MM1-1.1 Photograph (Intelligence)
AboutMM1-1.1 Photograph (Intelligence) is the first in a series of "meta-manuals" that examine practices of sensing presented in United States military publications.
The meta-manual series is a kind of media archaeology. It posits that a close reading of texts can reveal information about practice and through this about point-of-view. By focusing on "military" practices that relate to and/or overlap with "art" and/or "design" practices, the works in the series attempt to demystify and "de-other" military practices of sensing by placing them within a broader context.
Process
MM1-1.1 Photograph (Intelligence) was created by first downloading publicly available military publications—both those available on United States Department of Defense websites and those available on a variety of external sites that collect these—then performing optical character recognition on these documents where needs to make their text searchable, then creating programs to look for key words in the text, and then assembling the passages containing found key words from across the entire corpus into a manual that focuses on the key word topic. For example for MM1-1.1 Photograph (Intelligence) searches were performed on key words like "photograph," "photo," "picture," and "camera."