In his seminal work Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson wrote of the ways nations are constructed – of the common symbols and artefacts that define peoples within national borders. Equally potent are the symbols used to define others within those borders, or to signify they are outsiders. It is the symbols used in The Simpsons to […]
Visual.ly has just released a bunch of tools that allow users to display stats from Twitter and Facebook in infographics. I used one of the tools to compare the Twitter accounts @Rotary and @Rotaract. Rotary monstered Rotaract on almost all the measurements. While on one hand the results were unsurprising, on the other hand they […]
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It’s Just a Conference
In 2010, I attended the Asia Pacific Regional Rotaract Conference in Sydney. It was the first time APRRC had been held in Australia. Evidently, Australians had been conspicuous by their absence from conferences elsewhere. The Sydney conference was a good first attempt, given many of the organisers had never been to one before. Nonetheless, there […]
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The Nuclear Family
In the course of reading up to ground myself in Springfield’s esteemed academic circles, I came across a work called Atomistic Politics and the Nuclear Family. The article presents a case – though it has a few holes – that The Simpsons actually presents a strong image of family. The family values are couched in […]
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Simpsons Resources
I’m going to update this post as I go with useful resources for my thesis. Springfieldians Twitter List: I set up this list and added to it tweeps who are: “Inhabitants, observers and contributors of Springfield.” That is, the tweeps on the list are either Simpsons fans, accounts (claiming) to be Simpson’s characters, or people […]
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The Simpsons, Episode 1
UPDATE: If you’ve come to this post looking for information about content analysis, you might be better served looking here, where I’ve written up a more detailed and logical post. This blog is about to have a new regular topic because I agreed on my thesis focus topic with my supervisor today and I’m keen […]
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I Like My Work
I’m looking for work at the moment, which is always an interesting experience. I found a flexible, interesting job for a social media coordinator. Given I started a company doing this sort of work, I figured I ought to apply for this one. It’s not until you are forced to sit down and spell out […]
Wingecarribee Shire Council has announced their intention to renovate the Shire’s ageing Civic Centre today. General Manager Jason Gordon says the building is in need of some major work: in its current state the building does not meet numerous modern building codes including accessibility and mobility, environmental, customer and Workplace Health and Safety standards. Council […]
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Cat in a Box
The Kitteh Does Play Cat in a Box by Travis Holland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Based on a work at www.youtube.com/tah727.