Picturing Writing with Visual Research Methods

In Academic Writing as a Social Practice, Linda Brodkey (1987) argued that composition studies needed a new cultural conception of composing, one that reimagined the tired trope of the alienated and anguished writer who writes alone. In a chapter titled “Picturing Writing,” Brodkey relies heavily on visual metaphors; she passionately argued that we need new pictures of writers and composing practices in their rich, socially situated complexity. She asked readers to re-see writing, to consider alternative viewpoints, and in the process, to break away from popular perceptions of composing, particularly because such perceptions obviate new, different, or even challenging perspectives about writing (58).

More recently, Jody Shipka (2011) draws on Brodkey to suggest that one charge of contemporary composition research is to foreground and make more visible the circulatory processes of composing and textual distribution (38). In response to these and similar exigencies, I compose with photography as one way in which to see writing anew—a method for re-seeing the complexity of composing processes by literally and systematically picturing writers and writing.

As a qualitative researcher focused on the activities, objects, and environments of composing, I conduct ethnographies and case studies of writers in everyday life—from academe and industry to religious practice and social gaming. In these studies, I use traditional fieldwork methods such as semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and artifact collection and analysis. In my early fieldwork, I often used photography and videography as well, mainly as means of augmenting observational fieldnotes and capturing informal talk, gestures, and spatial and material arrangements.

A few years ago, however, I realized that my use of visual fieldwork methods, while beneficial, was also somewhat facile in its execution. I learned that over the last four decades, social scientists have explored the nuances of visual methods in studies of social life (see, for example, Pink, 2007; Spencer, 2011; and Pinney, 2011), of which writing is, of course, an inescapable mediator. The subfields of visual anthropology and visual sociology have enriched my understanding and use of visual methods in fieldwork. These approaches have developed in parallel to our own field’s explorations of visual rhetorics, resulting in complementary empirical perspectives on visuality and visibility.

Writing in the world: a tiny geocache container and scroll for logging visits.

More recently, therefore, I have adapted approaches from visual anthropology and visual sociology to the study of writers and their composing practices and environments. Doing so has resulted in many trials and errors, but the struggle has been rewarding: I have learned to use visual methods to explore, analyze, and present the rich materiality of everyday composing practices, and in the process, to formulate new pictures of writers and writing that may be generative for participants and composition researchers alike. More important, by using visual methods in field studies I have been able to create new forms of material engagement with participants about the role of composing in their learning, work, and play.

While critics such as Susan Sontag (1977) have suggested that photography results in the distancing of photographic subjects from photographers, I have found opposite to be true: Visual methods of fieldwork result in qualitatively different forms of intersubjective understanding between researchers and participants. Composing with photography throughout fieldwork can help researchers of writing move beyond mere tautological illustration; by using visual methods, researchers may document and engage simultaneously.

More important, participants may see their own composing environments, tools, and practices in new ways, from different perspectives. A technique known as photo-elicitation uses fieldwork photographs as pivots for better understanding participant practice. For example, by photographically demonstrating a writer’s well-maintained mise en place, the researcher may help make the familiar strange for a participant, and through discussion, develop new insights about their composing practices.

In a similar way, visual methods may result in presentations of experience that are more hyaline and evocative than traditional forms of reporting. Qualitative data is notoriously dense, and for readers, the mass of fieldwork supporting ethnographies and case studies is often opaque. In addition, traditional methods of collection and representation are necessarily sequential; observational fieldnotes, for example, may miss crucial details of actual practice—movements, tools, arrangements, or cross-talk that may meaningfully mediate composing.

A software studio’s whiteboard is a collaborative space for composing and ideation.

Photographs offer simultaneous renderings of practice, what Flusser (2002) terms surfaces rather than lines. A traditional ethnographer detailing the complex, collaborative work pictured above must transform the simultaneously visible surface of a software studio’s whiteboard into a linear representation of activity. A visual ethnographer, however, can present that visible surface in its full complexity; when coupled with an analytic narrative that details punctuated development, a more hyaline rendering of complex composing practices emerges.

Qualitative research is characteristically ideographic; indeed, visual methods foreground the situated materiality of composing practices. This is a key strength of visual methods as I practice them in studies of writers and writing: the ability to document and collaboratively explore particular systemic contexts and the ways in which artifact assemblages participate in composing processes.

