To get a better feel for the actor-network adaptation assignment to which I’ve been subjecting the students in the summer school class I’m teaching, I spent a few minutes trying to put together my own flatland map of some social stuff on campus. I went with a free association approach, spotting a lot of people wearing sunglasses in the morning and using that item as a kind of anchor-point for my collection. The people and other items that made it on to the grid are what struck me as I continued to observe individuals wearing glasses. Laying everything out in the grid, and then trying to create the connections between them is helpful for spotting inconsistencies and relationships—e.g. some professors carry computer bags/briefcases while some carry backpacks.

My next step in conducting the assignment, then, was to think about possible labels for the linkages between items. One thing that’s nice about the Cmap program is the way it asks for a label for the links between bubbles. This lends itself perfectly to the kind of connection/translation thinking that I see as a key to the actor-network approach. I took the blank labels and tried to find an interpretive term that describes the link. One question I have regarding the ANT approach and interpretation is the timing of putting in these kinds of labels. At the risk of over-distilling, at some level I think what Latour is saying is as simple as “just withhold judgment.” So, adding a label like between the items feels premature and leads to stereotyping. Still, it feels like the next step in making sense of the observation is to assign some meaning to the connection. Maybe it would be best to leave these labels blank or fill them in slowly while gathering more information.

The real challenge, though, with the assignment we are working on is the requirement to select songs to serve the function of the label. I guess this means I have another step to go in the translation process, so the premature labeling of the links may not be a problem after all. I have no idea, however, whether using songs for these spaces will be doable or what it might lead to.

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