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.

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.

Katrina Sluis is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arts, Media and English at London South Bank University where she leads the BA (Hons) Digital Media Arts. Her scholarly interests include critical theories of photography, digital memory and contemporary fine art practice. As a visual artist, she works with photography and digital media to explore materiality, archiving and transmission in relation to the digital image.

Her paper was entitled ‘Digital Material Archives: Web 2.0 and algorithmic memory’.

In her paper she drew attention to the materiality of the databases and algorithmic calculations that lie behind the ever-expanding domain of the internet and the huge variety of material it supports and allows us to archive. The nature of how information is managed and monitored, of how it determines what we find as much as aids us in our determinations in online activity raised a number of important cultural and political issues. What constitutes the digital archive, its scope, value and meaning were at the core of her talk which was a model of interdisciplinary research, covering cultural memory as much as the mathematics of databases and the ecology of Google servers.

If you are interested in attending our research events, or contributing a paper, please contact: paul.long@bcu.ac.uk.

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.

“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”.

The conversation I’d had with producers Debra and Jeremy was that it would be a shame to simply do the standard web approach, which is to make an electronic brochure. Rather than make a website ABOUT Aftershock, it would be far more interesting to put Aftershock ONLINE. A one off performance and the end result of the music that is created over the course of the week is interesting, of course – but far more interesting, engaging and interactive is the opportunity to actually present the process of Aftershock as it happens.

We considered that this was an opportunity for digital narrative; that the narrative would have a strong arc (from meeting to rehearsal to a final performance), interesting characters – and that those characters would interact and develop over the course of the week.

Nitin Sawhney and trumpeter Matt Halsall make their way to soundcheck

To that end, we decided to provide each of the musicians with small, cheap, portable digital video cameras, let them catch the interesting material (rather than impose a ‘film crew’ on them) and then make sense of that material through the website.

We agreed to make a prototype of this approach, and to develop the procedures and parameters on the ground in Genoa, so that we would have a model for working at future Aftershock events in Marseilles and Manchester.

Nitin was initially cautious of our idea. His concern was that the cameras would get in the way of the musicians’ attention to the material that he was workshopping, and that over such an intensive week, working in the service of the website, rather than in the service of the performance would potentially be to the detriment of the project. We reassured him that the ease of use of the cameras, and the musicians’ familiarity with the technology would quickly mean that capturing content would soon become a natural part of the workflow – but he wasn’t entirely convinced. Until he asked one very interesting question:

“Can they watch the video back?”

“Of course.”

And at that moment, Nitin transformed what we were proposing into a genuinely useful extension of the project and integrated learning technique for the musicians. If they filmed parts of the workshops on their personal, portable video cameras, then they could take that video away with them and study the complex bits, rehearse, and get it right overnight. As a result, more could be squeezed into the workshop time with less repetition, and the event could be more musically ambitious.

A great example of this was when Nitin taught the musicians his Hindi rhythmic vocal composition The Conference. The video above shows the musicians simultaneously capturing and learning the piece (which was later adapted and developed into a larger, collaborative piece for the concert).

Digital Narrative

One of the real challenges of the week for us was to develop a strategy to represent the narrative online. With over 500 individual pieces of footage filmed on a total of 15 cameras, sorting, tagging and contextualising was a real challenge – but we identified three main ways in which the material could be explored by visitors to the website.

1) Chronology

From the arrival in Genoa and meeting the other musicians for the first time, through the workshops and rehearsals and using the reality television convention of the ‘video diary’, audiences can get an insight into the process of music-making from idea to finished production.

2) By character

On a video that briefly introduces each of the characters in turn, explains where they come from and what they play, we get a glimpse into their individual character. Visitors to the website can select a character and view videos that include that person – whether in rehearsal, or in the break, interacting with their fellow musicians.

3) By song

Using the final setlist as navigation, audiences can trace the development of a single song (in any chronological direction) from its original, embryonic form through to its final presentation at the concert.

