The Globe Theatre in London has just launched a new electronic service. The Globe Player.
It is part subscription service, partly an encyclopedia of reflection about Shakespeare and his work, but mainly it is a delight to discover the Bard whilst seated at your own screen and keyboard.
The service enables you, after registration, to rent or buy over 50 films of Shakespeare productions at The Globe Theatre.
You can also explore the Muse of Fire resource. This is a film in itself, but is made up of extracts from a wide variety of interviews with major Shakesperean actors of our day.
The interviews are available on the globeplayer.tv web site and offer fascinating insights into both the deep knowledge of the actors, but also their subtle and insightful take on the works they interpret.
One interesting part of the site content is access to performances of The Sonnets, but set in contemporary New York settings…
The project piece above is an interpretation of Sonnet 3, set in Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn. A great way to listen to the language of Shakespeare, but framed by immediately recognisable modern contexts.
This service is truly ‘…a window of thine age…’.
Whether you are a long time resident in the world of Shakespeare, or just beginning to explore the universe of love, loss, drama and comedy that The Globe creates, then we think this is a wonderful resource.
William and the Web. Perfect partners in the 21st Century?
The British Science Association have just announced details of grant funding schemes for British Science Week in 2015.
Event dates: 13th to 22nd March 2015
As well as the usual grants by region in the UK, offering their traditional support to schools, this year (2015) sees the introduction of community organisation grants, offering those in the community sector working with ‘hard to reach’ communities the opportunity to build new work using science and discovery as a lever to engagement.
Kick Start Grants – grants of £300 for school activities (and up to £700 for schools/communities) in the UK faced with challenging circumstances.
Scottish Grant scheme – grants of £200 for schools and £350 for organisations in Scotland.
Welsh Grant scheme – grants of £200 for schools and £350 for organsations in Wales.
Community Grant scheme (new for 2015) – grants of up to £500 for community-based groups and organisations working with hard to reach groups in the UK whose targeted audience/participants include those not traditionally engaged with science. (These might be people who “..are from the Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic community (BAME); not in education employment or training (NEET); or who live in a remote and rural location”…Ed.)
Although the sums are modest, it is possible with imagination, to see how the seed funding could be used to engage those interested in science, or to give the undiscovered young scientist a chance to take their first step on the road to research, for example.
The Association web site offers the following as eligible activities under the grant scheme.
Presentations from invited speakers on science and/or engineering topics.
Field trips to local science centres, museums or university science departments.
Arranging a talk or workshop with a local STEM ambassador.
Recruiting a freelancer to deliver an arts and science activity.
Fete, family science days, mini festivals, science fairs.
Busking displays run in public venues, such as a supermarket, park or high street.
Hands-on workshops.
Debates and discussions with scientists.
At conversationsEAST we really warmed to the idea of a cross disciplinary event, say using musicians, artists and electronic engineers to devise an event using music, graphics and an introduction to audio-visual or web technology. The output of the engagement and learning to be put on the web, or streamed live, or turned into a music CD, for example.
As always, if there any Fellows in the region planning an event, we’d be happy to donate web resources from conversationsEAST to contribute to the work. Just let us know?
Our small journal produces a lot of data. We generate twitter feeds, meta-tags and article categories…on and on. Does it have a use?
One thing we do at conversationsEAST every month is to run our Twitter generated content through a Knight Lab application called BookRX. (Part of the conversationsEAST team day job is to be booksellers and publishers, so the findings can be used to plan thematic content for our literacy projects, for example…Ed).
For our journal it can serve the same function, offering insights into subjects that can be useful as leaders to content ideas, or to see if the profile of our readers is on the trend we believe we are following.
it analyzes your tweets (the words, Twitter usernames, and hashtags you use) and compares them to terms that are correlated with book categories.
… it is a book recommendation app at heart. The results can be interesting. We publish below this months analysis of our journal Twitter feed. We have featured the lead book in three categories; Science and Technology, Politics and Social Sciences and Business.
The Mobile Wave – are we immersed already?
‘In the tradition of international best-sellers, Future Shock and Megatrends, Michael J. Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, brings The Mobile Wave, a ground-breaking analysis of the impact of mobile intelligence-the fifth wave of computer technology.
The Mobile Wave argues that the changes brought by mobile computing are so big and widespread that it’s impossible for us to see it all, even though we are all immersed in it’.
The book examines theories (models) of how systems (those of humans, nature, and combined human natural systems) function, and attempts to understand those theories and how they can help researchers develop effective institutions and policies for environmental management.
