New media theorists and digital humanists, most prominently Alexander Galloway, have been writing over the last decade about “algorithmic culture”, about practices, interpretations and readings that arise within and around algorithmic media. Galloway often tries to chart a path out of the typical binaries of bad or good interfaces and implementations, away from the debate over whether algorithms and AI are a boot stamping on the human face forever. With less theoretical savvy and detail, I’m going to try to do the same in this analysis of 500px and Flickr. In particular, I’m going to try and work within the approach described very well in Chapter Four of N. Katherine Hayles’ new book How We Think, in which she charts “a complex syncopation between conscious and unconscious perceptions for humans and the integration of surface displays and algorithmic procedures for machines”. (Hayles, How We Think, p. 13) Along the way, I’m going to compare these sites expressly to massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, to show how similar the design imaginaries and their attendant contradictions and crises are across a broad range of algorithmic media.

How It Works

500px is the most interesting of the two sites in this sense, in part because of attention to interface and audience I described in my first post in this series. Flickr’s rating system is fairly rudimentary and linear: users can favorite a picture, they can comment on a picture, and the total views of pictures are tracked. An algorithm that relates favors, comments and views ranks photos as more or less “interesting”, and in turn, “interestingness” is used to identify which pictures should be highlighted in the area of the site called Explore.

500px uses somewhat similar mechanics to move images between filters called “Fresh”, “Upcoming” and “Popular”, and to move them within those designations. They have added two ways to rank: a “like” button, also known as a “vote”, and a “favorite” button, which filters the image into a user’s personal archive. In addition, as at Flickr, you can choose to follow another user, but at 500px, the activity of the users you follow fills the filter called “Flow”–you see not only what they post but also what they have voted and favored. 500px users can also comment on an image.

At 500px, votes and favors influence a measure called Pulse, which is visible on thumbnails from a mouseover. Pulse is a highly engineered algorithim: it leaps quickly above 50 from one combination of a favor plus a vote (you learn quickly that this is what it means to have a 59.7 Pulse) and then accumulates more and more slowly as it approaches 90 (out of 100), making a move past 99.4 exceedingly difficult. A photo moves from Fresh to Upcoming to Popular as it climbs in Pulse. Once it reaches its peak rating, it begins to slowly decline in Pulse at a steady temporal pace until it hits 50, reverting again to Fresh in time. (If an image is ever selected as an Editors’ Choice, it retains that filter for the rest of its time on the site.) An image can continue to garner favors and votes after its Pulse starts ebbing, but this will at best slow its recursion to the average.

However, photographers also have a measure that cumulates in a linear manner, called Affection. This does not decline over time: it simply gets bigger and bigger as the user’s images gain favor and votes. (It does not move from gaining or losing followers.) It only goes down if an image is disliked or if the user deletes an image that had likes and favors on it. A high Affection entitles you to dislike images: most users do not have access to the option.

Even if the site designers were secretive about the intent behind this design (they’re not) it would be fairly easy to see the intent. If photographs accumulated Pulse in a linear fashion, the Popular filter would be a largely static register of the most popular images ever uploaded to the site. (You can get a version of this, in some ways, by looking at which images are bestsellers in the Market tab.) This would be visually dull, and more importantly, discourage any new entrants to the site hoping to get attention for their own images (or even discourage established users with high Affection from hoping that newer images of their own might ever make it to the top of Popular). Pulse imposes the rule of time on what would otherwise be a photographic oligarchy. Virtually every competitive mechanism in massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft have been subjected to similar mechanics of decay and reversion, for the same reason: advantages which accumulate in a linear fashion and which are never disrupted or restarted quickly kill competition, deter new participation, and make the game dull for everyone, even the winners.

The Playing Out of Algorithmic Design

The recognition of a mimesis to the recurrent crisis of capitalist accumulation has long been noted by critics and designers. What I’m concerned more with here is how the algorithmic regulation of competition plays out in lived practice. Several issues leap out right away. First, that there is a tension between Pulse and Affection that can’t be resolved by the algorithm or the design. Users (or in games, players) have to decide what matters most: the signs of long-term accumulation of reputation capital (some coded into the design, others outside of the frame of the site or software) or the more variable algorithmic signs of prowess and success. You could easily create a sort of super-stat that measured Affection against participant-time and number-of-photos to distinguish the photographer who has very high Affection density per image from the one who has high Affection simply from the sheer volume of images and length of time participating.

