One of the aims of my KTP project, which ends today, was to look at knowledge management systems for small teams. Every day we’re exposed, through email, tweets, blog posts, news and research, to hundreds of snippets of information. But how do we get hold of them when we need them?

Knowledge management is a process that can be put in place to store, keep, retrieve and share knowledge in a useful way. When developing knowledge management it is useful to put a system in place where those who wish to share knowledge and collaborate can access, files, thoughts and ideas in a central organised location. The creation of such a system can be very costly, even using off the shelf technologies.

We set out to create a cost effective system, a prototype, to test the usefulness of knoweldge management across a small team at my placement (and which included the team at BCU).

Wikis and collaborative google docs could be used in this way, but they are quite hard work – ideally we need something that is easy to add to and something which is easy to search. We looked to Evernote for the answer.

Why we chose Evernote

• Evernote can be used across a number of platforms – it has native apps for Mac, PC, Android, and iOS, plus a web interface which makes it as near as universal as we will get.
• In Evernote you can easily clip articles and paste them to a shared notebook for others to see.
• It has text recognition software built in so images and scans with text can be searched.
• Content can be tagged and have meta data applied, greatly helping search and allowing data to be gathered easily into groups.
• We can do all this on a shoestring: one premium account costs $45 – that account can share a notebook with all the members of the team. Team members can use a free account to access the shared notebook, contributing and retrieving information from a communal database.

It is certainly in my opinion worth trying out Evernote for knowledge management within an organisation.  It’s easy to use and could provide a company with competative advantage against others, after all, knowledge is a valuable asset.

During my visit to SXSWi I found myself attending the following panels which all touched on the notion of singularity in different ways:

• Robot Panelists, AI and the Future of Identity
• Wall-E or Terminator: Predicting the Rise of AI
• 3D Printing: Not Everyone Will Be Excited
• PolySocial Reality and the Enspirited World

I wont profess to being an expert on the subject after only attending four panel discussions (so I might not get everything right in this blog post), but it is an area which interests me greatly and it was wonderful to attend panels at SXSWi that discussed it.

For those who don’t know (in layman’s terms), the notion of singularity is best described as a moment where AI becomes more intelligent than us, and in some versions of this the machine will be able to replicate itself with modifications to make it better in some way.

So within the realms of the 3D printer, a printer is currently being programmed to replicate itself totally. Once it’s done that, the replica may be able to reproduce itself but ‘better’.

Moving from singularity to the event horizon, the event horizon is a point in the development of machines when their is a point of no return.

The panel Robot Panelists, AI and the Future of Identity in my opinion showed the first signs of ‘humanity’ in AI through Bina48.

Bina48 is a animatronic torso that has been created to simulate a human. Bina48 can ‘talk’ and answer questions quite beautifully, is quite charismatic when doing so and can be a little scary. Bina48 has been created using a ‘mind file’ taken from a human Bina and can recognise speech though a speech recognition system, she then constructs full sentences and answers.

Bina48 was one of the highlights of SXSWi for me and if you get a chance I would recommend looking her up online. Seeing her might make you wonder if the event horizon is near.

This year I went to South by South West Interactive (SXSWi), for the first time and found the whole experience fascinating and exhausting.

When I was planning on going I was a little nervous about travelling and being in Texas on my own. Not something that now I should have worried about.

Before I bought my ticket for SXSWi there were several meetings to discus possible funding that was available from UK Trade and Investment (UKTI), along with networking with those people who were interested in going. As time drew closer to SXSW less and less people came to these networking events until it was only the delegates that had their tickets and were going.

The Birmingham contingent itself is made up of mostly people who have been to SXSW before and who are more than happy to help and give advice before and during the conference, which helps to promote a great community feel about attending. Once in Texas (on the first morning over breakfast), numbers and twitter handles were swapped so that everyone could stay in contact and no one was left feeling as if they were on their own.  Every night (once the conference had ended for the evening), individuals and groups of Birmingham delegates kept in touch via twitter and text and ended up eating dinner and networking together which certainly helped to create a friendly community feel.

During SXSWi the UKTI created an event where some lucky companies were able to present themselves to people attending SXSWi. These mission companies can be found on the Chinwag site here. During this event Birmingham was well represented and it was great to see the products that the people who I had been spending time with were doing via demonstration. This was a very useful event to attend as it allowed for the Birmingham contingent to connect with others from the UK who we had not been too closely in contact with before, see their products and forum other useful links and networks.

Chinwag also held two events; The Great British Tea Party and The Great British Breakfast which brought together attendees from across the UK for a networking opportunity.

Overall I found the community feel of the Birmingham contingent really helpful, friendly and supportive with regards to my SXSWi experience.  I would recommend that anyone who is planning on attending SXSW 2013 should make sure they get to know who’s going from Birmingham before traveling to the conference so they can share their knowledge with you.

After going once, I hope to go to SXSWi again, and if I do I’m already looking forward to sharing my knowledge with anyone new attending.

Hello, my name is Lisa Wiedemann and I am an intern-to-be at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. Before meeting the School of Media team personally, I would like to introduce myself.

After I finished my studies in Sociology, Cultural Studies and Educational Science at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (Germany) last year, I was looking for some practical experience within the broader field of cultural research. Digital Culture has been a main area of interest for my own research, but so far it has been from a theoretical point of view. It has been concerning the development of identity in consumer culture, and I will talk about this a little further on.

