On, Archives! was hosted by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) and also contained within it a dedicated symposium on ‘Broadcasting in the 1930s’ organized by Hugh Chignall (Bournemouth) and Jamie Medhust (Aberystwth).

En route to Madison we stopped over in Chicago. Now Chicago is undoubtedly a ‘cinematic’ city, so mythologised in American and wider cultures as to be already familiar to new visitors like me. We arrived on Independence Day which meant that the Stars and Stripes was ubiquitous and firework displays abounded.

Given the tendency to wax lyrical about such places in comparison to the familiarity of home I’ll reserve further remarks for another occasion. However, and acknowledging the trompe l’oeil effect of the cityscape and delights of wandering the streets in sweltering heat, what impressed were the various ways in which the cultural heritage of the city was celebrated.

Whether it was the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright or the heritage of blues music and others, this place had plenty of cultural confidence (although less evidence of the bluster which earned the label of ‘The Windy City’). What I liked was the unself-conscious aspect of celebrating all avenues of culture, ‘high’ and ‘low’, and the entrepreneurial spirit which made this place so interesting and interested in its own history.

On to Wisconsin and ‘On, Archives!’; WCFTR was an apposite place for this event as it is home to one of the oldest and most extensive collections of print, audio/visual, and graphic materials relating to film, theater, radio and television in the United States.

The conference organizer, Professor Michele Hilmes is International Visiting Fellow in the Birmingham School of Media and a scholar whose work on media history is truly inspirational . Michele and her husband were generous enough to host a ‘Cook-Out’ for us and other visitors at their lakeside house, a highly agreeable way to acclimatize.

The conference commenced with a keynote from Tino Balio who recounted the story behind the various archives procured by WCFTR. The collections focus mainly on US entertainment-based media, particularly archives of the American film industry between 1930 and 1960 (the business records of United Artists are here), popular theater of the 1940s and 1950s, and television from the 1950s through the 1970s. Holdings include over three hundred manuscript collections from playwrights, television and motion picture writers, producers, actors, designers, directors and production companies. In addition to the paper records, materials preserved include fifteen thousand motion pictures, television shows and videotapes, two million still photographs and promotional graphics, and several thousand sound recordings. For most of us in attendance, we could spend the rest of our scholarly lives here and happily never leave the reading desks.

Later in the first day, the keynote address for the symposium was given by Dr. Kate Lacey, University of Sussex. Her paper
”Paradoxes and Paradigms: Broadcasting and its Publics in the 1930s” drew upon her knowledge of the UK and German contexts in that decade, challenging us to think in more detail about the act of listening and reception of radio in this period.

Given the size and scope of the conference there were, inevitably and regrettably, many papers that one had to miss. Nonetheless, the overall quality of scholarship was high and made each panel rewarding.

One of the most stimulating panels concerned ‘Archives and the Internet’. This featured papers from Mark Hain, Indiana University
(“Resurrecting the Vamp: Cinema’s Loss and New Media’s Finding of Theda Bara”) and Josh Jackson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
(“YouTube and the User-Generated Online Archive”). The stand-out paper here, and perhaps of the conference, came from Ken Garner of Glasgow Caledonian University. His paper continued his ongoing concern with the life and work of John Peel and was entitled:
”Ripping the Pith from the Peel: Institutional versus internet cultures of archiving popular music radio – The case of BBC Radio 1′s John Peel Show”. This reported back on the activities of fans to unearth recordings of Peel’s show from over 4 decades of broadcasting and to digitize and share the fruits of these labours. Most intriguing were the results of his online survey of Peel aficionados and their perception of the BBC’s archiving activities.

