Date: 8–9 September 2011
We invite proposals from a broad range of academic disciplines for a 2 day symposium examining sites of popular music heritage: from institutions such as museums, to geographic locations, websites and online archives. Papers are welcomed that explore popular music within narratives of heritage and identity, real and imagined geographies, cultural memory and contested histories.

The event will focus on three thematic areas:

Popular Music Heritage in the Museum

In recent years museums have increasingly engaged with popular music heritage, as evidenced in a proliferation of exhibitions including those in the UK such as Kylie: The Exhibition at the V&A and the British Music Experience at the O2. Museum interaction with popular music heritage enables methods of narration beyond traditional written histories, engaging visitors with objects, sounds and images. The place of popular music in the museum raises issues of how music is both represented and used to represent and explore social histories, personal and collective identities, memories, and geographies. Possible themes for papers include:

• Popular music and locality in the museum
• Disseminating popular music heritage in museums beyond text
• History and memory in popular music exhibitions and collections

Heritage, Place and Local Identity

While ideas of heritage and cultural memory play an increasingly important role in popular music historiography, the spatial and geographic frameworks underpinning the production of popular music histories remain comparatively under-examined in studies to date. The spatial embedding of popular music heritage raises questions as to the ways in which ideas of local, regional and national identity are shaped by geographies of music and place; the role of mobility practices in the production of local music histories; and the capacity for popular music memoryscapes to stimulate (and sustain) embodied and emotional attachments to places and localities. Possible themes for papers include:

• Contested geographies of popular music heritage
• Routes of popular music heritage: mobility, migration, wayfinding
• Cartographies of popular music history

Digital Archives and Online Practice

Heritage practices have proliferated in the digital age and a large part of related activity online is devoted to popular music. ‘Authorised’ or otherwise, social media groups, blogs and web pages are organised and defined by, amongst other things, genre, artist, period and geography. Sites dedicated to the popular music of Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Coventry, Bristol, Woolongong, Brisbane or Detroit speak simultaneously to the hyper-local and global quality of popular music culture. The nature of such online practices raise questions about the ontology of the archive, the digital ‘artefact’ and collective memory. In light of the challenges presented to the music industries by digitisation, key questions concern the role of music and related intellectual property in online ‘folk’ histories. Possible themes for papers include:

• Contested geographies of popular music heritage
• Authorising popular music heritage and archiving practice online
• Building music cultures and communities of memory online
• Online music heritage, music industries and ownership

Please submit proposals for papers (300 words max) to

Dr Rob Knifton (robert.knifton@liverpool.ac.uk ) and Dr Les Roberts (les.roberts@liverpool.ac.uk).
Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2011

Date for registration: 30 June 2011

Deadline for submission of draft papers: 01 Aug 2011

• Further information and registration details will be posted shortly at www.liv.ac.uk/music/
• Papers presented at the symposium will be considered for publication.

This event is co-organized with the Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University.

I started the Birmingham Popular Music Archive as way of engendering civic pride through the wide range of music activity that has emanated from Birmingham and as a way celebrating and recognising those individuals and organisations that have played a role in this.

It has always struck me as a missed opportunity, and indicative of the way popular culture is viewed, that there is no permanent archive dedicated to the music of the city. For many reasons I hope that this is rectified soon.

In light of this then, I set about creating an online archive that asks its users to ‘tell us what you know’ about Birmingham and its music. It runs on a wordpress platform and was really an experiment to see if people would engage in constructing an archive which in turn would go some way to proving if such a resource was needed. It has been so successful that I’m now looking to host it on a dedicated site that will enable the site to become a proper user friendly website.

One of the reasons for doing this will be so I can fully integrate it across the spectrum of social media platforms. Bizarrely, although I use Twitter extensively and Facebook a lot in a personal capacity, I’ve never really used these tools to push the archive out to further potential users or audiences.

A Facebook page has been set up and my Twitter bio states ‘Celebrating Birmingham’s rich musical heritage’ with a link to the archive site.

However, I very rarely tweet about the archive and when I do it is usually to highlight an event or piece of work that we have done (such as the recent documentary Made In Birmingham) and I’ve never  posted on the Facebook page despite people still joining it, albeit in small numbers.

So I was pleased to be pointed in the direction of this recent academic article: An Analysis of Twitter and Facebook Use by the Archival Community
Adam Crymble in the ARCHIVARIA 70 (Fall 2010): 125–151which I hoped would provide me with an insight into this area.