The fundamental question this book asks is whether or not it is possible to get beyond seeing environment as a sub-component of social systems, and society as a sub-component of ecological systems, that is, to understand human-environment interactions as their own unique system
Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems by Lance H. Gunderson (Editor), C. S. Holling (Editor) Buy this book from Amazon.co.uk here
‘The first make-or-break step in persuading anyone to do any thing is getting them to hear you out. Whether the person is a harried colleague, a stressed-out client, or an insecure spouse, things will go from bad to worse if you can’t break through emotional barricades.
Drawing on his experience as a psychiatrist, business consultant, and coach, and backed by the latest scientific research, author Mark Goulston shares simple but power ful techniques readers can use to really get through to people—whether they’re coworkers, friends, strangers, or enemies’.
Getting through is a fine art but a critical one.
Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Mark Goulston M.D. (Author), Keith Ferrazzi (Foreword). Buy this book from Amazon.co.uk
Did BookRX get the feel of our readership right? The acid test for us is does the machine generated selection have an appropriate ‘RSA feel’ to it? We think it does, providing sources that are appropriately defined through the prism of our journal content.
The app also generates selections for sports and fitness, as well as a fiction list. These are a little more difficult to empathise with, although we may publish future lists as book recommendations of regular interest for Fellows, particularly as the volume of our Twitter traffic grows.
One charitable application for the technology, we can think of, is to use the Knight Lab service to generate book lists for on-line sale as a fund-raising initiative. Taking the guess work out of list building for your audience?
Editors Note:
BookRx was created by Shawn O’Banion and Larry Birnbaum and designed by Jeremy Gilbert and Sarah Adler at Northwestern University’s Knight Lab, with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the National Science Foundation
Northwestern University Knight Lab advances news media innovation and education. Developing ideas from experimentation through adoption, the Lab makes technology that aims to help make information meaningful and promotes quality storytelling on the Internet.
Continuing our diversions for summer 2014 , we nonetheless remain interested in gender inequality and below take the opportunity to look at interesting initiatives designed to boost the engagement and equality of status for women in technology.
Girls in Tech Paris 2014 – European Lady Pitch Night
Despite the rather off message phrasing of the translated title, if you are a female technologist, active in a European based start-up and have been operational in your company or project for between six and thirty six months, then you could be n your way to Paris for this Girls in Tech Paris/Orange sponsored annual event on the 23rd September.
Applications have been extended and are closing on July 23rd, so you still have time to get your bid in. All finalists will receive tickets to Europe’s top technology conferences, including Dublin Le Web, LeWeb and Europas. Your submission will be tested, in English, in front of a jury, after a telephone interview to complete the selection process.
If you are a female technologist intent on a career in the sector, despite some of the reservations below, we think Girls in Tech London is a great resource. Their pages offer insights into fifteen UK Tech Women to watch in 2014. Great role models and great examples of women driven technology enterprise. See more here…
Microsoft – supporting change in the gender balance
The Seattle giant recently, in June 2014, held a number of sessions at its Cambridge Research building in our region, designed to interest and promote female engagement with technology and software.
It is widely recognised that women entering the sector are faced by a massive gender imbalance, with attitudes to women still in transition in the industry. However, keen to not lose good minds and the opportunity for original research, Microsoft held a workshop on Tips and Tools for Scientific Research Success – ‘…aimed to educate attendees about Microsoft research tools, equip them with advice from experienced researchers about the opportunities of being an early-career researcher, and inspire them with examples from Microsoft Research that show the potential of computer science to change the world’.
Although 55% of enrolments in higher education are for women, data from HESA in 2013 shows, fewer than 3% of graduates were in computer science. Of that cohort only 17% were women.
Attendees at the Microsoft event in Cambridge looked at issues around cloud computing, research tools that Microsoft currently offers and how attendees might master Excel and WordPress in order to deliver and publish their research.
The attendees also looked at Chronozoom and Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope. If you are interested in history and star gazing, these are great tools to find out more about your subject at any level, even if you are not a research scientist .
Another solution to the gender imbalance in ‘tech’ is to build a steadfast Bailey castle, and exclude the male majority from it. In San Francisco, the Double Union feminist hacker space does just that.
Just using the word castle would, we expect, bring us into conflict with the collective’s base assumptions. However, an overwhelming belief in open-ness and collaboration is, we recognise, trumped by the assessment that the problems for women in ‘tech’ industry are so large, that barriers need to be erected to allow a comfortable, clear space for reflection and creativity.