However, in developing new pictures of writers and writing, visual methods have the potential to be nomothetic in the aggregate. Because visual methods may be more hyaline—presenting richer data than traditional methods alone—they carry the potential for fruitful cross-case comparisons of composing practices. Imagine, for a moment, systematically composed and collected photographs of 20,000 first year writers’ typical composing environments and the resulting wealth of both particular (ideographic) and tendential (nomothetic) pictures of writing that might emerge from careful analysis.

Visual methods in empirical studies of writing carry the potential to further develop and realize Brodkey’s argument for re-seeing our object of study, and more important, the people who write. Barthes (1981) argued that “the camera can be an instrument of deep meaning, connecting the scene to the viewer and the viewer to existence” (131). With visual methods, writing researchers can reframe cultural conceptions of where, how, why, and with whom people write in their everyday lives.

Shanghai Street Food

During the summer, when I told people that I was going to (or recently returned from) Shanghai, I was often immediately asked about food, and sometimes specifically about street food.

If you know much about me, then you know that I’m a food utilitarian. I eat for calories. I simply don’t care much about food beyond sustenance. This does not mean that I don’t enjoy food; I do. I enjoy the things I eat every day so much that I eat almost the same things, every day. But I am no foodie.

I will try almost anything, and Shanghai presented many opportunities for new culinary experiences. About the only thing I had that was challenging was stinky tofu during breakfast. Served cold, this everyday snack actually smelled fine to me—and was quite wonderful when it hit my tastebuds. On it’s way down my esophagus, however, it exploded in a kind of fermented, spicy, heartburny miasma. Despite that, I’d probably try it again…

As it turned out, just outside the West Gate of the Baoshan campus of Shanghai University, about a 1.5 mile walk from where I stayed and taught, is Jufengyuan Road, and area that Shanghaiist calls one of Shanghai’s street food meccas. I came to know this area well, visiting daily.

As the Shanghaiist post notes,

The actual Jufengyuan strip isn’t even the main attraction with its fruit wagons, skewer carts, etc. The real deal begins at the alleyway just right of the bridge connecting Shanghai Uni’s west entrance to Jufengyuan Lu - identifiable by the covered picnic tables, shrouds of steam, and scraping of woks. Here, you’ll find fried noodles and rice galore, shawarma, skewers, Chinese breakfast crepes aka jianbing , fried chicken, and our favorite, big Xinjiang skewers with ribs, chicken legs, and other animal parts spitted on medieval-looking metal swords.

This area is amazing. The smells, the open flames, the masses of people moving about carrying xialongbao and sizzling chicken and steaming soups—it’s essentially what I envisioned when conjuring the phrase “Shanghai street food,” and it was incredible that I was within walking distance for two weeks. And while I came to appreciate one stall’s very spicy noodles, I was much more interested in simply being there than in sampling all of the food on offer—the street food scene along Jufengyuan Lu was atmospheric, enveloping, all-encompassing.

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At this point, I want to write a few words about my experiences with street photography in Shanghai before I share some photos of the street food scene…

I never felt unsafe during my brief time in Shanghai, even though I stumbled into areas of the city where tourists and laowai are rarely seen. However, there were a couple encounters that I’d describe as “dicey,” and each involved my use of a camera at the time.

I’m fairly conspicuous as a street photographer; I love to shoot in low light and at night, and I’m a stickler for sharpness and legibility. This means that I typically stand out—with a big Manfrotto tripod, a Nikon D7000, a wireless shutter release, and a tendency to shoot low angle, wide frame shots. In other words, people can easily see what I’m doing, and in the process, they may become curious, shy, amused, etc.

This shot, for example, was taken in front of about 25 scooter taxis and their drivers—to the left of frame, and behind the camera—all facing me as I set up, and all watching me with interest. This was photography in front of an audience, and after I made a couple of acceptable shots, I moved along the crowd, showing everyone the resulting images. It was both odd and fun.

But I take few “candid” or furtive street shots. If you see close-up, legible images of people in my street photographs, there’s a very, very strong chance that I asked for permission before shooting. So, in touristy areas like The Bund, nobody cared about my photographic activities. But in a locals area like Jufengyuan Lu, as an obvious laowai with a camera and tripod, I stuck out.