The symposium proved to be a successful innovation and further papers of note included those in the ‘BBC Talks and Education’ panel, notably Todd Avery’s 
”The Trumpets of Autocracies and the Still, Small Voices of Civilisation: Hilda Matheson, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Ethics of Broadcasting in a Time of Crisis”. While Levinas never emerged in this paper, the account of the remarkable Hilda Matheson’s ideas on radio and the 1930s moment was a useful extension of Avery’s exploration of ‘Radio Modernism’.
Elsewhere, Ben Harker (University of Salford, biographer of Ewan MacColl) spoke on “Communists on the BBC, 1935–39″. Undoubtedly a small number of individuals, communists in the BBC were responsible for some of the most interesting of productions in the 1930s which challenged the patrician and culturally conservative nature of the voice of UK radio. While other papers illuminated other stories that also challenged any view of the BBC as politically and culturally heterogeneous, its dominant character for so long was exactly that, this calling into question the nature of the ‘public’ it addressed (or constructed) in its remit. I look forward to reading the results of this research as it emerges.

Tim Wall gave two papers. The first took place under the aegis of the symposium and was entitled: “Radio Remotes and the Nightlife of the Big City”. Although I missed the presentation and what sounded like a stimulating panel, Tim’s paper concerned the way in which histories of radio and jazz tended to reproduce each other’s shortcomings. This was explored through a reflection on Tim’s passion – Duke Ellington – and accounts of his place in early ‘remote’ radio broadcasts, or transmissions from jazz and other music venues. He revealed how existing histories are deficient in mapping the practicalities of these early years, leading to various kinds of historical confusion.

This historical reflection was taken up in Tim’s second paper as part of the panel ‘Archives and Institutions’. Speaking on “Public Service broadcasting, archives, and cultural television” Tim outlined some of his thinking on the way in which the BBC have constructed histories of popular music in recent years, notably in the ‘Britannia’ series of programmes.. Given the enviable resources amalgamated in such works (and in the US in series such as Ken Burns’ ‘Jazz’ et al), they often fall short as history, tending to offer rounded narratives in the service of the demands of televisual convention when audiences and materials suggest that something more adventurous and stimulating might be attained. The challenge of this paper however was to reflect on what role the academy might play in critiquing and aiding such histories. That we might actually take a role would be a start!

This panel also included Christopher Cwynar, University of Wisconsin-Madison
speaking on “NFB.ca: The Digital Archive as National Place in the Virtual World” and Jennifer Porst, University of California-Los Angeles
”The U.S. v. Twentieth Century-Fox, et al.: How the Forced Disclosure of Documents in Legal Cases Provides an Invaluable Resource for Researchers”. Chris provided a very stimulating assessment of the Canadian Film Board’s online activity (and a nuanced reading of its sight) while Jennifer used legal records to get at the kind of interview questions one would ask of film executives if only one could go back in time.

My paper was part of the first panel of Friday, the final day, encompassed in the theme ‘Documenting the Documentary: Postwar Public Affairs Programming’ and chaired by the delightful Shawn VanCour, University of South Carolina. Matthew Ehrlich, University of Illinois, gave an interesting paper:
”Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest”. This exploration of dynamic radio production on issues of public concern was fully illustrated with extracts from US radio features from the 40s and early 50s which for us drew attention to how different the sound of US radio was compared to the staid BBC.

My own paper was entitled “Inscribing the work of Philip Donnellan into documentary and other histories”. This developed my longstanding concern with the work and archive of this important, but not obscure, documentarist. My aim of exploring the nature of Archiving was rather attenuated but it is important I think to record a comment I picked up from Mark Haynes and which brought home to me something of the value of doing archive work. He suggested that for most people, the Archive is not something that they are familiar with, even though of course, many people are involved in a kind of personal, informal archiving process (of their cultural collections, personal artefacts etc). For us academics, our access to and use of archives is a privilege, even if we are sometimes under the controlling eye of archivists and institutional regulations which appear at times as if it would be preferable to NOT use the archive and touch its treasures.

Such observations, as well as the particularity of media archives raise questions about how we understand the Archive. Perhaps it is down to the variety of sessions and my own choices, but what did not emerge as fully as I had hoped were more provocative reflections on this meta-area. Nonetheless, this event was broad enough and gathered together enough scholars with an interest in such questions as to allow other discussions and collaborations that prompted reflections outside of the formal spaces of panels and papers.