Fast Company recently published a profile of the feminist work space and of Amelia Greenhall, the spaces Executive Director. To sign up for Double Union women must evidence that they share a similar world view as other centre residents.
A key ‘counter-text’ for Unioner’s is Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. The Union holds that it is the tech industry that needs to change, not the women in it. Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, drove a movement forward. You can see the Lean In web pages here. But the more ardent, Double Union feminist approach, and the data, argues that for most women in technology, the barriers are not falling. Despite gentler feminist movements, girls who code projects and the well known female faces in the industry – tokenism at best the Unioner’s would probably argue.
They present a cogent argument. Google’s payroll includes only 17% of employees who are women, whilst Facebook offers workspaces and careers to only 15% of its staffing levels to women. Not much evidence of internal change in these major sector players, we would argue.
Perhaps the solution is the rainbow coalition approach? The ardent, exclusive feminists and the gentler, inclusive mainstream corporate sensibility will together reshape the face of ‘tech’ in the future, for all women? We hope so.
We read and were stirred by the Fast Company article. Written by a female journalist it none the less includes a description of what the Executive Director of the feminist space was wearing. We can’t remember the last time we read an interview with Bill Gates which featured his wardrobe?
(Are there any similar feminist community initiatives for ‘tech’ in the Eastern Region? We can’t think of any. If you know of one, let us know. We’ll feature it on our journal pages and continue the conversation…Ed).
In his recent RSA Annual Lecture, Matthew Taylor espoused creativity. How the RSA should exist to ‘…empower people to be capable, active participants in creating the world we want to live in…’
In his lecture Matthew argues that we stand on the edge of a vast plain of opportunity. Social, technological and philosophical changes in the last century have the potential to enable every person to be creative, in the widest sense.
His core argument cites Amartya Sen, amongst others, who have argued that with the creativity that education and open-ness deliver, runs alongside a reliance on resources. These must be garnered, deployed and accounted for too.
He does stress that in this century those resources are, or can be for most, free. This journal, for example, is a product of imagination and the utilisation of Open Source software to create and deliver information and opinion to a social network.
Although we would bind ourselves to the argument it does not fully extend itself, yet, into the sphere of hardware. The technology we need to deploy free assets still comes at a cost, a la Amartya Sen.
Matthew also presses us to the concept that creativity is not the sole remit of high culture alone. For a creative individual, it is perhaps starting a new socially focused enterprise, writing and publishing new works or working with others to deliver societal change.
This notion of ‘the social’ is a strong theme in the lecture. Matthew argues for the collapse of ‘Fordism’ and traditional passive consumption of services in the local authority arena. The social transaction in the workplace and wider civic society itself undergoing dramatic change at the social/technological interface. This change, the lecture makes clear, is still under way. Destination unknown.
In the final part of the lecture we hear of two key restraints on creativity.
One is the ever increasing ‘gap’ to reach those who enjoy privilege and wealth. Matthew cites Thomas Piketty’s recent argument that the traditionalist, narrow pyramidal social and economic structures of the past continue to eat into the resources, and undertake exploitation of, the majority in the present. The spectre of Marx is at the feast, even for Piketty.
Secondly, the Weberian notion of ‘splitting’ is a key restraint argued for by our lecturer. ‘Social pyramidism’ is reflected in the largest corporations, whether in the civic domain or in private hands. Where individuals are completely constrained by function and hierarchy…to the detriment of their own creativity.
We would probably extend this argument slightly further, in that the traditionalist, elitist and pyramidal organisation creates a culture of fear, not of creativity. All creative people recognise the tone of those emails, the sense of ‘beyond my pay grade’, that any attempt at initiative and new thinking can create.
This personal creativity is fostered, we would argue, in the private, domestic domain to the disregard of the corporate structures that the individual labours under….perversely perhaps, in order to acquire the technology to be properly free.
In conclusion, the lecture pitches us into the argument of ‘civic effects’, where success for a creative society will be an ad-mixture of engagement in civil society, the activation and support of creative ‘doers of things’ and the press to change entrenched behaviours, in order to disrupt the traditional pyramidal approach.
It’s a powerful argument from and for the RSA and should be heard widely.
The web has promoted a revolution in media delivery and consumption, and has generated a similar paradigm shift in production processes and work flows. Whether for the corporate giants of this world, or the lonely writer crafting a masterpiece in his or her garret.
Evidence of the changes in news and visual media were well illustrated in a recent RSA lecture by John Ryley, Head of Sky News. His father, he tells us, was a vicar’s son, who was profoundly affected by his son’s elevation to the ranks of journalism.
