Notices by Kate (katebowles@mastodon.social), page 18

@ton @emory Other instances in the federation are very multilingual so as you follow more you'll find yourself falling among them. I see a fair bit of French.

@emory I'd love to know more about this. I'm an oral historian with some glancing GIS exposure. My interest is in how people's stories of experiences are steered around their understandings of space and place.

@mappingcat That's a gorgeous Salvia. I don't think we have it here but I'll check.

I marvel at salvia: so many of them, so varied, from tiny ones to toppling giants to "wait, is that a salvia?"

@gateau Parenting like a pro. 🔥

@gamehawk That's lovely: chicken paws is just so weird as an effort not to say "claws".

What I find from noticing these details is a sense of wonder that we get through at all, and at the same time a kind of pride in our stepping round each other in public so phone conversations can be had, internal musing can happen.

@ltaub @lauraritchie I spend the late spring vigilantly pruning sweet peas so they continue to bloom. At some point, inevitably, I'm overwhelmed. It's like nature's Tetris. Balance tipped, the plant makes enough peas to say to itself: job done. It promptly dies and on we go to next year.

But that fragrance is childhood to me. Gardenias didn't make it to the south of England.

@tellio @Tdorey @ShorterPearson @lauraritchie

Just quietly, that's genius.

@tellio @Tdorey @ShorterPearson @lauraritchie

That is so beautifully put. I think researchers into human experience of any kind need to grasp the courage to say "this isn't rigorous, it can't be -- it's provisional, incomplete, hesitant, and for now." I wish we said that.

In fact, I wish we didn't call it "research" when so often we just mean: having a think, putting some shape to ideas, hoping to push for small changes in this world.

The small contradictions of a summer Christmas. Australia, let's face it, we have no idea what we're doing.
https://mastodon.social/media/0v4-VHR4igu9gCkS4HA

@dogtrax A sudden hot summer wind under a dark sky has just blown through the house, catching us unaware. Things are being knocked about. We're running around closing doors and windows.

@Tdorey @Downes @bryanalexander

I'm sorry too that I missed it. But I really like Stephen's "community I can chat with".

I've found community I think with, at a scale I can live with.

@GeoffreyGevalt @Tdorey @ShorterPearson @lauraritchie

The other thing about this bit of research is that we're inside it. That is, we're investigating something that is really important to us: small communities in the age of big things. And we're involved in #smallstories just like anyone here: reading, sharing, writing, thinking, noticing.

This used to be called "participant observation", but I sense this is more like collaborative ethnography.

Thinking with/in.

@Tdorey When we moved in here, 16 years ago, there were two small fruit trees. Eventually both succumbed to rot and termites, and we took them down. Our neighbour told us she had watched those trees being planted.

But there was a also a small plain bush we couldn't identify, maybe waist high. It's now a full grown willow, metres high, that provides all the shade for our back deck in summer, and we hang lanterns in it.

#treestories

@miwilc

The other side to this is how federation and #hashtags work, and why this makes mastodon hashtags distinctive as perspectival experiences, not communities as such.

If I join #auspol on Twitter I can potentially see anything anyone has to say in that space. Not so here. But that takes a while to figure out.

@miwilc @HackJack

About how an instance works? That's also really interesting to me as I've been navigating in the big surf of mastodon.social since I first came here, and I keep wondering if there's a small place for me somewhere.

@lauraritchie @ShorterPearson @Tdorey Also apologies to @GeoffreyGevalt who I misremembered in that last one.