On several occasions in Shanghai, therefore, my conspicuousness was potentially positive or negative (for me, and others). Folks often would set up behind me—squatting down or leaning over my shoulder—as I framed a shot on my tripod, essentially trying to see what I was photographing. When I noticed this, I’d show people my shot, so they could see my results. Then we’d exchange thumbs up or down signs, smiles, shrugs, or frowns depending on what people thought of a given photo.

But on a couple of occasions, people were visibly upset by something I’d done with my camera. The diciest situation occurred just after I’d shot this photo, one of my favorites from the trip:

To the left of the frame, Jufengyuan Road moves out into the distance—a pedestrian, bike, and scooter thoroughfare with major chains (Wal-Mart, KFC), local shops, banks, apartments, etc. Just to the right of the frame is the entrance to the street food mecca.

For me, this fruit stand is visually lovely. I’d purchased cantaloupe skewers here on a couple occasions, and at night, it makes a fantastic photographic subject.

I shot this in the street, about 20–30 feet away from the stand. My tripod was low, the camera perhaps 30 inches above the ground. The woman working the stand moved in and out of frame as I was setting up the shot, and my intention was simply to capture her movement—a blur in the long exposure. In other words, I was shooting the scene—the well-lit stand, the movement of people nearby, the colorful fruit—rather than a portrait.

A man—probably in his 40s or so, shirtless (it was hot and humid), and a bit bigger in stature than I—set up behind me as I framed the shot, clearly skeptical and uneasy. After shooting it, I turned to him, gesturing back toward the camera, indicating as best as I could that I wanted him to look.

Finally, I picked up my camera and held the shot up for him to see. He was pissed. I’m not at all sure why, but he started screaming at me there in the street. He’s yelling in Chinese, I’m offering in English to delete the image, and no one nearby was able to mediate. Finally, he gave me a dismissive wave and I headed off down the street, quickly, hearing a few farewell yells, without taking another shot.

I feel bad, as I clearly did something to cause offense. But I also couldn’t tell if this was the kind of man who often yells at people on Jufengyuan Road. Because of this ambivalence, I kept the photo.

The rest of the photos were shot in the alley, with permission. I returned another night to shoot these, but I was still skittish; I ended up shooting far less here than I would have liked.

This photo is the poorest of the bunch, but it gives a sense of the stalls in the alley. From this view, I am about 2/3 of the way down the alley, so we’re seeing only the final few stalls along the vanishing point. To the right of frame are tables and many, many patrons enjoying their food.

At this stall, a family—a grandmother, son, daughter (or daughter-in-law), and grandchild—were very accommodating, and they really liked the shot after I showed it to them. The huge wok and open flame caught my eye, but I’m really pleased with the little details here—the shovel in the bottom left, the dividing paneling, the electrical sockets and peeling paint. A perfect environment for street food!

This image is intentionally dark; to the left of frame, a line stretched easily twenty people deep. The single bulb illuminating the workspace caught my eye.

Finally, a couple of the few food close-ups I shot, before and after.

Shanghai Graffiti

I have a few more posts from my summer teaching in Shanghai on the horizon, including today’s on graffiti and stencil art.

I spent much of my time on the Baoshan campus of Shanghai University; I learned quickly, thanks to some impressive heat and humidity, that there were areas of campus that remain shaded throughout the day. For example, many of the main instructional buildings had bicycle garages at the ground floor, like this one:

The walk to my classroom was about a mile or so, and I covered most of it by moving through the bicycle garages of a row of instructional buildings. And since I spent a fair amount of time there, I noticed some interesting stencil graffiti, which I couldn’t help but photograph.

Overall, however, there were few examples of graffiti that I saw during my two weeks in Shanghai. It's a big city, though, and I saw only a fraction of it!

Everyday Details

While I was in Shanghai, I spent half a day in and around Jing’an Temple, a key site of contemporary Han Buddhism in China.

This is a fascinating place for many reasons, but what I found most interesting were the everyday details—from the feel of architectural materials and their accompanying visual flourishes to the smell of incense and the sounds of visitors lobbing yuan coins into the central metal tower.