Pulse moves palpably to the will of the viewer: jumping it is a minigame in its own right, a nibble of cheese for the mouse that presses the levers. Affection moves glacially, as much a measure of how long a user has been contributing to 500px as it is of the variable acclaim of his or her peers. Affection sorts the site into a kind of social hierarchy, whereas a high Pulse for an individual image is notionally democratic, waiting for the one picture that sparks the hivemind.

The culture of practice doesn’t play out so neatly. Upon uploading a picture, it appears in Fresh. The volume of global uploads is such that any given image has around 5-15 seconds at almost any time of the day to stay on the first page of Fresh, and perhaps no more than 2-3 minutes in the first three or four pages. After that point, the only way for a user to discover that picture is either by looking at the photographer’s overall output or by seeing it in their Flow, where postings from followed users will appear. If a user is following a lot of photographers, then a new image will also move out of view quickly. In a user’s own profile, the default display is also temporal, meaning the first images that a new users posts will almost certainly not be seen by anyone unless they are extraordinarily spectacular or the user latter establishes sufficient reputation capital that other participants dig down into the archive and find images.

Moreover, the designers had to make a crucial adjustment from the outset: images that are tagged as having adult content have an algorithmically suppressed Pulse. The central justification for this move is that they are in aggregate the most likely images to be favored and voted and would dominate Popular if they were not adjusted, which would then change the entire presentation and purpose of the site and very likely drive away other photographers of all kinds. Which of course then creates an alternative motive for users to not tag their nudes or erotica as adult, which requires other users to notify the community managers, which creates a need for a penalty to users who fail to tag appropriately, which creates a possibility of malicious false notification or for that matter debates about whether an image is “really” a nude or erotica.

The conceptual point of both Pulse and Affection is otherwise strikingly different for different cultures of use within the site. A successful commercial photographer with an established business, like wedding photography, who is using 500px is likely seeing it first as a hosting service for a portfolio and a form of advertisement. Both Pulse and Affection are additional rewards for such a user, much as Yelp or Zagat reviews can help a restaurant, but they’re not necessary. A commercial photographer who is seeking work, say as a nature photographer or photojournalist, might cite Affection and Pulse as a part of a resume. And both measures also make it more likely that a photograph might be purchased in the site’s internal marketplace, which is good for both the photographer and the designers.

An amateur like myself with no real commercial aspirations sees Pulse in particular very differently. Pulse is like the digital camera itself: a rapid iterative feedback loop that teaches, a crowdsourced mode of instruction. But just as Ian Bogost has pointed out that games teach mostly about their own procedural content, so too does Pulse teach me as much about the algorithmic culture of 500px as it does about photography.

Here’s my highest Pulse image so far:

I don’t think it is in any sense my best photograph, but I understood why it attracted attention. The flower is a prominent subject even in a thumbnail, the bokeh in the background is attractively composed in relation to the foreground subject, and the pollen is crisply in focus and colorful.

Here’s my next highest:

Here I made a conscious decision to process the photograph for more attention. I like the composition and my focal point, but with ordinary pumpkin colors it seemed banal to me. So I desaturated the image some to create a different mood. Users at 500px seemed to respond very well to that choice.

Other experiments have taught me similar lessons. I took what I think is a fairly dull photo of a woodland path and dialed up the saturation of the green hues while processing it to dull the look of the path itself. I think it looks fairly lurid but it grabbed some attention when posted. Other photos that I like, on the other hand, languish deeper in my profile: posted too early in my participation, not grabby enough in a thumbnail, or so common in their composition and subject at the site that their technical merits hardly matter.

But working the algorithms of the site is also a game that has nothing to do with photography, and all users, whatever their reasons for uploading content, clearly play that game, perhaps in particular the most casual users who use the site for archiving personal photographs. Time of day, the random chance of how many photos are pouring into Fresh when there’s an upload (someone dumping thirty banal vacation shots of their buddies at a beachside bar can bury a sublime photo of a landscape by one of the site’s most prominent participants), juxtaposition of images, all of them matter and structure the dance of clicks and views and algorithmic workings.

