People Talking on Bananas

People Talking on Bananas Contribution to Acadamia

Hello,

My name is Elizabeth Wolfson and I’m a graduate student in the American Studies department at Saint Louis University. I’m currently working on my master’s thesis, which is about photoblogs and their place in the evolution of vernacular photography in the digital era. As part of my research, I’m emailing the creators of the various sites I plan to write about to get in order get some quantitative as well as qualitative data; that is, both a sense of what kind of traffic these sites see, as well as their motivation for photoblogging, prior experiences with photography, etc.

It’s a very small number of questions, and I don’t expect more than a few sentences in response to each question (unless you want to write more!). It shouldn’t take more than 10 or 15 minutes of your time, and would contribute enormously to my work. I’ve pasted the questions in below, so you don’t even have to download and open an additional file.

Thank you in advance for your time and assistance with this project.

Best,
Elizabeth Wolfson

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This sounds awesome Elizabeth. I’d be happy to be part of it!

peopletalkingonbananas.com usually gets about 300-500 hits a day, probably over 30,000 hits total. In addition, there are about 1,100 regular tumblr followers whose hits don’t show up in my analytics. As for submissions, I get around 1 to 3 pics a day.

I have a soft spot for inoffensive, non-humor. er… I dunno, really. If you’ve ever tried to pick up a banana and talk into it (since you were 6) it’s actually kinda funny, so I thought it’d be good to document. But since starting it, I’ve found a lot of support. I think it’s a winning concept because it’s user-generated (more like audience participation), it has simple guidelines, and it’s constructive rather than deconstructive. I don’t want to get too deep or high-n-mighty about it, but sites these days prosper on criticism, snark and generally have no substance (content). I wanted to make something that people could interact with, leave the computer and come back with something new, something that’s, for the most part, positive. So, seeing peoples’ pics and knowing that they had a fun time making them—that’s what makes me stick with it.

Tumblr. I chose it because of the design, really. It’s simplicity perfectly suits a photo blog.

They’re submitted by users. Sometimes I make them myself if it’s a slow period. Sometimes I’ll post a found picture, but I try to keep most everything on the site unique.

I just look for clean photographs with good color schemes. Sometimes it’s the person in the photograph—if it’s a “character”, I know my readers will like that (in terms of likes and reblogs). I usually don’t like to put up pics taken from a computer camera or a camera phone, but sometimes that’s all I have.

I try to post them (one per day) in the order they’re submitted. If a really good one pops up, I’ll bump it to the top of the queue, but this method allows me to keep track of the pictures I’ve posted.

None, really.

Nope. I read a lot of webcomics.