You can hear the lecture, and an introduction by Matthew Taylor of The RSA, with an audience Q&A, by using the audio player below…
In his lecture John Ryley describes his own early acquaintance with television. Describing it as a pseudo-religious experience, with the family sitting in rows, silent, facing an iconic piece of equipment, bathed in a particular blue light.
Web technologies and new software have also promoted a similar revolution in print journalism, which that and the ubiquitous access that the web offers to any journalist, would be or otherwise, the chance to profoundly affect their ability as humans to tell simple stories.
Why do we write, and become journalists, historians, authors, self published or otherwise? Has technology really affected the way we look at the word on paper and on screen?
George Orwell, writing in 1946, mapped the landscape of why we write. That perceptive voice is still being heard from Manhattan offices to Cumbrian writerly retreats…
“Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed”.
“Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity”.
“Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude”.
Orwell’s philosophy of the narrative is being flexed for the internet age at the The New York Times. Long an innovator in print journalism technology, they have recently published an article on the creation of their new back office production engine for the newspaper.
What is trans-figurative for New York Times journalists is the new focus on web and mobile as the default primary templates in this production process. The ability to blend digital content for traditional press production is not an incidental or trivial outcome, it is imperative to keep ‘paper on the street’, but it is a secondary outcome of the creative writing and editorial process. This is new.
It is also interesting that it is not only production processes and outputs that are being blended. The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the Firefox web browser and scion of the radical, open internet, has recently been the recipient of a grant “…of roughly $3.9 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which promotes innovation in journalism”.
With the money Mozilla will build a new ‘comments’ software for the New York Times and the Washington Post. It is remarkable that both newspapers are the properties of major league capitalists, but this non-profit initiative is geared to giving readers the chance to generate content, and to take part in the journalistic process by offering the writers direct feedback on their articles in new and innovative ways.
A new blend of capital, charity and community engagement, which may well transform newspaper publishing?
Finally, amidst all this corporate activity and development at scale, technological innovation for the lone writer has not been lagging behind. From your own desk you can change the world one article at a time by using the services of Medium – a mixture of blogging platform, paid for content, social networking and collaboration tool.
With a beautifully designed interface, and tools that are intuitive and graceful, you can craft stories, news and research that are delivered in an elegant format to your readers.
We like Medium. Its content can be challenging and provocative, but it is also a place where the thoughtful, considered article can find a home. From new fiction to a story of how the cellular structure of the nematode worm has an impact on human brain function, sculpted with light…all writing is here. (You can find the worm article here…).
Of course, as an RSA Fellow in the East of England, you could publish your thoughtful piece in the pages of conversationsEAST. That’s new too!
Send copy at any time to editor (at) conversationseast.org …your audience awaits.
Here at conversationsEAST, this was a story that had everything. High art, craft skills, invention, controversy and ladles of genius. Entwining a Texas entrepreneur, a seventeenth century Dutch painter and an obsessive journey into the ‘how it was done’.
Tim Jenison is a Texas based inventor and technologist with a deep interest in the painting of Johannes Vermeer (1632 – 1675). Put simply, Jenison is of the view that Vermeer could not have painted his interior scenes from life alone, the application of technology, Jenison insists, is how the stunning art works were created so long ago.
The short film below encapsulates the long journey of exploration that Jenison has undertaken to make his point. He has deployed art history skills, the talents of a craftsmen and the inquisitiveness of an inventor to make an argument, which whilst contentious is, none the less, powerful.
His five year journey involved making exact replicas of the furniture and musical instruments in a Vermeer painting, and through utilising the concept of a camera obscura and a mirror on a stick, Tim sought to recreate Vermeer’s picture, The Music Lesson.
The interiors of the room, it’s content and effects were built by Tim, even hand building the lens to seventeenth century specifications that he used to deliver his painting technique.
The results? Well you can see the full depiction of his work over time in this original article from an issue of boingboing.net.
Is it a good argument? We have looked at another old master to see if his thesis is watertight. We have used images stored on the pages of the Google Cultural Institute. (If you have a love of the visual arts this is a storehouse and toolkit of very impressive proportions – Ed.)
Section of Il Canal Grande de Ca’Balbi verso Rialto 1721-1723 Antonio Canal detto Canalletto | Ca’ Rezzonico – Museum of the 18th Century Venice
Within the broad sweep of this large Canaletto, the texture of the oil paint, the slightly impressionistic depiction of the figures and the matte ‘depth’ of the boat clearly show Canaletto’s brush work and his hand.