More importantly, the social mechanisms that the site enables almost regretfully play a key role, as they do at Flickr. A vote for a picture carries no intrinsic social weight–and for that matter neither does a dislike, which is a persistent issue at the site. I can like a photo (or if I were sufficiently Affectionated, dislike one) without being unveiled to the owner of the image. If I favor the photo or follow the photographer, my user name is attached to the action. But users often want a photographer to know more immediately if they’ve voted or favorited an image. Hence a common comment is “V + F!!!” or something of the sort.

What this enables, not by algorithmic design, is an economy of reciprocity. And again, this is a common structure in algorithmic culture, wherever it is used to construct a competitive relation between objects and actions. In World of Warcraft or other MMOs that have measures like reputation or experience that can be gained by defeating other players, the mechanics immediately lend themselves to reciprocal conspiracy, in which players coordinate an industrialized, efficient exchange of consensual victory and defeat to raise each other’s scores far more rapidly than people who are playing “for real”, requiring in turn a mechanism that provides for diminishing returns for defeating the same person sequentially. Which in turn just leads to many players regarding the entire activity of play as a larger scale version of the same managed competition, shaved down to the most efficient and algorithmic procedures for accumulation, dumping off everything else as a kind of hermeneutical and philosophical dross.

Algorithmic design approaches people like a Turing Test in reverse, an attempt to truncate them into codeable entities. And human users both rise to this entirely too well, with the collective ruthlessness of a virus seeking exploits and unintended effects, and subvert such truncation, finding ways to reinsert human aspiration and culture where they’ve been intentionally smoothed out of the workings.

Reciprocity rings at 500px and Flickr on one hand run almost like a moral economy alongside the meritocratic hierarchies built by the algorithms: some users work reciprocity hard and instrumentally to pump up each other’s reputation and images (and at some tipping point both reputation and images start to become self-sustaining social facts). Which often enrages both the “real” meritocrats and the aspirants who are trying to rise “honestly” through the genuine acclaim of others. It also affects the culture of commentary: very few comments express any constructive criticism or any detailed evaluation beyond “Great capture” (an especially silly comment when it is directed at both good and not-so-good images built through extensive composition in Photoshop). Even favoring with no comment creates an almost silent expectation of reciprocity. But any comment that is not an efficient offer of reciprocity also conveys some other human sociality, some possibility of connection beyond the algorithmic, as do the narratives or framing information that photographers offer with their images. All of which is complicated still further by the richly international nature of the site: “V + F” is a lingua franca in part because more detailed critiques would need translation into Spanish, French, Russian, Czech, Chinese, Hindi and many other languages to create dialogues between many of the most active contributors.

Algorithmic Eyes and Big Data

As your own favorites accumulate in a personal archive, you learn something about your own photographic eye, your readings of culture. But you also are retrained by the accumulation of images and your consumption of the totality of the site’s archive. An image that seems exceptional in its beauty and composition at first sight and would remain so if you stopped there and never looked again at the site becomes a cliche when something like it is seen again and again and again in the uploads of a hundred users. But in the best sense of meritocracy or evolution or capitalism, that same image can still be redeemed as wondrous if on the one thousandth iteration, a photographer of exceptional skill and vision offers their own version of the cliche.

The “big data” of an archive like 500px or Flickr shows patterns that are mined first and best through direct experience of navigating the archive. The user’s eye, clicking rapidly across and through the site’s interface, reveals structure and repetition but is also retrained and reoriented by that revelation. If I was setting out to be a successful commercial photographer and using 500px as an autodidactical tool, I would discover first many of the things that the standard pedagogy of photography tries to teach and second I would discover many things that an art historian or anthropologist of media might tell me about.