Approach

One of the most interesting things about this process, from a research perspective, was the difference in approach, rate of uptake in the technology, and comfort with the cameras between the different participants. My original assumption would be that everyone would more or less automatically become an ad hoc documentarian, contextualising and explaining the footage in front of them for the benefit of the audience. In fact, only one person in the Aftershock team took that approach: David the sound engineer.

Other approaches differed markedly from that style. One person turned the camera on herself and created her own story around (and separate from) the event itself, filming her trip into the centre, picking up foccacia for the other musicians and reflecting on her own state of tiredness (a recurring theme across all of the participants). Another simply caught short (10-15 second), anecdotal moments of humour and levity between the songs. Others conducted interviews, created set pieces just for the camera, or merely filmed entire songs.

The rate at which the musicians became comfortable with the technology was fairly uniform, with one or two exceptions (singer/songwriter Ila already has her own videoblog), but the use seemed to become almost second nature and casual by the third day. On the second day, we had removed the soft protective bags for the devices, which had added a stage when bringing out the cameras. As they were cheap (£35) pieces of kit, we were not worried about breakages or wear and tear – and this seemed to increase the amount of use for the devices overall.

On the final day, nearly everything was documented: the final rehearsal in its entirety; the bus trip to Camogli where the concert was taking place; the soundcheck; the performance itself and everything that happened around it. There were also quite a few reflective pieces, as well as instances where the musicians joked around, using the cameras as part of their ‘play’. In one instance, drummer Jason and Nitin interviewed each other – cameras facing each other – in a semi-ironic ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous’ parody. The camera had become an occasion for levity as well as simply the medium through which that levity was documented.

But as with their use of the technology itself, the musicians (with one notable exception) also became increasingly comfortable with being in front of the camera – and so the tone became increasingly conversational. Rather than try and present a camera-ready persona, the musicians relaxed by about the third day – as evidenced by the entirely conversational tone in Nitin’s post-soundcheck video above.

Into the future

There’s a lot to be written up from this week in Genoa – and Stef and I are still cataloguing, tagging and uploading the videos themselves, and reconfiguring the site so that it presents the different digital narrative approaches outlined above. I’m still drawing lessons from this process and there will no doubt be conference presentations and journal articles that spring from this. I’ve also arranged to interview Nitin further for a book I’m writing about Music as Culture.

Final performance of a collaborative piece called ‘Gondwana’

What was most interesting to me, though, was that the musicians asked the same question at the beginning of the process as they did at the end – but for entirely different reasons.

The question: “How long will this be up on the internet?”

Our answer: “Forever”.

Their response at the beginning of the process was to worry about their possible shortcomings in performance, mistakes made, how they might come across and how it might reflect on their future musical projects. Their response by the end was that they were delighted that they’d be able to go back and revisit this in future – and, for more than one artist, possibly even show their children or grandchildren one day.

Tim Wall: Mobile Music from Jon Hickman on Vimeo.

I was recently invited to make a contribution to the Mobile Music Symposium taking place in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the US.  I offered the organisers a paper on the transistor radio and its role in the developments of US radio music listening in the 1950s and 60s.

In fact I should have been there today, but sadly at the last minute I wasn’t able to make the journey.  In true Interactive Cultures style, though, I offered a videoed version of my paper, and a Skype link so I could join in the question and answer session.  You can watch the whole paper presentation (it’s just over 16 minutes long) thanks to Vimeo.
The paper is based upon research I’ve been working on with my colleague Nick Webber.  I called the paper Changing cultural co-ordinates: the transistor radio and space / time / identity.  It explores the way in which the portability of the radio set (in the car and later the pocket radio) connected with some major cultural imperatives and substantial social change in the mid 1950s to bring around a major shift in the radio listening experience.  At this time the dominant form of radio moved from the sort of mixed entertainment we get on TV today, to music and the record playing DJ.

The event has been organised to tie in with a new book The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason
Stanyek.  Nick and I have a chapter in the book which will build on the paper I talk about here, and develop the analysis into Europe and beyond.

The whole event looks really interesting and I’m very disappointed not to be there in person, but at least I can contribute and participate.