If you regularly read this blog, then you’re possibly aware of my ongoing multisensory ethnography of Eucharistic Adoration practices. Perhaps out of researcherly habit, I found myself zeroing in on Buddhist analogues while I was at Jing’an Temple, taking many photos of the seemingly small, often fleeting and sensory everyday details that help make a sacred space sacred.

What we often overlook, though, are the details that make everyday spaces what they are. We can extrapolate from these exemplary spaces, I think, and look at quotidian spaces in new ways.

Shanghai Selfies

Folks in cultural studies and related fields have been banging this drum for years: we are immersed in images. We have been, sure, but awareness of ambient photography has recently gone mainstream in a big way.

I’m actually glad that I’m not studying a phenomenon like selfies right now; I’m mildly surprised by the amount of work that's already been done.

I’m a reluctant photographic subject. In point of fact, I despise pictures of myself. But sometimes they’re necessary, sometimes being in a photo is polite and tactful, and sometimes they can simply mark a happening or event.

I spent two weeks in Shanghai last month, teaching a short professional communication course at Shanghai University. I’ll have more to say about this experience in subsequent posts; for now, I’ll just say this: I loved Shanghai, I loved my students, and I can’t wait to go back.

On a few occasions during my time in Shanghai I felt compelled to photographically document my experience, mainly for my family, by using this tried and true equation: human + location = experiential documentation.

I realize that these aren’t selfies, per se, but they’re as close as I’m likely to get. [1]

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1. Photo 1: a door at Jing’An Temple; Photo 2: a little tea garden and spicy peanuts (I was the only laowai there); Photo 3: Yuyuan Garden footpaths, sensibly designed to soothe and massage bare feet.  ↩

Eulogy

[ NB: Though this is my research blog, I sometimes write posts that are more personal in nature. This is one of those times. ]

In early 2008, my Dad died.

He was a tough, tough man; a smart man, and a man of few words that were often heavy with meaning.

I watched him die. Held him as he breathed his last breath. This was a hard thing. Seeing a man tough as nails reduced to bones by cancer.

My Dad and I weren't close, but we weren't distant.

I think about the last 10 days of his life a lot. I think about seeing him die. You can't forget something like that.

I don't want to.

My brother and I eulogized my Dad at his memorial service. I'm reproducing my part of the eulogy here because when I think of my Dad, I think of what ran through my head during the final days and hours of his life, and immediately afterward.

Small things.

Small things make a life, and small things comprise love and interpersonal relationships and family.

Small things matter.

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I’ve had time to think, these last few days of my father’s life, about my most meaningful memories of our relationship. The first thing that comes to mind is that I wish I had the opportunity to hear how he would approach the same question, his perspective on the most meaningful memories of our relationship as father and son. So, before I talk a little about what repeatedly occurred to me as we spent our final hours together, I think it’s worth speculating that we might find some important solace in approaching those we love, while we still have ample opportunity, and pose the same question of each other.

As I sat next to my dad the last few days, it was profoundly interesting to consider the memories that were most vivid. It seems that the most important events for me, as I thought about him while he prepared to face death, were not such important events in the grand scheme of things. At least not on the surface, anyway.

Right now, the most vivid and recurrent memory, where just my dad and I were spending time together, won’t seem like much of an event at all. When I was around ten or so, I had some kind of day trip, maybe with school or some other group, at Mt. Diablo, forty minutes or so from our home in Dublin, CA. I can’t even remember why I was there, or in what context. I don’t even remember who took me up the mountain that day, just that my dad picked me up in his red, two-tone Ford F-150 around dusk.

Darkness fell as we drove the winding road down the mountain, my dad and I not saying much to each other, but happy in each other’s company. More important than whatever I had done that day—climbing rocks, hiking, etc.—was my hunger for dinner, and my dad’s suggestion that we find a Foster’s Freeze instead of waiting until we got home. I won’t say that Foster’s was my favorite restaurant, but I loved the prospect of having a chocolate dipped soft-serve cone after dinner. As we neared the bottom of the mountain in the increasing darkness, my hunger and anticipation built as my dad took a few unfamiliar streets in search of a Foster’s Freeze.

I recall some frustration, some detours, but eventual, ultimate success: a booth with my dad, a hamburger and fries in an unfamiliar city after dark, and a cone of soft-serve vanilla ice-cream, dipped in crunchy chocolate.

