Landscape as Witness - #6

Apart from working on the thesis and corresponding photobook as per usual, I also spent the past week engaging a lot more with social media through a combination of new posts and polls. As I have been relatively inactive on social media over the past few months, the online aspect of Landscape as Witness (such as the blog posts) haven't been reaching a particularly large audience as of late.

Before uploading 'consistently' again, I wanted to get an idea of what sort of regular updates people would like to see, as well as how often they would like to see them. I did this by circulating an identical post on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (see below). As well as inquiring about the type of updates that were of interest to most people, I also included a poll so that they could vote on how often they would like to see said updates: 1-2 Days or 3-5 Days.

I received very helpful feedback regarding the type of updates that were of interest to people, all of which were greatly appreciated. In terms of the regularity of these updates, the results were quite mixed. Because of this I will aim to post at least 2-3 smaller updates per week, with the possibility of uploading more if needed.

I posted the first of these smaller updates on the 16th of August, drawing attention to the moving image pieces that are also an integral aspect of the Landscape as Witness project. The plan was to upload a short, 10-second clip, as the full 20-minute video pieces will be uploaded once this iteration of the project has been completed. Upon uploading, I also posted a link on Instagram Stories to draw more attention to the post (see below).

I ran into a couple of issues whilst editing this short clip, namely when it came to the automatic compression that occurred once it was uploaded to the various social media platforms. This was the case with Instagram in particular, despite the fact that I saved the clip in its specified format. I also had similar issues while posting on Twitter. Surprisingly, Facebook was the more forgiving of the three in this regard, despite its reputation for destroying the quality of videos once uploaded. In case anybody has only viewed the clip on Twitter or Instagram, below is an high-quality version (that can also be found here).

Despite having only uploaded a handful of posts over the past number of days, it has already had a large impact on the amount of visitors to my website. As can be seen from the graphs below, this month I have already received the most visits to my website since undertaking the field trip last summer. As a result of this, my blog posts this month have also received a record number of views for this year. This increase is also thanks to those who have shared my various posts online recently. Although the numbers aren't particularly impressive at the moment, I am hopeful that they will only increase as I continue posting/blogging more regularly.