Author: Nurul

It’s been a year since I started to write my thought in this blog. I remember when I started to write in this blog, it was not very easy. I’ve struggled in putting my sentences together and at the same time translating my thoughts from ‘Malay’ language to English. Although I think now I manage to write my thought well, better than when I started, I still have the feeling of not been confident enough in writing. But I guess by practice it will get better.

Also, thanks to Terry who introduced me to this book called ‘The craft of research’ by Wayne C.Booth, Gregory G. Colomb and Josepth M. Williams. This book is great! It does help me a lot in writing, thinking and how to do and manage my research. I highly recommend this book to new researcher. Easy reading and easy to understand for someone whose English is second language.

Other than this great book, i also like this short essay about writing. I find this essay beautifully written.

I took this from paul graham writting website. Quote from the site:

” March 2005

(In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes”23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting.)

I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

As for how to write well, here’s the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can’t get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don’t (always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence; if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; don’t try to sound impressive; don’t hesitate to change the topic on the fly; use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit sentences together; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don’t feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won’t read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you’ll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it. “

http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html

There are many things about Malaysia to discover and to explore. Here are some promotional video from Tourism Malaysia. Personally,I think Malaysia is more than this. Enjoy 🙂

Jeremy once asked me this question at one of my project presentation. Why Malaysia? Why do I choose Malaysia for my research topic? Why national identity? The truth is I didn’t know Malaysia until I’m out of Malaysia. I guess that’s one of my personal reason why I choose Malaysia and why I pick national identity as I main research topic. At the beginning of my research its just about craft and traditional products, then it move on to the identity of Malaysia. When I step in the Malaysian Identity I feel lost. What is my identity? Who Am I? Am I Malay, Chinese, India or am I Malaysian? Whats make me Malaysian? What is not Malaysian? Is it the food, the life style, tradition, religion, our past or perhaps education that makes us Malaysian. How does this inform and construct the concept of national identity? Why do we need national identity? Why do we need identity? Is it because to differentiate why race and family we come from? or to recognised our roots of heritage?

I have moved my blog from edublogs to my own domain blog. It’s much better to have own domain than having blog under certain company (in my case its edublog.org). I’ve used edublogs for a year now and recently they changed the whole page to a new look, I don’t blame them on this, it’s good to change the look regularly, its just that they also have a new methods of inviting the members. Like to get more option you need to upgrade your blog to ‘premium’ or else you just get the minimum of the blog. For example, I cant even put in a video in my blog just because I didnt upgrade mine to the ‘premium’ blog. This situation makes me buy my own domain and get all the option. Which what I did now.

So if you can read this post means that you already moved with me. 🙂 Thanks for constantly visiting my blog.

This week it turn out to be my turn to present my ‘working progress’ PhD work to all Comm. Design Postgrade members. We tried to make everyone stand up and present. Also it’s good for our new postgrade members who didn’t know what others research about. This week is my turn. So I did. As usual, I’m a bit nervous and sometimes lost in my own thought while presenting. But I manage to communicate to them, at last. Here are some interesting thought from them about my topic. I thought i should put it in before i forgot about it. (i would scan and put in my mapping plan too…later) you will understand clearly if you refer to the map.

My main area is still broad…huge. I have to narrow it down now! I’m still wondering and going around these 3 words – DESIGN (I’m referring to Graphic Design), CULTURE (mostly identity related) and BRANDING ( I’m referring to product, interested in Traditional products). All of these area, I’m looking it in Malaysian Context. I also presented some of my finding from the MI Online Forum (www.malaysianidentity.com). Interestingly in the begining of my Forum Idea, my intention it to look for Malaysian Identity. I thought i would find one. And I guess i did find, but many and its very complex to explain it. Trust me you don’t want to know about it yet. Not until I manage to explain it to myself first.

I know that Identity is my area too..somehow. Why? Because I think that it represent, relates, changes, sustained and create my 3 main area, DESIGN, CULTURE + BRANDING. Well let me just try to explain just a little bit what I mean in this context by identity. I would say at this stage the Identity in my understanding can be divided in two main area. The first one I called it Nation Identity (individual identity). It is about the behaviour emaotional feeling that can represent the society, the group of community they belong to and also the country. Most certainly it also contains cultural and traditional practises in their life styles. Websters dictionary states identity is the distinguishing character or personality of an individual. Identity begins with our names, addresses, family groups, and cultural backgrounds”.

The other one is National Identity. The notion of identity that the goverment position what the nation are to others. This has been practiced in mainly tourism areas. It is part of the substance to promote the country. I guess that are some of my understanding or finding at this stage about Identity. Back to what my dear friend said in the presentation.

1. Jeremy said: – Why Malaysia? What is interesting about Malaysia? (Perhaps I list down why I choose Malaysia?)
2. Yoko point out interesting view too – The Online Forum can be argued as a form of ‘cultural probes’, online cultural probes. She said it would be good if i play around more with the design of the forum. try to use it as cultural probes to investigate the identity. To use it as a method and try some other methods too. Then I can value all the methods.
3. Laurene said two things – a) that I haven’t been looking at the relationship or differences between the traditional way of making crafts and the commercial ways to make the crafts. Why did this happen and did this happen in Malaysia?
4. Our new members, Marious also mention about another interesting topic – ‘Brand Conversation’ ( this is interesting )

I also mention in my presentation, that perhaps for my next plan, I would like to do a semiotic analysis, this is referring to Barthes theory about sign, signified and signifier. I would analyse the layout, design, text and color. I might be looking at Malaysian ad, design, promotional items.

I saw one interesting Petronas Ad in Malaysia last year for Deepavali Festival.

I know I haven’t been writing to this blog for a while. The holiday, the warm summer and a short break, I guess makes me a little bit lazy. But it was a wonderful break for me after one year on my PhD research. Just a little update with things I’m working on at the moment. The abstract for ICAS 5 (International Conference Asian Scholar- 5) have been accepted. The conference will be in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, August 2007. Meaning I will have chance to go back to my home town. So yes, before thinking about the plan of going back to my home town, my first priority now is to finish the paper. This paper is a join research paper with Dr. Peter Raisbeck from Melbourne University.

Meanwhile I’m also working on my research project MI Forum and preparing the next project ( which I’m still in the process of figuring out what I wanted to do). Since I started MI Website, I’ve been questioning, reading, researching and exploring about the notion of identity, this relates to national and cultural identity. Searching for Malaysian Identity was one of my main search. One of the members in MI Website respond to this ‘ What is not Malaysian?’. Perhaps by lookin at what is not Malaysian will help me in this. Although it is not easy to define what is not and what is.

There are many reason why the questions of identity is hard to define. Identity in my contexts mean the personal, self identity and how this relates in the development of national and cultural identity. Until now I still can’t say much about the notion of national and cultural identity and why does it matter to us as a citizen.

I took this photo while walking around Rainbows Valley, Alice Spring. We camp overnight at Rainbows Valley, actually that was our last day after 7 days camping trip around Alice Spring. I saw different mark of animal steps around the sandy sand trails the next morning. Just looking at the steps we can try to guess which animals or which insect owns the step. This is the physical identity of these animal.

Just through the mark we can guess which animal owns it. What about us? What define the different between each one of us. Through our attitute, physical looks, personality, tradition, cultural practice languages and the country we come from might be another clue for others to guess and discover things about us. Just like the mark from the animals in Rainbows Valley I saw, thats how I get to know them, through their steps and trail on the smooth red sand trail.