Monday 6th September 2010

Digital development and Application; Content and Creativity

The publishing industry is currently undergoing major challenges: digitisation: is changing the material form of the industry’s key artefacts; the internet is transforming the potential ways in which publications can be distributed and the expectations of their consumers; and these two lead to profound implications for the business models of companies in the industry. Through this event we hope to bring together individuals and organisations involved in academic publishing to identify the issues and set out a way forward. We will present research we have undertaken into the perceptions of publishers, and identity models for the future which have been developed in both publication and our own work with the music business.

Date: Monday 6th September 2010
Venue: The Bond, 180-182 Fazeley Street, Birmingham, B5 5SE
Travel: a five-minute taxi ride from Birmingham New Street Station.
Parking: £5 a day to be booked in advance

Full programme and details of how to be invited to this free event are available on email request from here.

Popular music fandom: a one day symposium, took place at the University of Chester and was organised by Mark Duffett from the School of Media at Chester. As I will be conducting some research around fans as part of my PhD research I thought it would be useful to attend.

The keynote presentation was from Matt Hills from Cardiff University who is one of the UK’s key thinkers in Fan Culture and Fan studies. I had worked with Matt in the past as part of a research team that conducted some research about audience/fan online interaction with the BBC Radio websites as part of a Knowledge Transfer Project. Matt’s presentation was around considering new ways of looking at and researching fan culture based on three ideas of post-popular music, mnemic communities and intermediary fandoms. What I particularly liked was the area of mnemic communities drawing on the work of Bollas (1993) and how music has personal and/or community memory stored within it. He also touched on the idea of whether those memories are imagined and /or a community narrative. I thought this would be very useful to my research as my object of study centres around cultural/popular memory.

Mark  Duffett delivered an interesting paper on moving towards a new vocabulary of fan theory in researching and investigating fandom. He laid out a 9 step vocabulary model which due to my deep interest in what he was saying I failed to make any notes-doh!! I am hoping he will e-mail me his PowerPoint slideshow and if so I will comeback to discussing his ideas on a future blog. What was great about these two presentations was the fact that I am new to fan studies and it seems that I am at a point of entry where the ways of thinking about fandom are taking a new turn and I am getting current and future ideas from two of the leading UK researchers and commentators in the field.

Alexei Michailowsky from the University of Rio De Janeiro delivered an interesting paper about when the researcher is a fan and methodological points in carrying out research into your favourite artist. This was based on his experiences into researching Brazilian musician Marcos Valle. This brought up some useful strategies for me regarding my own research as a fan of British anarcho-punk.

I also met two very interesting people John Harries and Lisa Busby from a band called Sleeps in Oysters who have released records on Seed Records . John had attended to present a paper on David Bowie: A Case Study of the Established Artist as Fan and ‘Musical Conscience’ for the Mainstream which I unfortunately missed because it clashed with another presentation about Northern Soul from Dr Nicola Smith from UWI Cardiff which was really interesting and informative.  Lisa is not only a musician but also an academic who teaches music at Oxford Brookes University We had some interesting conversations about their band and performing their music live and also the revival of the audio cassette and interesting ways to package and market music in the digital age which is something that they and Seed Records really like to explore and develop.

We also talked about her course and she has said that there may be an opportunity to talk to her students about marketing, PR and promotion of music and musicians. She discussed a future conference she is organising and said that there would be an opportunity for me to present at it which will be a great opportunity.

A real coup of the day was meeting a fellow punk Michelle Liptrot from the University of Bolton. She is in the final stages of her PhD research into the longevity of anarcho-punk and hardcore. She hopes to submit in November but from our discussions we determined that some of her research and research findings would be really useful in informing my research. She has generously offered to send me a list of useful texts from her bibliography which I am really grateful for. I wish her the best of luck with the completing stages of her thesis and look forward to reading it once it’s published-if not before. We will definitely keep in touch.

All in all a really informative day that has given me some great ideas and very useful contacts. Thanks to Mark Duffett and his team for organising the symposium.