Crymble has provided a qualitative and quantitive study into 195 institutional and individual users over a 30 day period and in particular looks at the 2926 outbound links – links to other websites of archival information or interest – that were posted. Cymble splits the study groups in to three categories:

Archival organisations using Facebook
Archival organisations using Twitter
Archivists using Twitter

As the title states, Crymble looks at Facebook and Twitter as the social media platforms that he studied and provides a brief, but interesting account of the debates and usage that the archive community engaged with online. Surprisingly, the introduction of ‘Web 2.0′ didn’t significantly change the engagement with online tools and added a further issue to the debate in the community, one that I contend is still on going, that of the ability of researchers/content generators to tag or re-order collections which archivists argue, undermine their roles as professional practitioners.

The author offers a useful guide to Facebook and Twitter, including a ‘Quick Facts’ table showing comparisons between both and should be congratulated on  the clarity of language which, one would hope, will be of use to it’s intended audience – archivists!

Crymble is also clear that he is not writing a ‘how best to use’  social media but offering an insight to how the archive community is currently using social media which those thinking about, or already using these tools, might find useful for their practice. He rejects providing a textual analysis approach, merely looking at what people write to infer meaning, as being to narrow to provide a robust conclusion. Instead Crymble has thoughtfully chosen to look at the outbound links posted by users. These are links that lead to other sites that contain further information about the subject being discussed and the author categorised them as such:
User’s own website
User’s own blog
User’s own Facebook page
External website
External blog

and he further divided the links into four categories as to the motivation for providing the links:
Non-Archival: No intention to promote personal, organisational or archival information
Promotional Outreach: Promoting archival work of the organisation or person, a closely related organisation posting the link
Interest to Archivists/Other Archives: Links that other archivists or organisations may find useful
Broken Links: Links that were posted but no longer working when the author was researching the article

Using this method enabled the author to provide some clear analysis in his finding as to different approaches to how the groups used social media. As Crymble states, the three study groups all broadcast and use the platforms very differently form each other. He also provides a robust explanation of the methodology he used in the statistical data that he provides. Too complicated for me to try and explain here!

In brief, his finding showed that archivists used Twitter as a way of engaging in conversation with other users and the links posted were heavily weighted to material written by others as opposed to promotional outreach of their work.
For archival organisations using Twitter, the reserve was true. These organisations overwhelmingly posted links directly relating to their own material, for events and so on, and didn’t engage in the wider archival conversations.
Archival organisations using Facebook pages were much less active and during the study period over half the pages remained unchanged. Those that were updated were again pointed towards their own material and significantly linked back to their Facebook page. Again this was a case of an organisation using social media as a way of promotion rather than engagement.

As Crymble points out, there is a lot here that points to the need of further research being undertaken in the area of online archival activity to better inform those engaged in archive activity in reaching and engaging audiences. This he suggests, would also be off use when comparing offline with in-house programming in aiding archive organisations to better understand where to focus their outreach programs.

If there is a note of criticism it is the surprise that organisations such as the British Library with their Sound Archive or the Home Of Metal and Birmingham Popular Music Archive weren’t looked at in this study despite the author’s fairly extensive trawl for archive activity (there is an invaluable list of the 195 organisations and archivists included.) Harder to find but worthy of inclusion I think, are those individual Facebook pages set up as informal archives to mainly site specific places such as the Barrel Organ venue in Birmingham. Certainly an archive, certainly not an organisational one. Perhaps these these types of archives should be added to the list of further research Crymble notes. Although the author acknowledges that some will have been missed, just a cursory glance throws up these organisations.

However this is not enough to detract from a well timed and needed piece of research that has certainly made me think about how and why I should use these social media platforms in my own practice and the wider question of how the digital space has thrown up a huge amount of archives from a wide range people across a wide range of interests.

The full article can be reached here: http://adamcrymble.blogspot.com/2010/11/analysis-of-twitter-and-facebook-use-by.html

Bibliography

Crymble, Adam (2010) An Analysis of Twitter and Facebook Use by the Archival Community
Archivaria 70: 125–151

Time: 2pm
Date: Thursday 25 November 2010
Location: The Pump, Kitts Green Road, Lea Village, B33 9SB
Further info: info@reelaccess.org.uk / 0121 6758391
www.phillipdonnellan.posterous.com

I was asked to talk about music fanzines at the Birmingham Zine Festival. This informal presentation relates my experiences of music fanzines around the end of the 1980s.

