On 22nd June 2009 at our Perry Barr City North campus in Birmingham, the Interactive Cultures team attended RESCON09, the first of what looks to be an annual research conference at Birmingham City University. The event may sound like a highly futuristic, evil corporation, but it’s really just an abbreviation of ‘Research Conference’.
We’ve been busy this last week, travelling up to Leeds in order to present at two conferences.
The first was ‘The Word on Jazz’, the latest annual event held at the Leeds College of Music (it began in 1993). Andrew Dubber presented work coming out of his research with Tim Wall on jazz online as part of the now completed BBC project. Tim Wall and I were able to elaborate on the work that we have been doing on popular music histories on TV. Tim spoke about Ken Burns’ PBS series ‘Jazz’ while I spoke on the BBC’s ‘Jazz Britannia’ series. We’ll be developing these themes in further conferences and in at least two scheduled publications so watch for details. Suffice to say, our collective BCU panel was warmly received and generated some interesting observations and comments. Such instances serve to add to the rigour of how the work finally looks when (if) published.
Recently Andrew Dubber and Professor Tim Wall researched the activities of fans of specialist music, and the ways in which they relate to the BBC through interactive and online media. Their findings are now public, and you can read the full report as a PDF document.