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 Business of Live Music

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

31st March 2011

“It was exactly the same as 1000 other rooms above pubs that I’ve been to during my life time.” The live music space as heritage object – Rob Horrocks (Birmingham City University)

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

Prof Tim Wall’s presentation at The Business of Live Muic conference, Edinburgh, 31st March – 2nd April 2011.

Tim Wall at the Business of Live Music Conference, Edinburgh 1st April 2011 presenting his paper: Contemporary Live Jazz Scenes in the UK regions.

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.

Examining how online media functions as a mainline for the mediation and remediation of culture in the new digital age, the Online Mainline event seeks to open up an avenue for dialogue surrounding the uses and limitations of the online context as a tool for social, political and economic benefit. Seeking to analyse the new media and its associated alternative (and in some instances embryonic) media forms in the remediation of culture, areas of research interest that this event will interrogate include:

• Blogging and the Podcast
• Developing Technologies
• Social Networking Sites (Twitter, Facebook, Bebo)
• Youtube Generation
• Online and Social Organisation
• Online as Lifeline
• Fandom and Online Creativity
• Sharing Online and File Download
• Age and the Internet
• Online Gaming
• Gendering of New Technologies
• Online Convergence
• Online News
• Business and the Online Environment
• This list is not exhaustive and a diverse range of submissions are encouraged

Deadline for 300 word proposals: Friday, 20^th May 2011

Final papers should be 20 minutes in duration (including clips and demonstration)

Email submissions to: onlinemainline2011@gmail.com

Proposals should include:

• Presenter Contact Details
• Biographical information (200 words)
• Proposal in Word format (300 words)
• Details of technical requirements

Please direct enquiries to: Dr Kerry Gough, email: onlinemainline2011@gmail.com

A Screen Cultures Research Group Event

Date: 8–9 September 2011
We invite proposals from a broad range of academic disciplines for a 2 day symposium examining sites of popular music heritage: from institutions such as museums, to geographic locations, websites and online archives. Papers are welcomed that explore popular music within narratives of heritage and identity, real and imagined geographies, cultural memory and contested histories.

The event will focus on three thematic areas:

Popular Music Heritage in the Museum

In recent years museums have increasingly engaged with popular music heritage, as evidenced in a proliferation of exhibitions including those in the UK such as Kylie: The Exhibition at the V&A and the British Music Experience at the O2. Museum interaction with popular music heritage enables methods of narration beyond traditional written histories, engaging visitors with objects, sounds and images. The place of popular music in the museum raises issues of how music is both represented and used to represent and explore social histories, personal and collective identities, memories, and geographies. Possible themes for papers include:

• Popular music and locality in the museum
• Disseminating popular music heritage in museums beyond text
• History and memory in popular music exhibitions and collections

Heritage, Place and Local Identity

While ideas of heritage and cultural memory play an increasingly important role in popular music historiography, the spatial and geographic frameworks underpinning the production of popular music histories remain comparatively under-examined in studies to date. The spatial embedding of popular music heritage raises questions as to the ways in which ideas of local, regional and national identity are shaped by geographies of music and place; the role of mobility practices in the production of local music histories; and the capacity for popular music memoryscapes to stimulate (and sustain) embodied and emotional attachments to places and localities. Possible themes for papers include:

• Contested geographies of popular music heritage
• Routes of popular music heritage: mobility, migration, wayfinding
• Cartographies of popular music history

Digital Archives and Online Practice

Heritage practices have proliferated in the digital age and a large part of related activity online is devoted to popular music. ‘Authorised’ or otherwise, social media groups, blogs and web pages are organised and defined by, amongst other things, genre, artist, period and geography. Sites dedicated to the popular music of Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Coventry, Bristol, Woolongong, Brisbane or Detroit speak simultaneously to the hyper-local and global quality of popular music culture. The nature of such online practices raise questions about the ontology of the archive, the digital ‘artefact’ and collective memory. In light of the challenges presented to the music industries by digitisation, key questions concern the role of music and related intellectual property in online ‘folk’ histories. Possible themes for papers include:

• Contested geographies of popular music heritage
• Authorising popular music heritage and archiving practice online
• Building music cultures and communities of memory online
• Online music heritage, music industries and ownership

Please submit proposals for papers (300 words max) to

Dr Rob Knifton (robert.knifton@liverpool.ac.uk ) and Dr Les Roberts (les.roberts@liverpool.ac.uk).
Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2011

Date for registration: 30 June 2011

Deadline for submission of draft papers: 01 Aug 2011

• Further information and registration details will be posted shortly at www.liv.ac.uk/music/
• Papers presented at the symposium will be considered for publication.

This event is co-organized with the Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University.

In the same month, two peoples of the Middle East took to streets, trying to overthrow dictators who had been ruling them or more than 25 years. Cairo and Tunis share the same problems of poverty, unemployment and continuous price hikes. And both of them were counted among the ten worst countries to be a blogger, and also they were listed as enemies of the internet.