6-8pm

Wednesday 30th June 2010

Birmingham Library Theatre

The Colony, originally made as an innovative TV documentary, explores the experience of members of the Caribbean migrant community in Birmingham and the Midlands. The film allows its subjects space to candidly evaluate their reception in the UK and their relationships with home and other migrant workers. Controversial at the time of its original broadcast the film is an enduring and powerful document of a key moment in post-war British history.

Everyone is welcome but the event is particularly aimed at those with an interest in the social history of the region, post-war migration and community, documentary film and the BBC. We want to contact educators, heritage and community groups and researchers who will find Donnellan’s archive useful and who might aid in finding ways of preserving it and promoting its use as a resource for the social and cultural history of the region.

Biography: Philip Donnellan (1924-99) worked for the BBC from 1948-84. Much of his professional life was spent in the Midlands where he worked first in radio and then in television. His work expressed his belief in the value of ordinary life and culture and the need to give working people and underrepresented social minorities a space in which to articulate their concerns in their own voices.

The project: Philip Donnellan’s un-catalogued archive is held in the Birmingham Archives and contains an extensive range of film, audio and print material pertaining to his career with the BBC and the works he made in and about the region. An award from Screen West Midlands has allowed the employment of an archive worker to assess these deposits. As a result, we are already finding rich materials such as unbroadcast films, oral histories and programme research materials.

More information: Details of Donnellan’s life and work can be found at the

‘Friends of Philip Donnellan’ website

Subscribe to the posterous site

Join the Facebook group

Help? Please pass this invitation on to your networks and to those who may find the project to be of interest. If you are interested but cannot make the event, let us know and we’ll keep you informed of developments and available resources. If you can get an audience together and find a venue, we’ll be glad to come and show some of the films to you and talk about the project.

RSVP: If you wish to attend, please forward your details to:

donnellanphilip@googlemail.com

Postal address:

Dr Paul Long
Reader in Media and Cultural History
Birmingham School of Media
BCU
B42 2SU

Who is involved? The project is funded by Screen West Midlands and managed by a partnership of Birmingham Archives and Heritage, Media Archive Central England (MACE) and Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University.

Introduction to Jez’s premiere from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

In the video above, Jez Collins of interactive cultures explains the purpose and the genesis of the film, and how it connects with the Birmingham Music Archive.

Firstly an apology: as an academic I can’t take a title at face value. I find I need to hand wring and worry about the terms of a debate before I can do anything at all. And then once I have problematised the issue, I find that the title is wrong and I start using different words.

As a media and cultural studies academic who has been criticised by the Daily Mail for wasting tax payers money running courses on social media, this condition is particularly acute. I need to be seen to have thought too much about things to justify myself. So that being the case, I struggled to get into this topic and felt I had to change it. I hope you don’t all rush to get your money back, but stay with me for a moment. The new title is:

Social Media & Glocalisation

Social media seems to lend itself more to the idea of “glocalisation”, and this is perhaps a more interesting way of thinking about what social media means to Birmingham. Glocalisation isn’t an awful neologism that I’ve just made up – it’s a term that has some currency within academia, and it’s a strand of thought that you might want to follow up. I will briefly outline globalisation, how technology is associated with it, and then use this to a frame some ideas about social media and glocalisation.

Globalisation

Globalisation is a big idea (excuse the pun), or rather a big set of ideas and discourses. It can be seen positively as a system of changes that improves life chances for all, or it can be seen negatively as a force that offers greater liberty to some (conventionally Westerners) at the expense of others (the developing world). It’s a process of integrating global economies, societies and cultures.

We often find it manifest in scenes such as this which offer a cultural mash up of signs:

(image CC geographyalltheway_photos)

this image essentially relies on us reading the building as indexical of the “developing” world” while the three brightly coloured branded boards affixed to the building are understood as “western”. The contrast between these signs, the tension we feel between the developed and the developing, is the space where we find “globalisation”. This sort of image is actually a visual cliché: search for images of globalisation and images that rely upon this contrast of developed and developing signs are very common.