Below is a similar size section of the painting, The Music Lesson by Vermeer, that was the object of Tim Jenison’s attention. In it the light falling from the window, the tone and smoothness of the wall surface by the window and increasing colour change away from the light source into the room are, to echo Jenison’s argument, extremely photo-like.
Section of Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman, The Music Lesson c. 1162 – 1665 Johannes Vermeer | Royal Collection Trust, UK
This might disturb quite a lot of people
…David Hockney
The work of Jenison and his collaborators is a wonderful example to anyone who has an idea or a need to find out, whether an RSA Fellow or not. Obsessive perhaps, but stunning in the execution of so many skills and techniques.
Was Vermeer really a tech geek?
Read the article, watch the film and tell us what you think….
Image: Albert Robida, 1882 – The Public Domain Review, 2014
A wonderful vision of city and cultural life, imagined in 1882. Even in the 21st century it is hard to contemplate leaving a cultural event in a city, stepping into your floating air carriage and drifting off home in ease and solitude.
Even after the most vigorous Tannhauser at the Royal Opera House, a trip on the Northern Line to return to the solace of High Barnet bears no comparison.
We have not given up on the city yet, though.
Our recent Fellows Annual dinner in the East of England was held in the surroundings of Emmanuel College in Cambridge. Dating from 1584, the original Dominican Priory has been embraced by later buildings, yet Fellows were able to hear an entertaining and informative after dinner talk by Matt Lane, Head of the Royal Opera House site at Thurrock, the Bob and Tamar Manoukian Production Workshop, where ROH productions are built and delivered to cities.
The conversation also ranged across the occasion of the region’s forthcoming conference at the University of East Anglia. The programme for which includes Norwich Fellows session on Empowering Invisible Norwich and another on What is a Learning City? So although we will not arrive by hover car, the idea of the city will continue to echo.
Extending the city:
Writing just before the start of this century Peter Hall, in his book Cities in Civilisation – Culture, Innovation and Urban Order ( Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1998) was minded that…
At the turning point between the twentieth century and the twenty-first, a new kind of economy is coming into being, and a new kind of society, and a new kind of city: some would say no city at all, the end of the city as we know it, but they will doubtless prove wrong…
Hall goes on to develop his argument about societal change and stresses the enormous impact of technology on urban dwellers across the globe. This is true, but the forecasts of the end of the city have proved somewhat premature.
In fact, the building, or extending of cities, continues to be a hot political issue. For the forthcoming report by Sir Michael Lyons there is an indication that he will recommend that cities should be allowed to expand at their edges, a return to the New Town concept perhaps. With councils free to borrow and invest in house building and bringing reform of land release for house building to the table.
This latter point outlines how strong the the High Victorian concept of urban spread as an entirely bad thing remains. Surely the point is what sort of urban extension or city growth you achieve. We must not build urban ‘rookeries‘, or blanket ‘Bedford Brick‘ box extensions across acres of green fields either, we would argue.
Land release for social housing or city corporation development will be a thorny issue for private landowners, what ever the political persuasion of the originating idea, we suspect. You can see this debate outlined in more detail in a recent article from Patrick Wintour in The Guardian here.
Farming the city:
Using existing infrastructure in conurbations for innovative purposes is immensely appealing. Using it to farm, to develop new urban and social businesses based on food, new flowers and green space cultivation is a great way to deliver new skills, better diets and employment into communities, we would argue at conversationsEAST.
Robida in 1882, or Hall in 1998, could not have imagined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MITCityFARM project.
“As part of the City Science Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, we explore the technological, environmental, social and economic design of scalable systems capable of producing affordable and high quality food in the heart of our future cities”.
If you have an interest in this green aspect of the debate an on-line visit to MIT is worth it. The MITCityFARM team are working in three key areas.
Re-thinking the ‘grow it there, eat it here’ agenda
reviewing the ‘urban infrastructure facade’
developing global open access course-ware, to make knowledge about agriculture available to all.
In the East of England, the agricultural heartland of the UK, arguably, there must be Fellow’s projects that can be blended into delivery of vertical gardens, rooftop farms or the reclaiming of industrial and derelict sites for community owned small holdings or gardens? (Write to the Editor, let us know, we’ll do a feature…Ed.)
The edge of the city, in the city garden:
A blending of city growth concepts and urban farming/community greening agendas come together in the now, with the recent release of the short list for the Wolfson Economic Prize.