If you gave three sheets of paper to three persons, everyone will use it differently, a child would make a toy out of it, an artist should draw something, a poet may write a verse on it…etc, as everyone is using what he or she gets according to what he needs.

In the Middle East, common people are not allowed to communicate freely, because of political oppression, social conservatism or both. Now, a new type of media has enabled them to voice their opinions with the option of staying anonymous, allowing them to be heard. The story started with a citizen journalism covering the few protests taking place initially and developed with social networks aiding mobilization of offline actions on the streets.

The first wave of popular protests in the Arab world was in Cairo late 2004, as some intellectuals gathered and started to chant ‘Enough!’ calling President Hosni Mubarak to step down. This was the first time a chant against the president was heard; people were orally circulating the story. In 2005, the scene was repeated, this time some people managed to take pictures, and others wrote down the chants, sharing them with friends. This encouraged more people to participate, and the protests were getting bigger offline and online. Egyptians number over 58 millions and internet penetration is 21.2% with hardware and access relatively cheap (20 cent/hour).

Social media take-up and protest was driven by young, middle class and educated people producing social media content,  the rest is consuming it, until 3G mobile phones found their way to the country and aided wider democratic participation.  In Egypt, you rarely meet someone does not own a mobile phone, despite poverty (55% of what?), so many Egyptians have more than one set and usually prefer the phones with an embedded camera. With such penetration, we have a tool in the hand of almost everyone hat allows the documentation of Egyptian life, from the election forgery to the belly dancing! This online activity and sociability helped to provoke discussion of critical causes such as torture.
See how many mobiles are recording

A turning point in recent developments was 6th April 2008. This date marks the first general strike in the history of Egypt, an event started by a group on Facebook asking people to stay at home. Though its success is still debatable, it was disturbing enough to the regime to get more brutal with citizens, arresting the two admins of the Facebook group and torturing one of them. Yet, Facebook was not blocked, Egypt is the type of internet enemy who tend not to block a websites, but to block its editors; it means to arrest them illegally!

Though, you clearly find smart use of social network during the ongoing protests, Twitter as an example; had the hashtage #Jan25 trending worldwide, as protestors are sending instant updates, activists are tweeting the numbers of arrests and injuries and lawyers who volunteered to offer legal support, have their own lists to connect them throughout the country.

Over the past ten days, Hosni Mubarak regime was using internet and mobile cut to punish protestors, and stop the word spread, between 28th January to 2nd of February both internet and mobile services were blocked, though so many discussions on Egypt appeared in social networks, on Twitter, the tweets on protestors were abundant enough to trend the country name world wide, in English, French, Spanish and Italian! After all headed of mainstream media were turned to the massive protests, social media was used by citizens worldwide to show solidarity with Egyptians, every night new tweets, blog posts, vlogs and mash-up videos uploaded to show support to Egypt uprising.

Now, as a social media student,  the question I wish to get it answered is how the protestors in Tahrir square in Cairo were communicating over the time of their strike; how hundreds of thousands (2 millions in Aljazeer English estimation) were making their decisions and spread it among each others without having a mobile service or being online? I believe they have been using sorts of social non-digital media, something I will get it cleared from my friends who are in the protest now, but the violence and killings by plain clothes  give them no opportunity to tell their media experience in the uprising.

We are hugely saddened to report the death of drummer Tony Levin, who passed away today at the age of 71. Tony was a highly regarded jazz drummer and one of our partners on the AHRC KTF project. Together we developed http://tonylevin.org and produced academic research into building British jazz archives.

Tony was highly respected for his performances on several great British jazz albums and performed frequently at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in the 1960s with artists including Joe Harriott, Al Cohn, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Zoot Sims, and Toots Thielemanns.

He was perhaps best known for his work as a member of Tubby Hayes’ Quartet (1965-9), including the seminal record Mexican Green, but also played with numerous groups and artists, including the Alan Skidmore quintet (1969), Humphrey Lyttelton band (1969), John Taylor (1970s), Ian Carr’s Nucleus (1970s), Stan Sulzmann quartet, Gordon Beck’s Gyroscope, European Jazz Ensemble, Third Eye (1979), Rob van den Broeck (1982), Philip Catherine’s trio and quartet (1990s), Sophia Domancich Trio (with Paul Rogers, double bass; 1991-2000) and Philippe Aerts trio and quartet (2000s).

From 1980, Levin worked extensively with saxophonist Paul Dunmall, including as a member of the free jazz quartet Mujician, also with Paul Rogers (double bass) and Keith Tippett (piano).

Tony ran his own monthly club in Birmingham called TL’s Jazz Club and operated his own label, Rare Music Recordings. He had recently completed a successful 70th birthday tour, organised by Birmingham Jazz.

As you can tell from the video below, Tony was a lovely guy, a great storyteller, and a gifted musician. We feel privileged to have known and worked with him. RIP Tony. You will be greatly missed.

For more information, interviews and memorabilia, please visit: http://tonylevin.org.

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