interactivecultures

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.

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Our digest of links for September 16th:

• D’log :: blogging since 2000 » Guide To Sources Of Small Business Finance In The West Midlands –
• But who appointed the creative policy makers? – IC member Paul Long is seeking to find out something about those who determine creative policy in the UK and their relationship with creative workers who are at the receiving end of policy interventions, decisions and strategies.

Interactive Cultures at The Radio Conference from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Andrew Dubber and I spent the end of July at The Radio Conference.  This is a bi-annual international gathering of radio studies academics which this year took place at York University in Toronto Canada.  The conference brought together people studying radio from across the world, and there were particularly strong contingents from Australia, Britain, New Zealand, and USA, as you’d expect from an English language conference; but most parts of the world had at least one scholar representing them.

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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.

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The Ikon Gallery, in Birmingham City Centre – Image CC by ell-r-brown

I recently had an informal meeting with Ikon, Birmingham’s contemporary arts gallery, where we discussed how they can use social media effectively. Many galleries, museums, and other attractions have profiles in a number of social networks and Ikon is no exception. The main social media activity from Ikon is on Facebook and Twitter where they have developed a fairly active following. The Twitter account is particularly interesting when used to live blog from a series of talks. Encouraged by this initial success (which has come relatively easily), Ikon are keen to push forward and develop a more comprehensive social media strategy. I asked Ikon three key questions, and discussed a number of solutions for them. Ikon are keen for you to add more in the comments below.

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The School of Media’s new suite of MA programmes start this September. Several of the programmes have their heart in the work of Interactive Cultures or the research interests of team members. The MA Music Industry starts in September 2010, but we have had a major hand in the development of MA Social Media & MA Creative Industries and Cultural Policy.

A key feature of the learning experience on the MA Social Media is a research blog. I started this blog off with a few entries (some of which run parallel to but provide a different take on posts made to this blog) but our first intake of postgraduate students have now started contributing to the blog. The first two student contributions were made yesterday, and there will be plenty more to follow so do add the blog to your RSS reader. So, Ladies & Gentleman so say hello to Leland Strott and Jigar Patel.

Our star turn on iTunes came to the attention of MacWorld – read their article here.

The Interactive Cultures team discuss their iPhones: can we keep the conversation on track without descending into a “why we love Apple” love-in?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:15 — 15.2MB)

In an earlier post we mentioned an Interactive Cultures radio documentary about Irish rocker Phil Lynott. To mark what would have been Lynott’s 60th birthday this Thursday, BBC West Midlands 95.6 FM will be broadcasting the half hour feature at approximately 1300 on the Jimmy Franks Show on Saturday the 22nd of August.

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We’re pretty pleased with ourselves today. The Interactive Cultures podcast has been selected for global recognition on Apple’s education content service, iTunesU. Apple scan iTunes U content for podcasts that have relevance to a worldwide audience, and post them as star items on the iTunesU homepage. So now we’re happily sitting alongside eight other items from a number of well known institutions including Oxford and the Open University. We continue to publish content here on our own podcast feed. This will feature content before it hits iTunesU. To find more about the rest of BCU you might want to investigate the full range of content we publish.