The academic year has come to an end, and an exciting summer of research is just around the corner!

Last month we went to Mangaiti Station, the North Island’s only merino stud breeder. It was the end of lambing season and, as you can see below, the weather was still a bit cold and some of the new lambs had been given felted jumpers for added warmth. As the Kiwis say, “Cute as!”

Luckily, we were just in time to help with tagging the stud lambs, which basically involves three simple steps:

1) identify which lambs belong to which RFID-tagged ewes;

2) use a handheld RFID reader to identify the ewes;

and 3) put a temporary visual ID tag in the lamb’s ear, using an applicator not unlike the one that pierced my ears.

Later, each sheep will be given an EID tag as well as a more permanent, and non-reactive, brass ID tag.

Sometimes the electronic ID tags are lost and, occasionally, the tags cause infection and need to be removed. When we were there, the old-fashioned metal shears above were used to cut the pin holding the tag in one ewe’s ear, leaving a circular, tag-shaped hole where the infected flesh had rotted away. The ewe gave no indication she was in pain, but I couldn’t help but wonder if this scenario could be easily avoided with the use of different materials or through better tag design.

One thing that’s been made abundantly clear to us–and especially so during lambing season–is that merino breeders and growers are heavily invested in doing whatever they reasonably can to ensure that their animals don’t only survive, but actually thrive.

I’m currently writing up some of my observations for a paper I’ll be giving at the CSAA conference next month in Sydney, and I’ve found the concept of tinkering (via Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms) to be particularly useful in thinking about what it means to be bound to livestock in unsentimental ways and still genuinely care for them.

Now, what else is happening?

Well, next week Catherine and I are heading down to the South Island to visit Glenaan Station, Mt Hay Station and Beckford Farm, which is home to some gorgeous coloured merino, and we hope to visit a few more stations in Otago before the end of the month as well.

And as if that’s not enough, we’ve got five incredibly cool design projects happening this summer so be sure to stay tuned for updates on what we’re doing and making!

Update 16 November

I broke my ankle last week and am not going anywhere until the new year. (Boo! Hiss!) On the upside, we’ll still be doing some awesome design work over the summer, so please stay tuned for updates from me and some awesome research assistants!

This winter has been very busy for the Counting Sheep project — here are a few highlights of what I’ve been up to and what’s yet to come before the end of the year.

I was interviewed by Chris Speed for the first issue of new journal Ubiquity; I submitted a paper (co-authored with PhD student extraordinaire Catherine Caudwell) for a special issue of Digital Creativity on design fiction; and I submitted a paper for a special issue of the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media on emerging methods. We’re now at the mercy of our reviewers but hope to see all of these out soon. In less academic arenas, the amazing Sumit Paul-Choudhury and I wrote an article for Arc magazine on new and exciting connections between animals and technology.

With spring around the corner, we’re also headed back into the field to make some station visits – including to hundred-year old Mt Hay and Glenaan – interview some of the high country’s merino breeders and growers, and spend time with the sheep and dogs. (Yay!) We’re also looking forward to chatting with folks who are growing coloured merino and visiting Mangaiti, the only North Island merino stud.

I’ve also started working on the ethnographic write-up. I’d like to take the creative non-fiction course at the International Institute for Modern Letters next year, but in the meantime I’ll keep practicing and start looking at publishing options.

And last, but not least, our design work is also proceeding nicely. Stay tuned for Cybernetic Meadows: An Alternative History of NZ Merino Breeding and we’ll be announcing a summer scholarship opportunity next month.

It’s been a long time since our last progress report, so I thought I should take a look at what we’ve been up to.

To start, I’m really pleased to report that Samantha Carew, our amazing VUW Summer Scholar, has completed her video work–The Story of NZ Merino Wool–and was awarded a $500 prize for the Most Entertaining Poster in the scheme’s university-wide poster competition last week. Yay Sam!

Originally envisioned as a means to visually communicate some of our background research for use in public education programmes, I began to question if the videos could be used for further research rather than just as research outputs. You see, as soon as they were done I saw a problem: as creative works they may comprise original animation but they also represent a standard historical approach from a largely uncritical industry-based perspective, and the didactic approach we took does little to contribute anything new to discussions of NZ merino wool. What the videos do elicit, I think, are interesting and important questions about how culture is communicated or how stories are told. Although it seemed obvious to me that we had only told a story–not the story–of NZ merino wool, there was nothing about the videos themselves or our plans to have them used for public education that made that clear. And that made me think our work had not just reached, but actually created, a bit of a research dead-end.

This conclusion really depressed me until I presented our work at the Faculty Research Colloquium and remembered that by releasing them under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license I had always hoped that people would make or do something interesting with our videos–and so maybe I should think a bit harder about that. Then it came to me: I want to organise The Story of NZ Merino Wool Video Challenge! Inspired by Mix &Mash: The Great NZ Remix and Mashup Competition, I want to give people BY-NC-SA access to the two videos (including video files, audio files and written transcripts) we made and hold a contest to see how our story can be critically and creatively retold by other people, from different perspectives and in different styles. Of course, it’s going to take me some time to get this properly organised but I’m excited about the potential here.

Otherwise, I’ve been focussed on setting up fieldwork and writing up some research for journal publication. I just got word that my abstract for Fibreculture’s special issue on networked utopias and speculative futures has been accepted, so more on that later. Right now I’m trying to wrap up two papers still in the pipeline: one on merino wool advertising and one on RFID-based livestock traceability.