For example, spending a few hours watching thousands of images coming in as Fresh, rating some of them and tracking others, most users might recognize that successful images mostly conform to some of the basic norms of composition and craft in photography, whether they come from amateurs, professionals or people just sharing family and vacation pictures. Issues that are out-of-focus where they should be sharp, images that have multiple or no clear subject, images that don’t follow the rule-of-thirds without a reason for not following it, do not fare well. A viewer with no prior knowledge of these concepts might nevertheless begin to intuit them because of the pace and volume of digitized, algorithimic culture.

A few days or weeks of participation and most viewers could identify genres and tropes and subjects that get strong ratings from viewers without any knowledge of the history or circulation of those images. A list of image types often selected out by viewers might look like this:

Misty forests, especially with strong color contrasts or unusual color schemes
Sunsets, especially over water or agricultural fields
Pictures of circular bales of hay
Insect macros that contain narratives (the insect in motion, two insects having sex) or that offer dramatic color contrasts
Flower macros, especially of unusual flowers or flowers with intricate structures
Pictures of animals, particularly animals from the tropics, particularly animals from the tropics in the tropics
Star trails, especially over dramatic natural objects
Ultra wide-angle lens landscapes, especially those with small single buildings or people in the distance
Piers, paths, walls falling away into distance with leading lines pointing towards a distant dramatic object
Non-Western peoples in folk dress or ‘ethnographic’ poses
Soft-focus portraiture of women (nude and otherwise) in natural settings
Macro photography of water or liquid in motion
Still lives with strong color schemes and extremely sharp focus
Photoshop compositions of figures, landscapes and objects to exotic or fantastic effect
Small boats either floating or fallen apart on water or at the shoreline with strong color or textual contrasts
Birds in flight, especially raptors or large waterfowl
Spiral or fractal structures in architecture, usually shot vertically either looking directly up or directly down

And so on. All of which are cliches or tropes for a reason, because of their visual possibilities and the range of both aesthetic and technical understanding they can express. A more dedicated student of photography might also notice that certain strong genres of existing photography often don’t fare quite as well at 500px (but do pretty well at Flickr): B&W street photography, for example, doesn’t seem to climb very often to the top of Popular.

Someone reading for paratext might also notice that images with notes, stories or evocative titles often do better than those that do not. And certainly someone wise to the culture of the site itself would see where and how the workings of social networks and histories of presence within the site play a role.

The thing that’s new about algorithmic culture in this sense is partly what Haynes discusses in her book: that the “syncopation” it enables and produces is both showing us all something about how we already see and make and teaching us new ways to compose and design what we see and make: we discover in and are discovered by a site like 500px. We see the patterns, and the patterns teach us to make more of them, but also to remix them, deviate from them, improve upon them. We are never the solitary romantic artist or interpreter in that discovery or that creation: the algorithm is our co-agent, letting us, making us, traverse and annotate and generate a cultural technics that is so much vaster and richer and knowable than anything we’ve seen before, and is also more “us” than ever, more of us making and seeing and curating. But also making us see that there really are people (more of them than ever before) who compose and see and create differently and better than us: because the other category of image that often vaults to the top at 500px is the image that no one has seen before and is yet instantly familiar the first second that we encounter it, as if we have been waiting for it all along.

As we have been. Not just the us that clicks, but the we that includes our algorithms, made by us and making us. Managing our cultural spaces and unmanaging them, ordering them and sending them tumbling downhill towards strange attractors of all sorts. We spill out over the code infrastructures and interfaces–and that spilling, excessive us includes our technics, our machines, our programs, our pictures.

I. Interface, Energy and Sociality

Flickr has been called out recently by tech writers for its moribund, sluggish response to the rise of Instagram, 500px, Smugmug and other photo-publishing and photo-archiving services. Flickr still has a huge community of users and there is still a tremendous amount of daily activity at the site. As an archive of images, it still has no rivals in large measure simply because it’s been around as long as it has without major traumatic changes to its functionality or accessibility.

However, it’s easy to see why both commenters and users (both at Flickr and in other communities) see Flickr as dying or stagnant. “See” is the operant verb here. Before you ever dig down to the myriad of groups at Flickr to find that all but a small number of them have had no discussion or administrative oversight for months or years, you can see it in the default visual design.

