We’ve been fans of Posterous for while at the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research. It’s been a good tool for teaching, as we can create shared blogs for classes with ease. It’s also been handy for project partners, allowing us to build quick and dirty solutions for them so that they can see our ideas play out quickly.

We were strong advocates for the software, and experimental users of it (way back when, I pointed out to Posterous that they’d actually accidentally built a great podcasting tool and Simon worked with them as a private beta user of themes, amongst other bits of play we did with the platform).

As I say, I’ve been meaning to move for a while because I was starting to lose faith in the software (it had stopped being simple, had started to bloat) and because I was becoming worried that it locked users in too much. By this I mean that when Posterous went hard on a drive to recruit bloggers from other platforms it produced a suite of blog importation tools, but never provided a way out. There’s no back up in Posterous and no easy way to leave. When you’re working with a company that is funded through VC investment and has no clear business plan, these things should always be a worry –  that’s why during the revalidation of the BA (Hons) Media & Communication programme at BCU I’ve introduced the idea that students across our degree specialisms (journalism, PR, new media, photography, TV, radio, music industries and events) should build their personal web presence using web 2.0 tools, but that they should take a considered approach to this, interrogating the institutions in which they are trusting their professional presences.

So I’ve had my escape route planned for some time. Funnily enough one of today’s tasks is “work on blog” – I’ve promised my PhD supervisors that I’ll start writing publicly about my PhD, and as I’ve a PhD tutorial tomorrow I thought I’d better get things in hand (ever the student, eh?).

I’ve just done a dry run transfer of Posterous to self-hosted wordpress. Back last year I’d planned to use the Posterous to WordPress importer plugin, but it hasn’t been updated yet (I bet that’s in progress after yesterday) and doesn’t work with the latest version of WordPress.

This blog post is useful in outlining one way to get content migrated quickly, using wordpress.com as a bridge to a self hosted wordpress site. The import took less than five minutes to clear into wordpress.com, and same again on the transfer to self hosted.

Some things to look out for:

So I’m now waiting for my domain to switch over to my hosting, and this will be my last posterous post. It’s been a fun ride.

Friday 30th September (1pm – 4pm)
Birmingham MAC, Foyle studio

After last year’s inaugural Jazz and the Media conference, Birmingham City University have teamed up with Harmonic to deliver the second instalment. This year’s focus will be social media and how it can be best used to promote jazz and develop new audiences, as well as how jazz collectives are using these tools. Hosted by Tim Wall with guest speakers including Sebastian Scotney (London Jazz), Andrew Dubber and the festival directors themselves.

Tickets are £20 (£17), plus an exclusive £10 ticket offer for students. You can buy them online or from the box office on 0121 446 3232. Please also visit the website of the hosting venue, MAC.

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

Jez Collins, the originator of the Birmingham Popular Music Archive chaired a panel consisting of: Dr Marion Leonard, who was the curator of Liverpool’s The Beat Goes On, and who oversees on ongoing project to examine how museums collect and preserve (or not) popular music; Alison Surtees of the Manchester District Music Archive; Eve Wood, the director of the documentary Made in Sheffield (2001) and Mike Darby of Bristol Archive Records.

Speakers offered insights into each of their projects, revealing the variety of practices in this field, the public appetite for music heritage and the innovations and connections that curation has been making. Surtees for instance outlined how the online MDMA had generated input from around 2000 individuals, half of which regularly posted material on the site. Some of these were members of the bands featured and indeed, these explorations of music past also connected with the present scene in ways that avoided the potential necrophilia of such work.

The dynamic aspects of each of these projects was evident in the way in which they plugged into and galvanised cultural memory and generated positive responses from users and contributors. Each of course was located very firmly in the character of its respective location and had a part to play in civic and community identity. Many of the core activists worked on the archives as a labour of love (there was very little financial support available here) and a belief that music and its attendant cultures and meanings transcends the demands of the industries alone. This was an important point as one of the potential problems of work in this field is presented by copyright issues, not only around recordings but the attendant artefacts – album covers, posters, photographs etc. For many projects, the involvement of so many ‘forgotten’ bands and their good will means that these challenges can be overcome. Indeed, it is interesting to note that while one would expect such projects to feature more well-known (and potentially litigious) bands, public interest has tended to focus on some genuine retrieval work in digging up lost names, venues and events.

As a filmmaker, Eve Wood had some interesting points to make however about the cost involved in repurposing archive footage in her work. This was particularly striking with regards to the BBC and she quoted a standard rate of £3000 per minute for the use of footage (and that is exclusive of any further rights complications that may arise).

In addition, Wood also outlined some of the problems filmmaker-historians have with commissioning bodies. This related to the way in which there was an expectation that narratives should revolve around famous names and faces, although it was often the case that in pursuit of interesting stories, obscure yet interesting material would demand attention and explanation. Notwithstanding the paucity of funds available for the archiving projects, Wood’s experience also raised questions around the other kinds of pressures impacting upon these projects. Where they seek alliances with city agents and established museums and so on, there were potential demands on the nature of the stories one could tell.
All of these points of course highlighted the ways in which any kind of historical work is always inflected by a politics of practice -whether between contributors and users (why is X and not Y covered), or even by greater institutional powers.

Certainly, the growth of heritage projects around popular music is part of a challenge to the more formal and conservative ways in which archives and museums are perceived to have pursued their agendas (although I think this was a little over stated at this event). While the projects discussed on this panel have sought to expand the domain of the archive, where they have also proven to be innovative is in their participatory nature and use of online sites. In this, and given their ad hoc, enthusiast-driven origins, they have something important to impart to established institutions.

Overall, there was much to take away here for further discussion and thought.
The Bristol project for instance offered an intriguing model for collecting and making available its artefacts and of course, Leonard’s academic research activities were of great interest to me.

This handful of projects is indicative of a much more widespread international practice that has a relationship with the music and leisure industries but also operates independently of them (sometimes at odds with them), demonstrating the value of what Interactive Cultures researchers label music as culture. In light of the loss of so much material in the archives of the music business, the activities of the enthusiast, and fan, in informal (sometimes semi-legal ways online in file-sharing sites), performs an important job and indeed does much to underline the importance of popular music to communities to us.

A fuller version of this report can be found on Paul Long’s blog Media, Culture, History.

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.

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.

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.

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.