We drove home together, full and happy, listening to whatever was on the radio, a Giants game perhaps, on KNBR 680.

Why should such a thing be so vivid a memory for me, at this stage, just before and after my dad’s death? It’s difficult to make clear meaning out of the complex and convoluted memories and nuances of consciousness that we all wade through in times of stress and struggle. Who can say, for example, what my dad was thinking about as he neared death…

For me, the trip to Foster’s Freeze stands out, I believe, because it’s such a pleasant and simple reflection of a time when it was just dad and me. It didn’t involve much money, or an extravagant trip, or a significant milestone, though those things are surely important. Instead, it was a simple moment in a complex and lifelong relationship, one of literally hundreds of thousands of similar moments that make up the incredible fabric of meaningful human relationships, relationships between parents and kids, husbands and wives, and lifelong friends.

My dad did lots of nice things for me, things that had much larger implications in the scheme of things; he bought me a car, for example, and drove a couch and other household items 600 miles in a U-haul to Oregon to help me settle in for college. But far more important to me: he did little things really well. Like teaching me to fish, helping me to break in my baseball glove, improving my vocabulary, and taking me for a burger and an ice-cream cone.

I know that my dad loved my brother and I, and I know that he was happy we were with him these last few days. More importantly, I know my dad loved Les. Sure, they took some fantastic trips together, and did some significant things as a couple in the last 20 years. But I will be perpetually thankful that my dad had Les to do those things, those hundreds of thousands of little, simple things for him and with him as my brother and I moved away and began to take our own kids out for ice-cream…

:: repurposed ::

:: repurposed ::

:: repurposed :: is a blog exploring rhetorics, places, and publics from a group of researchers at Ball State University. It goes live tomorrow, though a preview version with a few posts are currently available. There are still some design issues to sort out, and some final preparations related to content.

While many of the contributions to the site will be from students in my senior seminar, the driving idea and impetus is the production of a sustainable and meaningful space for the ongoing discussion of the complex relationships between language, placemaking, and publics. Over the next few weeks, we expect to consistently have between 15 and 20 posts each week, and we are soliciting occasional guest posts from a variety of disciplinary and professional domains. We see this as a post-disciplinary endeavor, one which is ultimately focused on better understanding how we make meaning in and through our public places.

To that end, the site will consider wayfinding activities, architecture, mapping, ubiquitous computing and context-aware environments, the social production of place and the social construction of place, alleys and interstices, landmarks, edges, paths, and nodes, public discourse, walking, bikes, skateboards, autos, and the many ways that human beings repurpose their environments--discursively, materially, affectively--in order to make meaning.

Please consider adding :: repurposed :: to your feed reader or bookmarks. If you're interested in contributing--once or occasionally--on any aspect of rhetorics, places, and/or publics, please don't hesitate to contact me.

The Sartorialist

If you've been reading this blog for any reasonable length of time, you're already no doubt aware that when it comes to certain things I can be slow on the uptake.

For example, only recently have I discovered The Sartorialist, certainly not a secret to the blogosphere. In fact, my discovery engine for such things being what it is, the find was purely serendipitous; apparently The Sartorialist is fond of shooting photos of stylish everyday cyclists, and my introduction to the blog was via Cyclelicious.

One day a couple of months ago I finally wandered over to the site, gave it a quick look, and added it to Reader. Since then, my jaw has dropped no less than 10 or 12 times. It's not as if I'm someone versed in the nuances of personal style or the vicissitudes of elegance and fashion. I'm clearly not. Nor am I even all that interested in the clothing and presentation which are integral to each post, yet I acknowledge their collective import.

What makes this blog stunning is it's (apparent) virtuoso simplicity:

On the Street....Left Bank, Paris

On the Street....Cheap & Chic, Milano

On the Street....Rue du Marche St. Honore, Paris

On the Street....One More Time, Milano

On the Street....Milan Now, Milan

Instead of fashion photography, I see expertly composed images of interesting people in interesting places. I see broader publics, architecture, city life. And I see post after post of perfect light. In my limited experience as a photographer, nothing could be more important. In nearly every post, the most important details are surfaced. As I noted above, it's only an apparent simplicity.

