Last weekend, my dog and I helped with our neighborhood cleanup. We made the April 17th, 2008 issue of the New Haven Independent newspaper:
Continue reading Dog: Momo in the New Haven Independent newspaper.
Recently in Meta - Info about this blog Category
Just a small note that I upgraded this blog to MovableType 4.1. I think the process was rather smooth , but just to be sure -- try commenting on this entry to see if the comment mechanism works. If it doesn't, please e-mail me!
1:45pm Hmmm.... something is wrong with the commenting system. The previous anti-spam mechanism is incompatible w/ MT4.1.
1:52pm Now set up anonymous posting w/ reCaptchas.
1:58pm Accidentally nuked the old version 2.x stylesheets that I had been dragging around forever. Had to use a default 4.1 style to get everything working again. Boring!
I'm very pleased to be able to announce that my book Deaf in Japan (Cornell University Press) was awarded the 2008 John Whitney Hall Prize at the Association for Asian Studies 2008 Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.
Below is a photo of me with my wonderful editor, Roger Haydon, of Cornell University Press at the conference.
Continue reading Deaf in Japan awarded the 2008 John Whitney Hall Prize.
Sigh, I can't help myself:
Momosuke in Virginia with his snazzy new sports jacket.
Continue reading Meta: Obligatory Momosuke photos.
We just welcomed the newest member of our house: Momosuke Nakamura.
He's just 2 months old and weighs 2.0 kg (4.4 lbs)!
Well, they finally came out .... reviews of my book Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Japan (Cornell University Press 2006). One in the Journal of Japanese Studies and the other in Social Science Japan Journal:
- Steven Fedorowicz writes in SSJJ (http://ssjj.oxfordjournals.org):
On the back cover of the book, Cornell University Press classifies Nakamura’s work as Asian Studies and Anthropology (rather than Deaf Studies or Sign Language Studies), and this is quite appropriate. While keeping her focus on deaf people, Nakamura also places them within the wider contexts of Japanese history, politics and society through comparisons and connections with other Japanese minorities and social movements.
- Carolyn Stevens writes in JJS (http://muse.jhu.edu):
Nakamura’s methodology combines the field techniques of anthropology, archival research, and the political analysis of social movements to gather information on deaf movements in Japan in the postwar era, with the goal of understanding what it means to subscribe to “deaf identity” in Japan. She frequently includes cross-cultural perspectives from international deaf movements and language systems to contextualize the Japanese case, as well as poses thoughtful and provocative questions about personal and communal identities by comparing the Japanese deaf community to other minority groups in Japan.
Both reviewers had very insightful comments about my work ... and they didn't thrash it which is a big relief. Phew! There's another review coming up in Sign Language Studies by a noted Japanese Deaf scholar which I'm looking forward to.
Well, I'm finishing up my week in Honshu and it's back to Hokkaido on Monday morning.
Continue reading Meta: "Deaf in Japan" reviews.
I recently gave a talk at a symposium during the 4th annual meeting of the Japan Disability Studies association. It was held on September 17-18th at Kyoto's Ritsumeikan University.
There's a short article in the Kyoto News: http://www.kyoto-np.co.jp/article.php?mid=P2007091700113&genre=G1&area=K1C
I recently took a trip to Awaji Island to visit the earthquake museum there (see other blog post) among other things. It's a 200 km round trip by car from Itami City in Hyogo Prefecture (where I'm staying this week) and I decided to rent a Toyoto Prius.
The rental cost ¥10,500 for the day; the tolls were ¥7800; and (drumroll) the gasoline only cost ¥1350 for 10 liters. That works out to 20 km / liter or about 47 mpg! According to the car's computer, the average mileage was 23 km/liter or 53 mpg. I think the discrepancy is because the tank may have been a little less than full when I picked it up (and reset the odometer/drive computer). **
** The exchange rate is ¥113 to US$1 and plummeting.
In any case, let's take the average to be: 50 mpg.
This was for mixed city / highway / island / mountain driving with four passengers. Wow.
Everything I had heard about the Prius: poor acceleration, poor visibility, little luggace space, jerky braking, mileage not as high as advertised, etc. proved not to be true. The acceleration was great, visibility is fantastic (especially with the back view LCD monitor/camera), there was more space in the back than I thought, and I couldn't tell when the car was using ICE, electric motors, or regenerative braking -- it was that smooth.
I'm totally in love.
Sign me up for one when I get back.
Continue reading Meta: Sold on a Prius (50 mpg!).
I'm happy to report that my film Bethel successfully screened at the Disabled People's International World Assembly in Seoul, South Korea on Friday afternoon. The screening went very well and we had an extended Q&A period afterwards with myself and one of the Bethel members who had come for the opening.
Apparently the entire Photoethnography.com website (along with the blog) crashed this weekend due to complications from a server upgrade. Apparently while the old server had no problem parsing an .HTACCESS file with Mac style linebreaks, the new web server choked on it and blocked all access to files.