The first looks specifically at how “ethical” wool is being defined and promoted locally and internationally by The New Zealand Merino Company‘s Zque brand and by Icebreaker. This has involved reading a lot of advertising copy and watching a lot of promotional videos, trying to make sense of it all through a bit of content and discourse analysis, and situating my analysis within broader discussions of ethics, affect and consumer culture. This paper has actually been a lot of fun to work on and I think it’s coming together nicely, if a bit slower than I would like.

The second uses actor-network theory to look at NZ’s new National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) Programme as a technosocial assemblage. The scheme–”designed to [electronically] link people, property and animals“–will become mandatory for cattle in November and for deer next year, but there are currently no concrete plans for including NZ’s sheep. (Part of the Counting Sheep Project is to imagine what that might mean.) And this brings me to the NZ National Agricultural Fieldays event in June, which is billed as “the ultimate launch platform for cutting edge agricultural technology and innovation.” I’m really looking forward to going for the sheep and wool-related booths (and okay, I’ll admit it, the cool tools and awesome food) but NAIT will have an exhibit there that will offer a unique opportunity to observe government-industry-farmer interactions related to this research. It puts off submission of the second paper longer than I would like, but I think it will be worth it.

And last, but definitely not least, I’ll be heading to Sydney for a few days at the end of the month to catch up with some colleagues and spend some quality time at the Powerhouse Museum. Not only does their collection include a lot of brilliant material related to the history of merino sheep in this part of the world, but I’ll be checking out the possibility of a small (for now super-secret and completely unrelated to sheep) research project for next year. Wish me luck!

When research is officially only 40-50% of my academic workload, I’m learning that it’s easy to start feeling like nothing’s getting done. I’m hoping that these progress reports not only communicate to others what we’ve been doing, but also help me keep things in perspective.

First of all, our super awesome summer scholarship student Samantha has been hard at work bringing The Story of NZ Merino video series to life. The first video tells the story of how NZ merino wool made the shift from commodity to brand, the second video tells the story of the NZ “ethical wool” brand, and the third video poses questions about how ethical producers and consumers are socially constructed. I’ve been responsible for the story and writing, and Sam has been responsible for visual design and video production. This year, VUW’s Summer Scholar Scheme has organised a poster competition as a way to help students understand that “communicating research and scholarly findings to a general audience is an essential part of academic and professional life” and earn some extra prize money. Given that our project has focussed on how media design can directly inform such activities, I’m fully supporting Samantha’s participation and the final videos will be made publically available in March under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. In the meantime, I’ll be looking for ways to distribute the videos for educational use. It’s our hope that the videos are well suited to secondary and early tertiary curriculum, as well as for museum public education programmes. We’ll be working to ensure that the videos are also fully accessible to the vision and hearing-impaired, and look forward to seeing what kinds of learning activities our work can support. If you, or anyone you know, might be interested in working with us on this, please email me.

In other news, I attended KiwiFoo last weekend and had the opportunity to facilitate a thoughtful discussion on rural computing (a.k.a. RFID+Sheep). There was a fair amount of interest in how pervasive computing could be used to support farming activities like herd/flock and pasture management, as well as the potential to establish NZ’s capacity to deliver these technologies to market. Given my own focus on social research and cultural content creation, the hard business talk was more than a little out of my league–but it was fascinating to see how people with different interests could still support and benefit from each other’s work. I met some really good people with whom I hope to work in the future, and I’m looking forward to visiting John and Karen‘s Lifeboat Farm in the Wairarapa to experience some farm tech and sunshine. (As an aside, after eating their happy lamb I now understand why people like it so much; it’s a fine fine meat.)

Continuing on the event front, a few days ago I attended Scott McCloud‘s Writing with Pictures workshop at Webstock. (To be honest, I wanted to attend David McCandless‘ workshop on How to Make Information Beautiful, but I couldn’t afford it.) And since I’m such a huge comics fan, and have used Scott’s books in class for years, I was really looking forward to it. Plus, I have a lot of visual communication to do in the next couple of years and was eager to learn. Now I’m quite glad I went–Scott’s a friendly guy who is happy to answer questions–but he didn’t cover a lot that I didn’t know from his books and I was disappointed that we didn’t tackle the art of storytelling, with the exception of a lovely exercise in which a couple of people read a comic out loud and Scott deconstructed bits of the story. I also learned a bunch of fascinating things about facial expressions, like anger+joy=cruelty and that resentment=anger+weakness (looking away) while defiance=anger+strength (looking straight ahead). And in terms of practice, I learned that even though I cannot actually draw–everyone thought my giraffe was a brontosaurus–I can make funny scribbles on paper. Unfortunately, my “abstract” style does not lend itself to the communication of complex information, and it looks like I’m going to have to find a different way to up my game in these areas.

I’ve also been making slow but steady progress on my research and writing. I’ve got a draft version of a paper on the social construction of ethical wool, as well as one on international livestock traceability programmes and the politics of RFID. I also submitted an abstract on how to imagine rural computing to the Fibreculture Journal special issue on networked utopias and speculative futures, so hopefully more on that later.

And last, but not least, it looks like our C&T2011 workshop on ethnographic fiction and speculative design has received a fair amount of initial interest and we’re hoping that will translate into some interesting submissions. There’s still plenty of time to get in an extended abstract and we’ll send out reminders two weeks before the deadline. I’m also excited to see that the workshops have been scheduled over two days, so I hope to participate in the Food(ing): Between Human-Computer and Human-Food-Experience workshop or sneak a rural computing paper into the locative media, memory and presence in the city workshop.