Communications technology is generally considered to play a big part in the modern era of globalisation, facilitating it at a number of levels: the computer networks that allow world markets to coordinate quickly and allow money to move from place to place; the phone networks and email systems that link branches of multi-national organisations and allow information to flow readily; the distribution technologies that allow news and coverage of events to arrive in our homes within seconds or cultural artefacts such as TV and film to be replicated and distributed to us. Techno-utopians often take up Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the “global village” as a metaphor which describes the process of globalisation: the suggestion here is that technology removes physical barriers and allows us to work at far remove from our colleagues. Thomas Friedman, in “The World is Flat” extends upon this idea to describe ten “flatteners” – forces of change that drive globalisation – that are heavily reliant upon computers and the Internet.

Social Media

Social media is a broad term which you can more or less interchange with Web 2.0 – it describes a set of technologies and services that make self-publishing online very easy, and which often allow the consumers of such media to interact, most commonly through comments of some sort. I tend to use the term very broadly to encompass blogs and social networks and within that I would include services you may know such as: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube, MySpace etc. These services all sit on top of the networks which I have described and are often seen as a step towards democratising access to media production and publishing.

The reach of these tools is global, but not usage is not universal. Access is restricted by the availability and viability of communications infrastructure, personal devices – i.e. phones and computers, skills and of course the inclination to actually take part in social media activity. Furthermore, from country to country, participation in certain networks and activities follows a different profile, as this infographic attempts to show. This is further complicated by regulation, for example it is well documented that China blocks access to a number of international services such as Facebook. Nonetheless, the structure of the connections between people and the interlinking of platforms affords us a meta-level network of networks with a global reach.

So far I have described a global network which offers the opportunity for citizens from across the world to speak to one another, to share stories, across Friedman’s flat world, as if they were neighbours in McLuhan’s global village. And what do we do with this opportunity for global communication?

Very often we talk about ourselves, our friends, our city, what we are doing, where we are going. This tweet is actually fairly typical. It’s ordinary, but it’s very real. Undoubtedly social media does operate globally and can involve people from over here with events over there. For example, social media was widely reported as being an important channel in delivering information to mainstream media during the Iran election protests. Similarly news of natural disasters, plane crashes, and other extraordinary events are often broken via social media. I’m not going to deny this process but I am going to suggest that these are exceptions. Mostly, to borrow from Raymond Williams, in social media “culture is ordinary”.

Glocalisation

It is tempting when we consider social media to suggest that, because the networks they create are not bounded by space, they are bringing about ever more urgent globalisation. Yet to do so seems to me to be overly deterministic. Technology doesn’t determine its own outcomes, these are negotiated. For most of us our use of social media is very local, either to a place or a known community. We are turning the structures of globalisation back upon themselves, and using them in ways that serve local needs primarily. This is not globalisation but glocalisation.

Examples:

• Hyperlocal blogs e.g. digbeth.org. Here the potential for global reach is turned inward – telling a story to the local community. Sometimes the stories become national or international as happened at the Bournville blog;
• Localised versions of global internet memes e.g. lolitics;
• Meet ups that are organised through social networks, e.g. Birmingham Social Media Café, and Likemind – which is actually governed globally but run locally (hat tip to Pete Ashton for comparing Likemind to other networks such as Freecycle which have global governance);
• Co-working spaces such as Moseley Exchange which rely on email and social networks to organise activity between physical meetings (see Hampton & Wellman for more on this).

The event, Chaired by Tim Challans (former co-ordinator for the West Midlands Culture & Sport Improvement Network), will highlight the latest research and intelligence relating to culture, sport and tourism and review the implications for the West Midlands: a region striving to assert itself as a national and international visitor destination and a leader in the digital agenda. The intention is for the event to dynamic and interactive, providing plenty of opportunity for delegates to dictate discussions.

Full details of the conference programme, speaker biographies and venue information are on the West Midlands Cultural Observatory website

The conference is being organised by the West Midlands Cultural Observatory, in association with Birmingham City University, the West Midlands Cultural Research & Intelligence Group and West Midlands Regional Observatory.