Since I am interested in British Cultural Studies and digital culture, I was really happy to discover the friendly people of BCMCR during a long click-journey through the Internet. I don`t know any other research centre, with such a mixed focus on current media and cultural issues: especially Social Media, which pervades so many lived experiences. I particularly enjoyed the content on Social Media as it identifies our interactive culture as a creative tool, rather than simply as a communication channel or networking device.

I am especially looking forward to familiarising with strategies of music organisation and music consumption in the Digital Age. Reading music magazines and writing fanzines has been a huge part of my own youth and I was a big fan of British bands – “The Smiths” for example.

As a student of sociology I associated Birmingham with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which is well known for interdisciplinary research. I have a similar impression of the Interactive Culture team and I am sure I will learn a lot about different approaches toward media analysis.

My thesis was about the lifestyle and fashion blogs of girls; typifying the aesthetication of their everyday life. For instance, in these days of time-space-compression, a young urban subculture shares with the online community what they have worn during the day, what they have bought in the afternoon or what they have eaten in the evening – a pictoral and written summary of lived experiences. Thus I considered the relationship between media transformation and self-constitution of modern subjects. At first this might seems to be similar to the long tradition of cultural criticism in the field of sociology, like the idea of economic self-exploitation through cultural capitalism (consumer market prescribes stencils for lifestyle and forces distinction and individuality). My key interest though was to show how far these weblogs are part of life`s organisation in contemporary culture. Web blogs as online strategy embody what the French philosopher Michel Foucault called “Technology of Self” (Foucault). These days it is important to be creative, to show individuality and to distinguish oneself from others – we could say these are the demands made on modern people. By producing a personal web diary I think fashion bloggers become practitioners and not just observers, taking pictures of their lifestyle or writing about their consume experiences. It was also important for my work to examine the gender aspect of using these new technologies. After receiving my degree I taught about gender and consumerism at the University of Hildesheim.

I believe my time in the School of Media will better inform my interest in popular culture particularly around my main areas of interest (Gender, DIY Culture, Social Web, Cultural Theory and the fading dividing line between work and leisure). I am also interested in research that utilizes academic expertise in a consultative capacity to assist public bodies, commercial companies and community organisations.

The Interactive Cultures Team envelops a vast spectrum of new areas of potential research for me, such as traditional forms of broadcasting and print: popular cultures; cultural policies; media education; creative economies, radio studies; journalism and PR and music heritage.

Certainly after 6 month internship, I believe I will have developed my sense of direction regarding my future academic plans and maybe have developed ideas for my PhD. I’m looking forward to joining the Interactive Cultures team and meeting people in the so called “Treehouse” – I guess everybody likes the idea of climbing great heights!

The research team at Interactive Cultures were shocked to hear about the untimely death of our good friend David Sanjek. We have been working with David in a number of ways, and he was a really supportive voice in our endeavours. He was one of the great music and media scholars at Salford University, and we’d met up at conferences and seminars on a range of topics, pursuing many of them together.

Dave Sanjek on dums

I met David soon after he arrived in the UK to work at Salford, and we immediately hit it off. I already knew about his father’s definitive history of the US music industry, and that David had helped with an updated version of the publication.  Within a few minutes, though, our conversations were off in many different directions. We immediately discovered we had many passions in common, but he seemed to know so much more about things I only had noticed, or he offered such an interesting left-field take, that I was intrigued. As part of the burst of intellectual energy that emanates from Salford we were in frequent contact, and the events at the university always served as stimulus for some interesting debate, often leading to a whole line of unexpected discussions which took us late into the night.

He was also kind enough to say positive things about our team at BCU, and delighted that we turned up en masse to events he’d organised or co-organised. It was great to be involved in fairly recent public seminars and conferences around Northern Soul, the work of Tony Palmer, and popular music on television and in film. Along with Ben Halligan, Dave had welcomed a range of contributions from IC members to the Sights and Sounds conference and book.  Our conversations always threw up new possibilities for further collaboration, and now sadly none of these is possible. We were working together on an edited book on Northern Soul, which I must now complete alone.

I have always been attracted to independent thinkers, and David personified that concept.  I loved his paper at Sights and Sounds about why the Medicine Ball Caravan, the cult hippie rockumentary, didn’t work, and that his take on Northern Soul re-re-located its sounds back into US music culture. He was as happy writing about musical theatre as about Jimmie Rodgers, Frank Zappa or Jump Blues, and as adept at eulogising about the magic of the music experience as he was at detailing its economic structure or the issues of music IP.

Dave Sanjek, you were a great friend to Interactive Cultures and you will not be forgotten.

Professor Tim Wall

The role of universities, the NUS and student union venues in the business of live music

Paul Long at The Business of Live Music

A conference to mark the completion of the AHRC funded project, The Promotion of Live Music in the UK

Alternative Media and Remediation

Event: Thursday, 15^th September 2011

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 20^th May 2011

Digital culture innocuously pervades our everyday lived experience. It shapes how we define ourselves, organises our communication and mediates our cultural moment. The Online Mainline event aims to map the territory of the new digital age, examining how the online environment has come to shape our offline world and experiences in new, innovative and productive ways. Impacting upon our social experiences, business organisation and industry connections, the online environment has come to define the ways in which our society becomes mediated across generations and cultures.

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