On the final day we had the option of being taken on a tour of the WCFTR archives that are housed in a fine old building on the university campus. On the tour then, it was a delight to sample some of these treasures and to see original sketches from costume designer Edith Head as well as a set of letters from the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. One of the ‘Hollywood Ten’, Trumbo was jailed for his defiance of the anti-communist Senate hearings in the 1950s and we were privileged to be shown some of his letters to his wife that were written from his prison cell. Faced with such documents, the value of the archive is tangible and one feels able to commune in some manner with the historical moment. The skill of those at this event was to make media history come alive out of such materials.

Tony Palmer’s – All You Need is Love from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Prof Tim Wall and Dr Paul Long presenting to the Sights and Sounds conference, University of Salford, June 2010. All You Need is Love is a 17 part documentary covering the Story of Popular Music. The program was originally broadcast between 1976 and 1981, but since that time it has neither been commercially released or repeated.

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.



Sam Coley and Oliver Carter presenting to the Sights and Sounds conference, University of Salford, June 2010.

Radio documentary, fandom and new participatory cultures from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

We will be uploading videos of all three presentations to this blog in the next few days.

In this post is Matt Grimes’ paper:  Punk’s Underbelly: De-Canonizing Histories of Punk which he has written about and posted in full on his own blog.

Punk’s Underbelly: De-Canonizing Histories of Punk from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

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.

We’ve been increasingly interested in the idea of ‘Music As Culture’ in the past few months. I’ve presented under that banner at a couple of conferences and events in London and Berlin recently, and Jez has been hard at work developing some projects on that topic.

The central idea is very simple: that most of the discussions and many of the important decisions being made today around popular music, copyright and online participation are from the perspective of music as a primarily commercial enterprise.

In fact, to read the newspapers and blogs, and to attend the music industry conferences, you would be forgiven for thinking that music itself has failed, because it is no longer as profitable as it once was.

But music is not just commerce. It is an important part of our culture, and we’re interested in the ways in which that is manifest – and in particular, the consequences of overlooking that very important point.

So we’ve launched MusicAsCulture.org. It’s a place to bring together projects that highlight this very important point. It’s not an organisation as such, and nor is it a body with a specific political agenda. It’s an umbrella under which we can explore and discuss ideas and issues around popular music, archives, cities, scenes and creativity.

Live, Loud and Local
We’re launching MusicAsCulture.org with a very special project. Here in Birmingham, as with many places elsewhere, heritage music venues are in danger of closure or losing their live music licence because of issues of noise. Areas that were once not residential now have tenants, and the clash between apartment dwellers and local music venues has demanded a response at a policy level.

From the Birmingham Post:
Digbeth Pub The Rainbow Facing Closure After Noise Complaints

And Pete Ashton predicts a riot.

UB40 step in
Brian Travers from the band UB40 approached us to discuss ways in which we might collaborate around this issue – and on November 3rd, the band will play a one-off gig at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth to raise money for a new roof on the building, in an attempt to reduce outside noise.

Brian and the band believe that live, local music is vital to the city and its cultural life. Their performance at the Rainbow serves to draw attention to this issue.

Under the Music As Culture banner, we’re bringing together a group of interested people to help document and communicate this effort, using all of the tools of the digital age, and some old-school ones as well. We believe these conversations and debates are important ones, and it’s gratifying that such an incredibly successful international act such as UB40 are so involved and interested in their local community and the ongoing creative lifeblood of their hometown.

Follow the UB40 Campaign Live, Loud and Local at Music As Culture here – and look for more projects coming soon.

Goldsmith University MA students Nicolle Smith and Stefan Peters have just finished work on a short web-documentary series called Broken Record.