All the crucial functionalities you might seek in a visual publishing platform that also serves as social media are present somewhere in that interface: links to other platforms; the ability to customize sets and collections of material; user control over levels of access to material; multiple ways for users to comment upon, bookmark and curate the material of other users. But then look at 500px.

Most of the same functionalities are present somewhere in 500px’s interface, with one huge exception (to which I’ll return shortly). But 500px’s designers understand that the content of the site is visual, so the user controls and publishing tools are hidden “under the hood”. The pictures control the interface and the interface’s presentation shifts upon each reload, creating an endlessly dynamic relation between the images that creates an exciting meta-image: it allows a viewer to find surprising associations between images, to see each picture in a new way each time it is encountered. This is true whether I’m looking at my Flow, which is built up from the activity of users that I’ve chosen to follow (the images they’ve liked, they’ve favorited, they’ve posted), looking at Fresh (new postings), looking at Popular (highly rated), or Editors’ Choice (hand-selected images).

500px’s sensitivity to visual design might be attributed to the fact that its creators are skilled photographers, or to the declared central goal of the site (to provide top-flight photographers with a publishing platform with a built-in payment system), or to its creation in a more recent and bandwidth-intensive era. Or conversely, to the fact that Flickr was an accidental offshoot of a design process that wasn’t intended to produce a photo-sharing service and has since undergone several changes of ownership and configuration that have prevented any possible comprehensive redesign of the site’s appearance.

The causes are less important than the consequences. The first consequence is a recursive mimesis: 500px’s look intuitively persuades a user that the site is devoted to rich, spectacular visuality, and the spectacular visuality of the good images is enhanced both by the way that they appear in isolation and in concord with others. 500px’s interface automatically associates everything posted to the site together via a single channel (Fresh) and mixes together everything that a user’s hand-picked group of other users bookmarks or likes (Flow).

You can see the same thing on Flickr, but it takes going two or three clicks deep via Explore. It’s not a default gateway into the site itself–the story at Flickr is your photostream, not Flickr as a whole. When I go to 500px, I often spend time just looking before I go into my own profile to tinker or survey activity on my pictures. When I go to Flickr, I might occasionally choose to go to Explore to see what’s new and interesting, but I’m as likely to go to my Contacts or to the groups I follow. I don’t ever see images with the same sense of dynamic presentation and juxtaposition: they all appear in little boxes. Flickr is the visual equivalent of a particularly static and uninvolving 9-panel grid comic-book layout put up alongside a dynamic comic-book layout by Jim Steranko or J.H. Williams.

The visuality of 500px lends it speed as well: users can shift between different collections of images quickly and down to the level of individual images or the collected works of a single photographer and back again with a minimum of clicks and a very intuitive interface design. Getting around Flickr is much slower and much less intuitive: seeing content without a specific predetermined search takes much more understanding of the site, not just its interface but its community and culture. It is much easier to simply look at 500px. The interactivity of the site is often a goad for traversing its visuality: ah! there is another great picture, click “like” and oooh! yet another, favorite it. The results of your own curation of other people’s work into Favorites are a thrill, like traversing a private museum. Looking at your favorites on Flickr is a much less visually rewarding experience.

And yet, if you want to go deeper, below the surface, there is almost nothing to 500px: it’s all image and no scaffold. Visuality is the alpha and omega of its community: exchanges between users are limited to the comments at the bottom of photos and to a very badly designed support forum that is palpably both an afterthought and a reluctant concession. By design (both in the aesthetic sense and the business-plan sense) words and all they enable don’t belong at 500px. Flickr, on the other hand, has as much room for words as users would like to claim. Though many groups and fora have gone relatively silent, there are still areas of strong activity, where users talk to each other using both words and pictures. (I find the group Photography Critique particularly interesting and useful, for one example.)

This difference both affects the kinds of sociality that are possible at the respective sites and reflects the kinds of sociality that they aspire to. 500px was founded with the clear intent to help photographers sell their images, either directly off the site or to build reputation capital for their professional work. In this it has so far been successful, from what I can see. If I were looking for a wedding photographer today and money was no object, I’d be able to find a good ten to thirty from 500px who were incredibly exciting and distinctive in their work. (For example, the Israeli photographer Victor Vertsner, whose work I could easily favorite in its entirety.) In pursuit of this constituency, 500px’s interface is much less friendly to copying or reusing the work of its users, and it has incorporated a sales mechanism into the core design, unlike Flickr’s rear-guard relationship to Getty Images.