The Ins and Outs of Music Fanzines by Interactive Cultures

Last month I spent two days in the company of South African social media academic Marlon Parker. Regular readers will remember Marlon from his guest post several months ago. The purpose of the visit was to share thoughts and ideas in the field of social media, and to discuss social media education. We were fortunate that the visit coincided with a number of social media events in Birmingham, which meant I could give Marlon a real flavour of what we do in the West Midlands and I could introduce him to as many contacts as possible in a few short days. So what does an academic and social entrepreneur from Cape Town make of the social media activity in Birmingham? And what could we learn from him? The answer is: “a lot”.

Social Media for Social Good

Marlon’s work is centred around the concept of social media for social good. He works with communities in Cape Town, using social media to tackle difficult social problems in Cape Town. Sceptics might wonder how blogging can help find away through problems such as gang violence and drug dependencies. For Marlon the answer is simple: social media works when there is a community bonded by a common set of circumstances. He works with people who are coping with or trying to escape certain circumstances. There is a tension in this society, but that tension is a bond. Where you have a bond, a set of shared circumstances, you have a community. Where you have a community, social media can be effective. In the video below Marlon outlines his work and his philosophy to Nick Booth of Podnosh / Be Vocal:

Social media used for social good is a common aim of media workers and thinkers in Birmingham, but Marlon’s projects are operating at a level of engagement that we are currently only aiming for. Marlon’s work demonstrates that we can make effective social interventions through technology, and could provide useful evidence when we make this case to policy makers and government agencies.

Social Media in Education

Another area that is something of a Birmingham specialism is social media education. From social media surgeries to my own school’s MA Social Media, we seem to be at the vanguard of this area. Marlon’s own university has aspirations to provide qualifications within this area so a lot of our discussions revolved around social media education.

To this end, I introduced Marlon to Jon Bounds, Stuart Parker and Michael Grimes. They are core members of social enterprise We Share Stuff (I am also a member of the team). A key We Share Stuff project involves using social media to engage young offenders with technology, leading to credit towards formal qualifications through the Open College Network. Marlon was very impressed with this innovation, and is considering introducing it into some of his projects in South Africa by contacting his equivalent of the Open College Network. As a group we also discussed the spectrum of training and qualifications, from Level 1 through to masters degrees, that could come under the social media subject area. We sketched out how these might be applied to real world skills and jobs. While we were not able to come up with any key action points to take this part of the conversation it is something worthy of further consideration.

The Social Media Scene

In addition to meeting with Nick Booth, and The We Share Stuff team, Marlon managed to meet a number of local bloggers and social media workers. Birmingham and the Black Country have a well developed network of regular meetings where the social media community or the wider creative industries community meet up. We were lucky that Marlon’s trip coincided with Brum Bloggers, an evening pub based meeting, and Black Country Social Media Café, a more formal daytime meeting (which happened to be the furthest North Marlon had ever been).

So what did Marlon make of us? Here’s what he has to say over on his blog:

Overall I am very impressed by the level of creative industries involvement in the space of Social Media and It also showed me that here in Birmingham there is a breed of social media people who have such a vast amount of experiences to share and could be useful for others out there to make the trip or connection with any of these amazing individuals who will add value to your social media experience.

I hope we’ll see Marlon again soon, and I’ll be sure to keep up to date with his blogs and his formal publications on social media for social good.

With this in mind, earlier in the month Siobhan Mullen and I joined the first of three “Pathways For Community Media in London” seminars organised by London Metropolitan University. The aim of the series is to “bring together community media practitioners to identify the needs and aspirations of London’s many disenfranchised communities and discuss a way forward that will give them a voice over the airwaves and the internet”. The hope is to eventually produce a manifesto for Community Media in London.

Although BCU’s representatives were “outsiders” in terms of the London radio debate, guests were interested to hear about Birmingham’s diverse mix of community radio. It was a productive afternoon, hosted at the Rich Mix Centre by Penny Wrout, BBC London Communities Editor, who generously got in the first round at the end of the day. Other attendees included Khera Amarjit the founder of Desi Radio, Trevor Dann the Director of the Radio Academy and Jacqui Devereux, Director of the Community Media Association.

Future seminars topics include “Sustainability” on the 12th of June, “Ways Forward for the Future” on the 1st of July. For more information, contact Donald McTernan donald@donaldmack.co.uk

Picture: Sam and Siobhan with Project Coordinator Donald McTernan and Peter Lewis, Senior Lecturer in Community Media, London Metropolitan University.