This is an amazing blog, one that I wish I had been following long ago.

Upland

Photos taken in and on the road to Upland, Indiana, where friends treated us to the beauty of Ivanhoe milkshakes. It's good to be in the Hoosier state.

Fall Syllabi

It's that time of year once again, when the heat of summer dissipates into crisp fall evenings and the trees gain shape by losing shape, molting brilliantly colored leaves which fall into the paths of so many university students on so many campuses around the world. Marching bands will march, coffee will be consumed, and my students will scratch their heads for a few weeks...

In the time-honored tradition of my field, I make available to any and all the syllabi and course calendars from which my students will teach me and teach one another. There is some overlap, yes, but the two courses, despite the apparent similarity of the deliverables, will end up in very different places in just a few weeks. Comments and suggestions are warmly appreciated.

Go Timbers!

Tonight, the Seattle Sounders of MLS will travel down I-5 to PDX for a U.S. Open Cup showdown with the Portland Timbers of USL. No idea what I'm talking about? That's okay. A primer can be found here.

Go Timbers!

Bicycle Wayfinding in the Early 21st Century

I've long been fascinated with with the interstitial spaces of cities. Back streets, alleys, shortcuts, and other little-used or liminal spaces are profoundly interesting to me. One of the reasons has to do with the arrangement of such spaces themselves. Another reason is the potential they offer for alternate wayfinding, spaces separate from the traditional grid that nonetheless allow movement through a city in ways that are often far more effective and interesting than sanctioned norms of travel.

I can pinpoint my own fascination with such spaces: I grew up in a suburban home in a suburban environment where alleys and other interstitial spaces were systematically engineered out of the landscape through rigid norms of wayfinding predicated upon the ubiquity of the automobile.

So my fascination begins in lack.

Yet while my suburban childhood was scrubbed clean of the concrete canyons, alleys, and spatial loopholes of the big city less than 30 miles away, my family's home abutted "the creek" and an industrial park across the water, and both provided some of the liminal mystery missing from suburbia.

"The creek" was in reality a series of arroyos and wastewater drainage culverts connected throughout our subdivision at right angles that paralleled our suburban streets. By age 10 or 11, my friends and I had determined who lived on "the creek" and how we might travel to each other's homes (and other places throughout the city) without ever setting foot on pavement. The flattened rock roads that bordered either side of "the creek" became our preferred mode of wayfinding--by foot or by bike--and "the creek" became our haven, a liminal and semi-private thoroughfare ignored and concsiously unseen by the good citizens of suburban car culture.

Bicycle Wayfinding

A couple weeks ago TechCrunch featured a service called Ride the City, an organization whose mission is to help cyclists navigate New York City efficiently and safely. For navigation from point A to point B, the service allows you to choose the "Direct route," the "Safer route," or the "Safe route." This is an interesting appropriation of the The OpenStreetMap, and one that is increasingly viable given the ubiquity of GPS-enabled mobile phones. Moreover, any application which serves to increase the safety of bicyclists in major urban areas is both welcome and necessary.

Today, Wyrdy published a compelling piece called The New iPhone is a Pointing Device for the Real World: The Ground Will Speak. Among the more interesting points is the discussion of augmented reality and the ability to tag and interact with real-world spaces. Both Ride The City and the News-Wyrdy piece have me thinking about the ability to increase interaction with the city, to foreground the previously unseen, and to navigate urban environments via bicycle in ways that are subversive--ways which allow non-car citizens to reclaim and repurpose the city in part by networking automotive non-places.

Yet even as I am encouraged and energized by technology-enhanced bicycle wayfinding, I have reservations that stem from rhetorics of space and map-making. I am thinking in particular about Diehl et al's fantastic article "Grassroots: Supporting the Knowledge Work of Everyday Life" and the importance of understanding and uncovering the rhetorical infrastructures of mapping and wayfinding in and through their technological manifestations.

In short, I see the tremendous potential of GPS-enabled services for increasing the ability and effectiveness of bicycle wayfinding, but I also see tremendous potential for the limiting effects of a normalized consensus about what constitutes "appropriate" or "safe" bicycle movement throughout the city. Much of cycling, in my opinion and experience, is about circumventing or subverting the norms of automobile-focused city planning. Tools such as Ride The City should allow and embrace user-generated contributions of liminal and interstitial wayfinding.