A richer set of community tools and platforms for communication at 500px could aggregate, collate and connect users in a much greater variety of ways–and in so doing, subvert the desire to produce separation between the commercially viable photographers and everyone else, as well as allow words to ‘work’ the images in ways that run counter to the site’s aesthetic objectives and identity. All social media communities that have hierarchies or intentional separations between aspirational groups within the community run into trouble about the management of those separations where the groups overlap.

As 500px has become more popular, it has drawn three other communities: amateurs with no commercial ambitions (like me) who are hoping to learn and improve via posting and viewing; people who take and post pictures from their own lives and experiences and use the platform to share this documentary record with family and friends; and a more shadowy group that uses such sites to deposit and circulate copyright-violating or illicit images. (What complicates the fourth group’s activities is that one group of commercially-viable photographers on the site are creators of original erotic photography, whose work is subject to a complex set of filters and disincentives. More on this in the next post of my series.)

The amateurs who are learning benefit from the much more rapid iterative loops within the site’s interface design: it is in that sense like a digital camera itself, showing you almost right away how images attract or disinterest their viewers. But to learn in that fashion, they need the precious commodity of the Internet age, attention. The more that the non-commercial amateurs use the site’s mechanisms to draw attention, the more potentially rivalrous they are with the people who need that attention to make a living. At the other end, the amateurs who hope to be seen as photographers have an equal felt need to separate themselves from the people just sharing their vacation shots and baby pictures–but for that group, the attention provided by the site can be both a source of amusement in its own right and a way to make social connections to strangers.

500px has had several implementations of a “dislike” button that I believe they may feel helps to manage these rivalrous borderlands and keep the site’s identity clearly focused on their core constituency. The problem, as always, is that social media designers believe that sociality follows from design. Instead, as Flickr demonstrates, it follows from history, usage, custom and culture, from the actual users in the actual situated lives that a site attracts–both those it attracts on purpose and those it attracts by accident. Design and interface are the material preconditions of social practice in digital media, but once a sociality takes its emergent shape in a new site, it can have a remarkably adaptive, plastic and durable spirit that subverts, protests or ignores attempts by designers to push and pull it where they want it through recoding and refurbishing. At some point, every successful social media site needs to hire more sociologists and anthropologists and fewer coders if it wants to understand what it has become and might yet be.

Archival research is another of those jobs that some faculty do that isn’t particularly photogenic, like reading secondary literature or doing peer review. At least many scientists have a machine that goes ping or a cage full of fruit flies, not to mention groups of students and postdocs who can assemble for a photo in the lab.

This last research trip was the first time I’d extensively photographed some of the documents I was looking at, though I also took a ton of notes and had some photocopies made. (The photocopies were of long reports where virtually everything in the document is interesting to me, and also that I might want to use in my teaching at some point.)

Archival work is what drew me to history in the first place. There are definitely days that I wish I wasn’t in a field that also has a necessary ethnographic component, because I’d often just as soon stay burrowed deep in a big pile of documents and images and artifacts. It’s the best example I can think of for explaining how some kind of ongoing research experience feeds back into my teaching. It’s not just that it keeps my expertise sharp, but each different archive, each different vein of documents or materials, helps me understand more and more what the relationship is between action (individual and collective) and representation or information, something that’s crucial for explaining to my students about the powers and limitations of classroom knowledge.

Sometimes, the event is very directly part of my work, most often when I’m speaking or presenting. I had a wonderful opportunity to speak at Juniata College in March, for example. It was a chance to catch up with an old friend and also meet her colleagues on the faculty, who were terrific, energetic, and smart without exception. The students impressed me even more: they asked really intelligent, pointed, intriguing questions and kept me on my toes for well over an hour after the talk ended.

Sometimes I’m at a meeting or event because it’s strongly connected to a course or program that I’m working with during the semester. Which doesn’t mean that’s just an obligation, there’s always something for me in these events: a new idea or an old one clarified, new information or a reminder of something I’ve known for a while, an encounter with a new perspective or a soothing reacquaintance with a familiar one.