I guess it was our fault for having a malformed .HTACCESS file...
Sorry for the inconvenience everyone!
For the folks who haven't figured it out, I'm right in the middle of fieldwork in Japan. I don't have internet at home and occasionally check it during the week, so I most probably won't be able to update this blog much for the next couple of months!
I'm leaving soon for some more fieldwork in Japan and won't be able to maintain this blog on a daily basis as before. One of the time-consuming tasks that I do each day is checking through the comments and getting rid of the dozens of spam comments that are posted.
I'm implementing on an experimental basis a CAPTCHA type spam filter for comment posts. Before you post a comment, you'll now be required to type the word 'camera' in the anti-spam comment field. Most spam robots won't know how to do this, and their junk spam will get filtered out automatically.
Please give it a spin -- please add a comment to this entry saying whether you like it or not! If I don't get any comments, I'll know it's either broken or stinks!
I've uploaded a two minute trailer for Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan onto a new website I've dedicated for Bethel publicity: http://www.disability.jp/bethel
Please enjoy!
Continue reading Film: Bethel film trailer uploaded.
A reporter from Kyodo News has been interviewing me the past several months about Bethel, looks like a translation of the original story made the English section of the Kyodo website:
http://home.kyodo.co.jp/modules/fstStory/index.php?storyid=307467
I hate how they have to post my age!
Karen
Continue reading Meta: Bethel in the news.
Hi Karen,
My name is Loren and I'm a media grad student and documentary filmmaker in Buffalo, NY who stumbled across your blog some time ago and have been following it for a while now. I have some technical questions about the film you just finished since I know you're working in the HDV format and am currently working on a full length doc in HDV as well.
What I'm wondering, assuming your shooting ratio for the project was relatively high, is what kind of workflow you used to deal with all the material? Could you maybe do a post describing it for your blog?
Anything from whether you used native HDV or an intermediate codec for editing, software / hardware issues you ran into that were frustrating, and hd delivery format for festivals (if you're using one) to whether you captured / logged your tapes at night during the time you were shooting or left the capturing / logging process entirely until after you had completed filming.
Your blog gives a lot of insight into the tools that you use and I'd love to hear more details about both your experience shooting ethnographic documentary in HDV and your overall production process.
-Loren
My Workflow
In the field, I usually operate as a one-person crew. If I'm lucky, my partner can help me with a second camera and do interviews, but usually I am by myself. Sound is important to me, so I try to use wireless lav mics or use dual-system sound with a digital audio recorder. I shoot everything to HDV and label each cassette with the date, sequence number, and topic, and camera name. For example: 20051221b-BETHEL – Canon is the second tape I shot on December 21st, 2005 at the Bethel Community using my Canon XL-H1.
I write daily fieldnotes and I note the tape numbers in my fieldnotes where possible. Otherwise, I just correlate them later by date and time. I don't otherwise have time to log and review tapes in the field. I also carry a very minimal fieldkit which doesn't include a preview monitor (except the one built-into the camera). This has led to some problems -- noticeably that I have fluorescent flickering in some sequences of Bethel because Hokkaido uses a different power frequency than western Japan. This was not noticed until I went into post.
After the first fieldwork period, I went through the tapes that I knew had core material and I made a rough cut with them in SD mode (standard def using the built-in downconverter on the XL-H1). I sequenced a few shots together in iMovie to get a sense of what the film could be about. This gave me a sense of what I was missing (hospital life, community activities, etc.). When I went back to the field again, I shot those additional sequences.
Back home, I organized and logged all of the tapes. I had about 40 hours of tape for the two shoots in Hokkaido. Since the film is about 60 minutes long, that's a 40:1 shooting ratio. Pretty high, but I'm not very skilled. I captured and logged everything into Final Cut Pro. With each hour of HDV about 8 gigabytes, the 40 hours fit fairly well onto a 500 gibabyte hard drive that I dedicated to this project. Since i was using Final Cut Pro HDV, I stayed with the HDV codec rather than converting to a HD or intermediate codec that would take up much more space on the hard drive. The trade-off was some additional processing time, but the Quad-Core Mac Pro made that less important than it could've been.
Logging all the tape was a major pain and a major project. My partner Hisako helped here too. :-)
From there, we went through the tape logs and highlighted what we thought were key sequences. I storyboarded some of them on the corkboard in my office. And then I made some rough sequences and patched them together.
Right now, I'm outputting and distributing the various rough cuts to standard-def DVDs. I am editing in HDV and only downconverting at the final moment in Compressor. The resolution of the standard def DVDs that I'm burning isn't quite as high as I'd like -- I understand that there is some magic involved in getting Compressor to downconvert HDV into SD properly. In any case, I'm excited that the latest version of Compressor handles burning HD formats to DVD-Rs for playback on HD-DVD drives, so as soon as the prices drop on those, I'll implement that into my output formats.