The Wolfson Prize team undertook research to see what sort of urban development was uppermost in people’s minds. The Garden City was by far the most popular ‘civic choice’ of growth mechanism. Simon Wolfson talks about the design choice in this short film below…
In conclusion, maybe the time is now right. We have innovative thinking on edge development, an energised architectural sector with modern materials and community sensibility, coinciding with increased interest in city farms and Garden Cities from the civitas.
In the last two weeks the BBC have launched a new set of web pages and content dedicated to the arts. The material , as you would expect from the Corporation, is diverse and stimulating, with a fresh feel in terms of web layout and visual impact we thought. It draws upon television, radio and web outputs to create a new miscellany.
Below are some of the items we have found interesting at conversationsEAST this week.
Both are of a historical bent, with historian Niall Ferguson opining on how young students now see and re-act to the First World War. A topical segment from the 2014 Hay Festival, with brief contributions from Rosie Boycott and Kate Adie.
Niall Ferguson, ever controversial, begins by describing the teaching of history about the First World War in the UK as, essentially, education about the Home Front. The lack of familial links for young people to the events of 1914 onwards make the story of the Battle of the Somme as relevant as the Battle of Thermopylae, thus the concentration on social history.
The Ferguson thesis on how students see The First World War is encouragingly developed to include how contemporary learners, Ferguson argues, are now very interested in strategic calculation and miscalculation.
This is a credible argument for a return to interest in the prevailing political frameworks by students of 1914. The less comfortable summation is completed by references to the teaching of the impact of the First World War as a video game…perhaps something of an unfortunate trivialisation of all the stories of loss, destruction and bravery that will emerge as the centenary of the conflict is remembered this year?
Have a look at the clip above and see if you agree?
You can see details of Changing Chelmsford’s First World War: Then and Now programme on our projects page. This is a Lottery funded project between RSA Fellows and the local Civic Society which pertinently concentrates on the historical context of the Home Front, under-scoring the very real social and economic impact of war to the Fellows credit…despite the Fergusonian treatise on domestic history above.
See Scottish novelist Denise Mina talking about her film project here…
We loved the fact that the project was filmed on a smartphone, with very modest funding. The finished piece will be premiered today at the Go North Festival in Inverness.
We thought what a great project, harnessing the power of ubiquitous modern technology, to create a story about a community. An ideal medium for a local arts/history project for Fellows in the region perhaps? Detailing the currency of everyday lives, to to be made enduringly available on the web.
We warmed to the new BBC Arts amalgam and will revisit its news feed regularly. See more here…
The Science Museum Group have just launched the first issue of their bi-annual on-line journal. See the first edition here.
A collaboration between the Science Museum (London), the Museum of Science & Industry (Manchester), the National Railway Museum (York) and the National Media Museum (Bradford). The Group has achieved Independent Research Organisation (IRO) status with major UK Research Councils.
The Science Museum Group Journal is an open access publication. Designed to be freely available to all readers and ‘knowledge distributors’…( a conversationsEAST concept? Ed.) The articles can be freely copied and adapted, as long as the appropriate attribution is given, under the terms of theCreative Commons Attribution licence.
(Care should be taken of course, if the articles contain imagery or data that is subject to copyright by other individuals or organisations).
Ian Blatchford, Director of The Science Museum, writing in this first issue opines…
Academic publishing is going through a period of extraordinary change and its future is somewhat uncertain, but the Science Museum Group Journal takes advantage of being born in a digital age, with all the opportunities that this offers. One of the greatest of these, perhaps, is the ability to share our extraordinary library of images, film and multi-media, not just as wallpaper but as an important and often beautiful primary source in its own right…
Reading the first issue a couple of articles shone out for us as a wonderful way to use the internet to contextualise history.
Florence Grant, a post-doctoral researcher at Yale Centre for British Art writes about George Adams assembling large amounts of ‘philosophical instruments’ for George III in the 1760’s.
The illustrations in the piece echo the research findings about the importance of using old engravings in the design process for new instrumentation – cutting and pasting in the modern vernacular…long before Microsoft Word. Read more here…
Similarly, Alice Cliff’s piece on William Bally and his phrenological specimens uses graphics to effect, helping us understand the variety and scope of this Manchester made 3D archive.
The article reveals that Bally used a pantograph to create his specimens. A piece of equipment well known to sign makers in the mid 20th century before the arrival of the micro-chip and the keyboard. Read more here…
We enjoyed exploring the first issue of this new journal – academically sound, rigorously produced and open to all. If we may be permitted a thoroughly unprofessional salutation…way to go Science Museum Group!