Xavier was invited to our regular research seminar to talk about the strategies he has developed for knowledge transfer work around the Cult Film Archive and Cine-Excess, the company he has formed to restore and reissue significant cult films. The release includes DVD extras that are designed as educational and knowledge transfer devices. The formula is working well with interest in the film and its academic based extras leading to significant interest from relevant media and sales reaching audiences beyond the academy.

Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) classic cult Italian horror – a masterpiece of the modern macabre that uses excessive visual styles and even more excessive on-screen murders to create new pathways between art-house and atrocity. The documentary featured enough footage from the original to cause one member of the audience to “step outside for a breath of fresh air”.

Research group member, and chair of this week’s session, Oliver Carter commented: “I have followed Xavier’s work closely since the late 1990s and it was a pleasure to welcome him to this week’s session.  Xavier’s work with Nouveaux Pictures and the Cine Excess label  demonstrates the variety of possibilities knowledge transfer presents.  We are thankful for him taking time to come to the Birmingham School of Media and look forward to sharing our approaches to knowledge with him in the future.”

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.

Why is it different?

Rather than creating a brochure website around the festival, or simply filming the festival and putting that online, our goal is to capture the spirit of the festival using a range of techniques such as photography, text and handheld, personal digital video. We have given small, cheap, portable video cameras to select audience members, musicians, backstage staff and the festival organisers and asked them to capture whatever they think is interesting: the buzz of the audience, the surrounding environment, snippets of the music performed, and any discussions that take place around jazz.

In this video, Professor Tim Wall describes the aims of the project:

What are we going to do?

We’re gathering together all of this video, photography and text from contributors and publishing it live on a website as the festival happens. We’re also tagging the content in order to experiment with the ways in which the characters and stories that are captured can be navigated by visitors to the website. This process gives audiences the opportunity to experience the festival in their own way and makes the event accessible to those who may wish to attend the festival in future years, or who may never have considered visiting a jazz festival at all.

Andrew Dubber describes this process:

Although we’ve worked on projects like this before, with Aftershock in Italy and with the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, we don’t have a fixed idea of what we’re going to end up with. We’re working with a loose structure and quite a lot of improvisation – in a way, it’s just like jazz.

Follow the event

Please bookmark http://justlikejazz.org and follow along with the experiment as it happens live online between September 18-20. The website will also remain online in the future, so you can check back to discover our thoughts on what came out of the process.

We hope you enjoy exploring the festival online with us,

Tim, Andrew, Simon and Jez.

Cartoon of Sam Coley CC Alex Hughes

Moseley Barcamp was held at The Cross in Moseley on Sunday the 28th of July and was a free-ranging forum for those involved in Birmingham’s social media / internet “scene”. Speakers included Pete Ashton, Nick Booth, Chris Unitt and Michael Grimes to name but a few… The room contained a fair smattering of the “Brumtwitter mafia” who debated, and I imagine “tweeted”, passionately about all things “web” in Birmingham.

I spoke in my capacity as Radio Degree Leader at BCU, and reserve Kiwi for the Interactive Cultures Team. Much of the dialogue was preaching to the converted – although my admission that “I don’t blog and I don’t twitter” was followed by audible gasps of disbelief. Since the hard working guys from Rhubarb Radio were streaming live from the event it made sense to touch on the role of super-local online radio content and how it relates to the current proliferation of community radio in Birmingham. The ongoing visualisation of radio was another topic of discussion, especially the emergence of audio-slideshows. (Brummie based Ben Chesterton is an award winning proponent of the medium and last month his site attracted a healthy 14000 visits).

A common comment I hear in regards to adding pictures to radio is; “Don’t you mean TV?”… No, I don’t… Just as blogging’s not the same as sending a letter to the editor, audio slideshows are a different ballgame altogether. But I digress…

As someone who’s yet to be fully inspired by social media technologies (another gasp) it was an interesting insight into Birmingham’s rich vein of online communities. Congratulations to Shona McQuillan for putting together another thought provoking event.

PS. My thanks to talented cartoonist Alex Hughes who ignored my request to delete a few pounds from my likeness, such is his dedication to accuracy. See more of his drawing from the day at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nibster/