In our age, most motion is done with the assistance of technology. The farther we go the faster we go, the less our bodies have to move at all.

As technology, legs themselves are almost obsolete. As technology, they have buried themselves in cars, elevators, and the telescopic hallways at the gates of airports. They are the evolutionary experiments of our species. Though we keep the hardware, we have lost the application. The intensity of our desire for motion has made our bodies merely units of transport, personal storage containers, carry-ons. ~Travis Hugh Culley, The Immortal Class

Culley's 2001 paean to the culture of the Chicago bike messenger, though at times overwrought and over-romantic, remains one of my favorite books. Culley argues that "the problems of cycling in the American City are as real as the problems of driving in the American City. They are in fact the same problem, and the courier should be credited for overcoming the problems of transportation with such admirably simple tools."

Much of Culley's book is about the philosophy that attends urban wayfinding via means anithetical to modern urban planning. He contends that

The bicycle is a revolution, an assault on civilian territory, intent upon taking, from the ground up, responsibility for the shape of our cities. It is a mutiny, challenging the ever-one-way street. The bicycle is a philosophy, a way of life, and I am using it like a hammer to change the world [....] ~Travis Hugh Culley, The Immortal Class

Culley's most lucid and effective arguments center on the experience of navigating an urban landscape built specifically to exclude bicycles. Such navigation considers the liminal, the interstitial, and those spaces consciously unseen by the automobile. More importantly, since most American cities were not built with cyclists in mind, subversive bicycle wayfinding can reveal things about the city--things which are generally ignored by mapping technologies--which can enrich our understanding of urban space.

When a motorist sees a biker run a red light, cutting through four lanes of traffic going twenty to thirty miles an hour, the driver is generally going to think that the messenger is totally insane, has no regard for anyone, and doesn't even care enough about life to look before rolling out into a stampede of steel.

[...] motorists will likely never understand this because they will never address the innate advantages a bike has over a car.

The kind of perception that drivers have behind a windshield, a set of small mirrors, a thousand-pound engine, and dashboard seriously limits their view of a cyclist's experience. The speedometer, the doors, the little sticker that says that the steering wheel is equipped with an explosive airbag, the seat belt, all of these aspects to driving a car condition the driver's mobility and perception.

Cyclists work with a much more open sense of immediate space than drivers do. They have at least 330 degrees of unobstructed vision [...] and about 720 degrees of hearing. [...] I see wholes, even at the highest speeds I can reach.

[...] Most drivers don't have this kind of metaphysical connection to their cars. The car for most people is an anesthetic, a wall between themselves and the world. ~Travis Hugh Culley The Immortal Class

Ultimately, and most importantly, Culley's experience as a bike messenger gave him a perspective on city planning that I invoke here as crucial to the present and future (grassroots) engineering of our cities beyond the dominance of the automobile.

How can a government of car-numbed, suburban politicians intelligently manage a street or organize a city when they are unable to see beyond their dashboards and their own symbolic aggression? Can a governing body that is so remarkably ignorant of the dynamics of a cyclist's behavior represent a cyclist's needs? And furthermore, should a governing body that only knows how to drive through a city be chosen to manage it? ~Travis Hugh Culley The Immortal Class

These questions bring us back to the technological tools increasingly available to those who experience the city on an alternate or cross-hatched grid, who navigate the interstices unseen by the comparatively massive population of steel-ensconced citizenry.

Lines and signs marked the street lanes explicitly for automobiles. The pedestrians were sanctioned to cross inside carefully drawn white lines. I was somewhere in between, unsure of which directions to follow. ~Travis Hugh Culley, The Immortal Class

Our tools need to be used in the interests of alternate wayfinding, of uncovering and communicating--on a larger scale--the liminal spaces conducive to navigating the city via bicycle, while simulatenously claiming a greater and safer propotion of the currently cross-hatched spaces of shared navigation.

In other words, we need strategic rhetorics of mapping, wayfinding, and user-generated local communication that makes bicycles more visible and viable in our urban environments. Leveraging some of the new tools available to us--in the spirit of the Grassroots article noted above--may help us do so.

Randoms