They interviewed me for the series, and there’s a lot of stuff in here that is pertains to my Music As Culture interests and the Deleting Music book as much as it does to the general tone of what I research and discuss as part of the Interactive Cultures team at BCU, and what I usually write about on New Music Strategies.

The series is definitely worth watching, and features some good insight from some interesting people from different parts of the British digital music world – and it’s presented for your entertainment below.

Share and enjoy.

Part 1: Introduction

An introduction to our panel of experts, up and coming indie act Shuffle, and Nicolle and Stefan, your fearless guides to the contemporary state of digital music culture. We briefly look at the history of the recording industry and how it got to be where it is today.

Part 2: Commerce

Do people really download? Nicolle and Stefan go to the streets to ask how people get their music. Business-type people tell us about the current state of the music industry, why it is the way it is and how they can capitalize on the new digital culture model.

Part 3: Culture

What is the new music culture? How do artists and music consumers navigate the choppy waters of copyright and creativity? What sort of art will surface from the way music is consumed today? We grapple with these issues in Episode Three.

Part 4: The Future of Digital Music Culture

Our experts weigh in on what the future will look like in terms of music and what we should avoid so creativity isn’t stifled in the digitalized wild west.

Visit the Broken Record official site.

Andrew Dubber & Jez Collins spoke at Open Music Media London on the subject of “Music as Culture“.

I attended an event in Copenhagen back in March this year. It was organised by Jazz Danmark, a government funded body whose role it is to promote and foster Danish jazz. My keynote was about how musicians could use the opportunities of the internet, and it seemed to go down reasonably well.

Through that connection, I was invited to be a guest of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which finished today (I’ve just returned home).

Naturally, I was delighted to attend. Of course, there would be a lot of great music and events – but it also gave me an opportunity to research and consider the ways in which a festival like that could communicate online.

I thought of it as a natural extension of the Aftershock Project for me. How do you take those ideas and begin to apply them elsewhere?

But although it’s still very much about live music, it’s configured very differently. So the frame through which I saw the event was one of digital narrative, and how you could BE a jazz festival online – without simply making a brochure or an online programme. In that sense, the approach, at least, remained.

And this was timely, because this week, we’re off to talk to the organisers of the Scarborough Jazz Festival to discuss just that issue.

While I was there, I captured some video, and talked to a few people – but it’s the way that this could all be assembled that interests me. And I came up with a concept that is helping me think through the ways in which events could be considered.

The digital narrative matrix
Essentially, the digital narrative matrix is an interwoven series of frameworks through which an event can be viewed – the overlapping threads of story that can be signposted and brought to the attention of the site visitor. For instance, with the Aftershock Project, those key narrative threads are character, chronology and song development. But there are all sorts of different ways in which you could build a matrix (not The Matrix – that’s a film. Just a matrix).

When building a matrix, I think the key questions that need to be considered should include the following:

- What are the possible stories?
- Who are those stories for?
- What is interesting to them?
- How can they be involved in that storytelling?
- What is important to communicate?
- What can be done in the digital realm that could not be done in any other way?
- What else, other than the obvious, could be interesting?
- What else is going on? (eg: off-stage, behind the scenes, amongst the audience)?
- What does it all sound / look / feel like?
- What do you have to be respectful of that would lead you to a different way of working?

The things to avoid are mere reproduction of an audience experience (ie: filming a concert and putting it online), reportage, and fixed delineation by subgenre or music type. Instead, a successful matrix would tease out opportunities for surprise, delight, conversation, and human interaction.

Of course, I have pages of notes about how that could be translated as an online digital narrative matrix in the particular instance of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which differs markedly from any other event – and I will type up and send a report to the festival organisers in thanks for my invitation, in the hopes that will be helpful to them.

But as a result of these conversations, and many more I had with other festival guests, I’m looking at working with a few other festivals and organisations on this sort of thing. Which is great on two important levels: first, that this sort of research can have direct and helpful benefits to cultural industries; and second, going to jazz festivals is cool.