Lucid have developed a Java applet that can be installed on any Java enabled phone (edit: they have also written an iPhone app). This applet turns the phone into a QR code scanner. Lucid was all set to deliver a demonstration of how the QR codes can be “scanned” by camera phones to deliver context based information but a key partner pulled out.  I’d been bouncing the idea of a social media based treasure hunt around with BCU colleague Paul Bradshaw and local blogger Jon Bounds and then promptly forgotten about it. This seemed like a good opportunity to resurrect the idea.

We were up against some constraints: the project has to be delivered in March, and the software has already been written so we had to build the game around that framework.  Luckily it all seems to link together although the final product is more of a “scavenger hunt come tresure hunt come game of tig” then the original “Tweasure Hunt” concept.

Here’s what we came up with as a basic idea:

• We’re going to hang a lot of the project off the back of twitter, because Birmingham’s Twitter community are open to new ideas and like a laugh, because it gives the project a simple platform for in game communication, and because it provides an opportunity to hook that commnication into lots of useful services if we wanted to.
• The objective of the game is to accumulate points by scanning QR codes at various way points. Codes will be scattered across the city centre, and will vary in points value. Codes can be scanned in any order.
• We will launch the game with a clue via the @brumtag account on twitter. We will then push out more clues throughout the game.
• Here’s the interesting part: some of the clues will be on the move. Several codes will be carried by volunteers, who will be moving around the city: players will have to get ahead of them and catch them to gain the code. Their clues will lead players into an online trail that will vary from clue to clue, e.g.
  • the volunteer might be posting postions using GPS
  • the volunteer might be live blogging, describing locations along the route
  • the volunteer might be taking photos of their route and uploading them to flickr
  • and many other fiendish ideas

The winners will be the players that get the most points during game time.

I realise that there are some issues with the game, not least of all that it relies on people being pretty comfortable with technology: it’s not very inclusive. The idea of this game isn’t to answer every question about context based data but to inspire and show some of the ways that the software could be used and developed. I’m not involved with the further development of the project – I’ve done my bit now – so if you want to find out more it’s best to contact the team at Lucid. We will of course forward any feedback collected below to the Lucid team.

Provisional date for the game is Saturday 21st March, 12pm – 5pm. I for one am looking forward to playing @brumtag.

What we did in Phase 1

In Phase 1 student teachers were asked to take Flip video cameras into the classroom.  These new breed of pocket video cameras are small and easy to operate, making them relatively unobtrusive when compared to a traditional camcorder. Working in pairs as part of their initial teacher training practice, the students were encouraged to film one another and use the footage to reflect on their own teaching. We set up a private group on Vimeo to allow the students to share and discuss footage.  Students attended a workshop that introduced them to the process of recording and sharing video.

Initial feedback on Phase 1

A number of interesting observations can be made from the first phase of the project.  Colleagues in CRQ are undertaking a number of focus groups and writing a full report on the outcomes, but here are some initial thoughts:

• Video and the Internet are scary and emotive subjects within the classroom context.  The very fact that we were using these two tools created a barrier to some students even getting started with the project as their schools simply would not allow them to use the equipment.
• The online forum to share video and discuss teaching was wholly unsuccessful.  There is a suggestion of social networking fatigue amongst the students, but the key here is about the way in which they actually used the cameras.
• Students found their own uses for the equipment.  In some cases it was too early for them to take a reflexive approach to their teaching (this was after all their first teaching experience) and so they did not use the equipment.  In others they preferred to use it directly as a teaching tool, for example recording demonstrations and running a looped playback, freeing them up to move around their class.
• Reflexive use of the cameras came about when lecturing staff made school visits to work with the student teachers.  With a lecturer to record and lead the discussion, this reflection on teaching practice was viable and effective.

Plans for Phase 2

The next phase of the project will be starting in January, and will see a change of direction.  Much more emphasis will be placed on the education lecturers modelling practice with the cameras, and leading the reflexive use of the technology.  Additionally those students who have found opportunities to use the camera as a teaching tool will be given the opportunity to develop this further.

We would be interested to hear from teachers, and teacher trainers: how would you use video technology in your classroom to make you a better teacher?