Sometimes I’m just there because I’m interested. It’s what being in a college community is all about. Often that’s when I’m keen to share what I’m hearing via Twitter or this weblog. Though that didn’t go so well at the recent TEDxSwarthmore event, where there was a weird anti-Twitter, anti-information technology policy in place. (Ahem. First letter in TED is…?)

Pre-Twitter View

Post-Twitter Seating

But I rarely experience it as exuberance. The cool weather in fall always energizes me, but that’s probably because I have energy to spare. By the time I hit April, I always feel absolutely worn out. The students feel it too: there’s a three-week period from the end of March into mid-April where they are all tired, ill or both, and usually preoccupied with overwhelming obligation to a particular course or extracurricular activity.

Somehow around mid-April that feeling shifts a bit: the end of classes is in sight, the crush of events and committees desperate to finish some business before the year ends is easing, you make peace with the things you didn’t write, didn’t finish, didn’t say. By then usually I’ve missed the chance to plant peas and my garden is a sorry mess, but at least the weather brings some joy.

Broadly speaking, my theme of the visual documentation of faculty work always has two accompanying problems. The first is that some of the work of faculty makes for a lousy picture, or can’t be pictured at all. I’m just finishing my fourth tenure dossier review of the last four months, and I’ve done a fair amount of peer review recently as well. I can’t actually give any picture of that without puncturing confidentiality.

Second, much of what faculty do as a part of their professional duties is also very pleasurable or interesting. For so many people, it’s not work if it’s not unpleasant and burdensome. Before we get to any of the other reasons why there is some popular dislike of professors, I think the fact that academic labor is often enjoyable is a mark against it: we get to think, to write, to explore our interests, to merge our personal vision of the world with our professional obligations. Or, as in this case, to listen to, converse or present to a variety of interesting visitors to our workplace. We go out into the world, but at many campuses, the world also comes to us. Still, it is work in the sense that it takes time, it takes effort, and it produces value for our employer as well as ourselves.

Visitors are like a slow-motion but also humanly satisfying version of the serendipities I often find in digital culture. A team or a group is travelling to campuses like Swarthmore: I don’t know in advance they are coming or often even that I’m invited until a week or two before the visit, but then the day arrives and I find I learn something completely new. Or I find out that something I thought was a problem unique to us turns out to be widely shared, or what I took to be an improbable ambition has been accomplished. Sometimes they’re reassuring: old friends are still friends, and as reliably insightful as ever. Sometimes they are transformative: a look at work I’ve never even heard of that once seen becomes central to my thinking about a problem.

The first day of classes is always a bit of a puzzle for me as a teacher. There are obvious things to do: hand out the syllabus (or point students to where it is online), talk about the structure of the course, deal with logistics. In a small discussion-oriented class, get students to introduce themselves to each other. What’s less obvious is whether to begin work on the substance of the course. In seminars that meet only once a week, you pretty much have to roll up your sleeves and get started, which usually means sending enrolled students instructions about readings or other assignments before the semester even begins.

In my survey courses and mid-level topical classes, I often try to talk about the overall themes and ideas we’ll be dealing with. Over time, I’ve shifted the content of my opening remarks towards some attempt to justify the class, to explain to students why I think it’s worth teaching, what I believe they’ll get out of it, both in terms of the content we’re studying and in terms of some of the pedagogy I plan to use. It just seems odd to me now to just start up as if it’s self-obvious why a survey of the Atlantic slave trade and West Africa is important or worth a not-insignificant fraction of a student’s total course budget in their time at Swarthmore.

One thing that complicates matters a bit is a shift in student practices. In the time I’ve been teaching at Swarthmore, students have become increasingly inclined to “shop around” in the first week of classes. The harder you charge at chewing through content in the first week, the more likely you are to have some students who need special assistance to catch up with what you did in the first week because they don’t show up until the second. So I also try to start on a bit of a slow burn in most classes. I don’t really care for rigorously symmetrical patterns and rhythms in a syllabus–I tend to build up towards heavier reading, do that in some intense bursts, and then back up and build in another direction. So regardless of whether students are coming and going from the roster, I’d prefer to spend the first two weeks building up towards the first full grappling with an important issue.

