interactivecultures

I was recently invited by the United Nations and World Health Organisation to attend their annual international conference to discuss the use of radio in prisons as a way to engage with hard to reach prisoners. I, Morag McDonald (from CRQ at BCU), Phil Maguire (from the Prison Radio Association-one of our KTF partners) and Andrew Wilkie (from the National Prison Radio Authority) presented a one hour workshop on the benefits of using prison radio as a tool for health promotion and education within prisons. Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of January 2010, our current AHRC-funded knowledge transfer fellowship (KTF) project draws to a close. That’s only a marker date, but it is the point at which the funding stops. Three months later, we need to have submitted forms, letters and financial summaries which, among other things, evaluate our project’s effectiveness and general, overall, wholesome family goodness.

And there’s our problem. We’ll have spent two years working with our KTF partners – and there are lots of them – and we have to judge how effective our involvement has been. Read the rest of this entry »

Left to right: Prof Tim Wall, Andrew Dubber, Dr Simon Barber and Jez Collins.

What is it?

‘Just Like Jazz‘ is a collaborative project between the Interactive Cultures research unit at Birmingham City University, and the Scarborough Jazz Festival. The team comprises Professor Tim Wall, Andrew Dubber, Dr Simon Barber and Jez Collins. Part of our academic interests include jazz and so we’re working with the Scarborough Jazz Festival to explore the ways in which jazz festivals can be portrayed online.

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In an earlier post we mentioned an Interactive Cultures radio documentary about Irish rocker Phil Lynott. To mark what would have been Lynott’s 60th birthday this Thursday, BBC West Midlands 95.6 FM will be broadcasting the half hour feature at approximately 1300 on the Jimmy Franks Show on Saturday the 22nd of August.

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Birmingham City Council has come into criticism this week over the development of it’s new birmingham.gov.uk website. The coverage and the chatter on the topic got me thinking: how could public sector organisations commission these big projects in a way that might prevent embarrassing questions? Could large scale public web projects be done in a more innovative way? Here’s what I came up with.
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Paul Murphy in Dublin, Photo by Ellie Gibbons

Phil Lynott, lead singer of Irish rockers Thin Lizzy died on January the 4th 1986. It was a slow, painful death, the result of years of drug abuse and excessive drinking. Had he lived, Lynott would be turning sixty next month. It’s a little known fact that this legend of rock was born in South Birmingham. An interesting piece of trivia that caught the attention of Jez Colins, founder of the Birmingham Music Archive.

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Last week I served time at HMP Brixton, as part of our commitment to KTF partners the Prison Radio Association. It was a productive session, which taught spot production skills and built on previous visits to Swinfen Hall, a long term male prison for young adults just outside Lichfield, and Brockhill, a male prison serving the Worcestershire and West Midlands areas.

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Jon Dovey at the “Internet Attractions” Workshop

Last week I attended the University of Nottingham’s “Internet Attractions” workshop, sponsored by the AHRC as part of their “Beyond Text” research programme. Over two days the team examined short-form online media and the fleeting ways they tend to circulate. This was the first of two workshops in the series and focused on ‘user-generated’ content.

The workshop brought together academics from a range of disciplines as well as various media practitioners. Keynote speakers included Professor Barbara Klinger from Indiana University and Hugh Hancock, the Artistic Director of “Strange Company”.

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Singer Nima captures video of her fellow Aftershock participants on a dinner break in Genoa – Pic © After Shock Project

“I can’t believe how hard you work.” High praise from Nitin Sawhney, composer, multi-instrumentalist and (it turns out) heavy-duty arts and culture thinker.

Of course, work’s a relative term when you’re doing something really enjoyable and fascinating in a really amazing setting, but given that I was completely focused on (almost) nothing other than the task at hand from 8am till 2am over 5 consecutive days, perhaps he had a point.

I was in Genoa, Italy with Birmingham web developer and entrepreneur Stef Lewandowski to work on the Aftershock Project – a pan-European collaborative music event. In short, Nitin Sawhney turns up in a town, brings about a dozen musicians together, and they workshop, compose, rehearse and eventually perform about an hour’s worth of completely new music over the course of a week. Stef had been commissioned to make them a website, and he’d asked me on board for my perspective as the “online music guy”.

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Many thanks to Jon Bounds for recording and then uploading the video.