Franklin Sayre

I’m the Makerspace Librarian at Thompson Rivers University and also Co-Chair the Librarians’ Department. These days I am particularly interested in creating active learning spaces that foster belonging and encouraging sustainability and critical thinking about technology and information.

1 minute read

Weeknotes are where I share what I am doing without worrying too much about them being perfect. They are a way of thinking-in-public. They are written quickly and generally without editing.

Sabbatical

  • Bullet points are great. So much less threatening than sentences and paragraphs.

Ethics-application-purgatory

  • I am still struggling to get an ethics application finished for the interviews I want to do as part of this project.
  • The semi-structured interview guide has been the hardest thing, because its the fulcrum where all-the-many-ideas-in-my-head about this project is meeting what-are-you-actually-going-to-ask-people-in-language-they-will-understand.
  • This is valuable but its frustrating because it is inevitably delaying interviews until the last 2 months of the sabbatical

Are-na and Bagos-Inspo

  • Whenever I feel down about where I am with the ethics package, I need to remember that I actually have done a ton of theoretical and conceptual work.
  • Many books and articles read. Most of that is in Obsidian Notes via Zotero and Readwise.

  • But this is a design/creation/making project! It is meant to be visual. There will be physical bags but also digital bags. In the interest of having better ways of finding and organizing these things I started using Are.na to collect images, links, books, pdfs, etc. I really like it! Here are links to a few of my open channels (if you go to my profile you can see more):

  • bagspo carrier bag sabbatical inspiration | Are.na
  • methods bag bagspo | Are.na

Methods bag

  • Being stuck in ethics-application-purgatory is only okay because I can start work on the methods bag while I wait for the review to come back. The methods bag brings together all the influences and is meant to be used throughout this project.
  • I need to remember that I don’t need to know how everything fits together before starting. The figuring-out will partly being in the doing.
  • I am starting to figure out how to turn an idea into something that can part of a bag without it literally just being a book-in-a-bag.

Materials

  • Starting to figure out ways of representing place through textiles. Cyanotype is going to be one. Shape another. Dying fabrics with natural materials.
  • This week I need to start gathering materials before the first frosts.

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