been trying to get better at for this blog, though with the large amount of photos I don’t always do it.

Reading through the case studies of disabled people accessing the internet, what stood out to me most was that while I’m aware of sight impaired folks needing assistance (and me trying to provide it), that there’s many more reasons to not be able to navigate as easily as an able-bodied person. These are the ones I need to educate myself on more, and be able to make space and include them.

I seem to have powered myself out getting riled up about diversity, so I shall leave it at that. Week 4 (and maybe 5) soon!

 

Things!

Yet another attempt at revivifying this blog on roughly its fourth birthday!

 

But this time, with a slightly different format, namely the 23 Things project at the university. Having started slightly late is made up by the fact that I already read about the initiative and have this blog, so Thing 1 and 2 done!

I’m hoping that on the one hand I will be improving my digital skills (the list of Things appears to me as a good mixture of things I’m familiar with and things that are new to me) on a more regular and structured basis; and on the other that doing this regularly will help me get back into blogging in general. There are a lot of images that are still waiting on my harddrive, and reflecting on current ongoings as well as the ability to go back and see into my own personal evolution can only be encouraged.

Also learning that the university has a social media handbook for students. That’s pretty cool. Although strangely as a digital native my immediate response was a rather immature “I know what I’m doing and I don’t need rules written by someone older who doesn’t know me”. But reading through it, there are some important point that as a person with privilege are easy to forget about, especially accessibility/inclusivity topics, and it’s always good to have a reminder about privacy and limited authenticity of social media. It is the danger of being someone who thinks they have been doing this for a while (I am – I hope – under no illusion that there’s many people out there who have seen more if the internet than I have, and they wrote this guide) and have become set in their ways, unwilling to budge when someone points out a flaw. But that’s where the self reflection comes in, so this blogging should be a perfect tool to recognise and overcome such hurdles!

 

Thing 3 involves googling myself, which is always fun (and works best when you spell your name right. Surprise!). With my full name, the first page is all relatively recent doings: involvement in the theatre, a credit from the Board Game Jam this spring and me as a contact for the company I worked with this summer. Interestingly, quite far up the list is a facebook credit for supporting a local artist’s fundraiser that I’ve never seen before.

Searching for the shortened version that I primarily use for social media, it’s a very different picture. Up come my twitter and etsy profile – the latter of which I didn’t know was as public as it is – and more set design credits, but this time from reviews rather than my profile on the Bedlam website, which uses my full name.

All in all, there’s definitely more out than I thought, as my digital activity has spiked massively since coming to university (there used to me only a group photograph with names from my confirmation). So I toggled some privacy switches and am tempted to do a regular search just to make sure I stay on top of my online presence (and that’s not even going into professional vs personal).

Which brings us quite neatly to Thing 4. My phone was already set to ask me for any apps wanting permission to access/use data, which I feel is excellent. Admittedly beyond that there’s not a lot of security I put into it, aside from not using any bank account details, saving passwords, generally keeping a minimum of apps etc. Online I take care of privacy settings on fb and to a lesser extent twitter, and if the odd app sneaks into fb it usually only gets a minimum of information and no sharing permissions. So fairly happy with how I’m doing on that.

So far, so good. 4 Things down, 1 to go. And a whole lot of new information learned!

Summer Hibernation

So this blog has been very quiet throughout the summer, which shows how busy I was with other things – and that the idea to make really detailed entries for the roadtrip that is today’s theme just made me push it back forever. But today by chance I thought to try this again, and as luck will have it, it’s my 3 year anniversary on WordPress. It’s not exactly been smooth, but this is still a thing that I want to keep going, so here is another attempt at that.

Oslo offered many opportunities for sweet parting shots, from Ekeberg to the Medieval Fair at the castle.

But I was not too sorry to leave, and knowing that every single part of Norway is unseemingly beautiful, it was fun to embark on our adventure.

No beaver sightings, but it was sure a busy fellow

First stave church (outside only)

First instance of *wtf snow?’

Second stave church (too dark inside)

The famous 24km tunnel

I almost regret not taking this beautiful driftwood badger

These were the first two days spent between Oslo and Bergen, learning that most passes were closed due to snow (in June an unusual occurrence even in Norway) and finding an alternate route – which turned out to be even more beautiful than the original route.

From there we made a quick detour to the Vøringfoss just before the tourist masses arrived (one Japanese bus on the one end, a Russian one on the other) and then doubled back to Bergen. I’d only ever been there for a day and we didn’t have much more time there this time around either, but I fell a little bit in love. After two years of Scotland the occasional rain were really no annoyance and the sun was all the more beautiful. Granted, living there is much different than just staying shortly, and we obviously caught the most interesting and beautiful bits (except for the mountains, gonna have to come back for those), but it is a wonderful place. The evening light was magnificent (and made the climbing back up to our B&B much more bearable)!

So many things happening in only three days, I shall split it up here and continue with the other half of Bergen, ponies, Rosendal and a first glimpse of the North Sea.

Spring Pic Dump

Since I continue to be late, here’s a whole marathon of pictures taken over the last three months – bits Edinburgh, bits Oslo, and then a lot of Copenhagen.

Yes I enjoy playing with my focus why do you ask?

Missed spring so painted some on myself.

And they say German has long words.

Tromsø

Without much ado, because these are from one and a half months ago and I have really no excuse to only put them up now. Looking back, they suggest a certain favouritism of blue and gold, and I won’t deny that I love that combination. But despite it being appropriately dark for a town above the Arctic Circle in February, my own memory of it is mainly white.

Moving towards spring

Most of these pictures are already a month old, just after I came back to Oslo, but lately the photographic itch hasn’t made itself very notable, and my trip to Tromsø will be getting a post of its own later on (hopefully soon, as long as I still remember enough to make it worth its own post). Looking back at these is interesting, the weather and landscape has changed very much since then. No more knee-deep snow, only damp grey patches between surprisingly green grass. and after one and a half months most sidewalks are free of ice again. The days are noticeably longer, but we still get stunning winter sunsets.

Winter Tales

Disclaimer: It will be a good lot more winter pictures than tales. I’ve been back in Oslo for a week now, and it’s a little strange – feels a lot more proactive even though I know I haven’t really been doing that much. Or maybe I have and it just seems little  because I used to do just the absolute basics.

My long, long holidays were immensely enjoyable, and I got to find some new safer ground to stand on, which is incredibly helpful. I say that now – I have also been ill for about half the time I’ve been here, and my brain too clotted with that to allow any overthinking/vicious circles/other depressive thoughts. It’s always easier to forgive yourself not being up and energetic when you’re physically ill, rather than if something mental holds you back.

But this isn’t a post about thinking (I’ve done plenty of that for myself and I’m sure it’ll come up another time), this is more eye candy.

Wandering in Winterlands

It has been a while. But in turn this has given winter time to come in a little more, and I’ve got three separate expeditions that I can show off today. After the quiet November December has picked up pace a little more, thanks to adventurous friends and my own efforts – I realized that making plans makes me a much happier person, so plenty of them were made. Now I just have to hope that I actually manage to go through with all of them…

Wartezeit

I wish I could tell about grand adventures that I’ve experienced and have the images to show for it, but really it has been a very quiet time. There was some snow

that didn’t last even the night, and it was followed by three weeks of solid grey clouds – the sun only came out again yesterday. With the clear skies comes frost, punctually till 12am everything is white, and then thaws away quickly, since the sun is still surprisingly warm. Or maybe it’s just gotten so cold that anything feels warm.