Advising is certainly a perennial favorite as a scapegoat for the ills of the curriculum. When students graduate without some of the skills or competencies that faculty expect them to have, we often blame advising. When students avoid some disciplines or cluster in others, many faculty believe that poor advising is the reason, and the same goes for when students perform poorly in a particular course or program of study.

Partly we know that most of us were given little advice on how to advise students about their course of study. Rather like skill at teaching, skill at advising grows organically out of the discretionary practices and insider knowledge of faculty. When I first arrived at Swarthmore 17 years ago and was asked to advise first-year students, most of what I did was make sure that they were taking what they needed to take and that they knew about the resources available to them. (Most of which I had to look up in various booklets and catalogs myself if the question arose.) Sometimes I connected to a student more deeply and was able to be a more subtle guide to their curricular and life choices, but you can’t make that happen by fiat. That’s still the case: no matter how much more I know and understand about academia, I can’t be a mentor to everyone, because not everyone needs a mentor in the first place, and very few of those who do need me in particular.

What I’ve tried more consciously to offer to my assigned advisees over time is a frank explanation of the structure of the curriculum, conceding where appropriate its ungainly or baroque character. At this point, I think I can tell my advisees a lot about what each department studies, why they study and teach it in the way that they do, and what trade-offs are involved in both practical and intellectual terms in taking on a particular course or major. I want my advisees to have some insight into why the hip bone connects to the leg bone, at least insofar as they’re interested in or seeking that kind of perspective. I think that’s what faculty can do as advisors that can’t be done as well by others in the college community. Conversely, we aren’t as good as connecting advisees to support services, or knowing when our advisees need counseling of other kinds. But I think we’ve collectively gotten to the point where we recognize that spending time just doing an audit of a student’s transcript is a waste of a face-to-face meeting.

When we recognize that students aren’t getting all the advice that they might want or need, however, I’m not sure what to do about that institutionally. As I said, you can’t force a mentoring relationship. You also can’t force a student who doesn’t want advice or is afraid of what an advisor might say to actively seek it out. I’m also not sure you can compel faculty and administrators to have a richly contextual understanding of the big picture of a given curriculum or institution.

Syllabus maintenance and construction is one of the quintessentially invisible parts of a professor’s job. I’m still stunned from time to time that many people outside of academia or education think that a professor or teacher just walks into a classroom and recites knowledge at students. I read a large range of books and essays that never make it into the syllabus as I’m thinking about lectures or discussions I’d like to convene. I look back over evaluations and consider how past assignments have worked or not and what kinds of pedagogical tweaks or experiments I might try in a given course. I’m usually still shifting around a few things here and there a day or two before the semester starts. (Well, and afterwards, but that’s a different kind of project.)

There’s also a lot of annoying logistics to deal with most semesters. Right now I’m shifting some readings onto Moodle from Blackboard, which just takes a bit of adaptive adjustment to Moodle’s interface and design. Courses that make more use of technology or have more ambitious media usage require a bit more logistical foresight.

I spend a certain amount of time during the summer thinking about courses I might teach in the future as well. That’s the best time to read and explore in new areas, not just because my schedule is a bit looser but also because I’ll need to be ready when the deadlines to get new courses on the schedule hit in the middle of a busy semester.

Today I’m at a WordPress Camp being run by instructional technologists from Swarthmore and Trinity. I’m really pleased by the turn-out: over twenty faculty and staff from Swarthmore and Haverford are here, and there’s a wide range of project ideas and questions. There’s the somewhat inevitable technical glitch at the moment (seems to be a consequence of lots of people trying to work in the same server space simultaneously) but I’m sure that’ll be ironed out shortly.

This is a big part of academic life, and it often goes unremarked upon simply because it’s so built into the culture of scholarship and teaching. The cranky professor who refuses to learn new technologies or approaches is a favorite media trope but in many academic communities, that person is the exception rather than the rule. What’s more typical is the constant rethinking and adjustment that workshops, seminars and camps support.