Museology PhD Forum – Updated

26th January 2012 – 10:30 to 16:00

10:30: Coffee and introductions

11:00 – 12:15:
Louise Tythacott: Loot from China’s Summer Palace in auctions, exhibitions and museums

12:15 – 12:45: Lunch

12:45 – 2:15
Derek Trillo: Re-imaging the museum: Digital photography, the visiting experience and audience engagement
Julia Snape: Sensing the Medieval: some contemporary approaches to the display and interpretation of Medieval art

2:15 – 2:30: BREAK: coffee, tea and introduction from visiting PhD student Victoria Lopez

2:30 – 4:00:
Chiara Zuanni: Understanding pseudo archaeology and its impact
Deborah Leftwich: From Missionary to Museum; the relocation of Tibetan Ga’u
Dr Helen Rees Leahy, Fixing attention in the museum

MMXII workshop: Mapping Manchester with the Manchester Histories Festival 2012

MMXII Mapping Manchester 2012 – digital engagement workshop 10 – 1pm, Monday 12 December 2011

MMXII is funded as part of ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC) Urban Experiments

Samuel Alexander at the University of Manchester

This workshop was designed to bring together in discussion academic researchers, ‘heritage’ institutions and other people who are currently working with or interested in using digital media to engage various audiences in Manchester’s histories. It was convened by Abigail Gilmore, Institute for Cultural Practices, with the Manchester Histories Festival and held at the People’s Histories Museum, Manchester.

Delegates were invited from University of Manchester researcher networks, including CRESC, and the range of cultural partners working with Manchester Histories Festival 2012.

We heard from a number of people already working with digital media in museums, libraries and archives, the arts and the academy to engage people in the research resources and activities in and about Manchester. This was work which had a focus on linking place, people and research through geo-location, tagging and mapping tools and media. The full programme is here, and presentations, notes and links from the ‘Show and Tell’ session are below.

The aim of the workshop was to share and build links between common interests, to provide the basis for collaborative public engagement activities with Manchester histories and to consider future programming for the Festival beyond 2012.  The discussion session revealed clear interest in develop platforms and methodologies for opening up the knowledge resources in the city in stimulating and exciting ways, using various online social media (such as Flickr, Google Maps, History Pin, Twitter and Foursquare) to augment ‘offline’ programming including walking tours, performances, lectures, workshops and research seminars.

We hope that this is the beginning of a network for research, public engagement and digital media mapping Manchester’s histories – any comments, questions and suggestions welcome via abigail.gilmore@manchester.ac.uk or below. And look out for future seminars and events, and many other chances to join in through the Manchester Histories Festival 2012 programme.

Manchester Archives+ Dave Govier

Dave talked us through the recent work by Archives+ using Google Maps & Flickr to promote resources such as the Manchester Local Image Collection. The work has overcome the problems with social media mapping tools, and is focusing on new ways to encourage people to join in, contribute and curate their own histories maps. For more information see the project report and blog here

Historical Mapping Martin Dodge

Along with Chris Perkins, Martin has been working to promote access to maps on Manchester and show the city revealed by the layering of data made possible through mapping. Following development work bringing together these various cartographies, the publication of the Map Reader (with Chris Perkins) and a funding bid to JISC, Martin is interested in finding ways to take this forward – presentation here

Data mapping Niall Cunningham

Niall is a new Research Fellow at CRESC and has been working on various projects which map data spatially, including the Great British Class Survey data and more recently new work with Laurence Brown and Andy Miles on spatial inequalities, the built environment and socio-cultural change in Manchester. His interests include thinking about the role of geographical location on economic future and on understanding historical resonance and inertia through data mapping. Presentation here

Univercity Culture Abigail Gilmore, Kostas Arvanitis, Julian Hartley & Jim Ralley

UnivercityCulture was an University of Manchester-funded pilot to develop methodologies for student engagement using geo-location and annotation of research. It has formed the basis for thinking about how to map research and draw people to and around the resources in the city, by annotating spaces and places with digital content (using Google, Foursquare, Youtube, Twitter and QR codes). Prezi here

Gaming and Novars Jim Ralley

Jim introduced us to the ways in which gaming, ‘gamefulness’ and ‘gamification’ can provide enticing ways into hidden, obscured and previously ‘dry’ subjects by describing the two games he designed with UnivercityCulture – Campus Obscura & Histonauts. Jim also showed us a film he made on NOVARS work to ‘aurify’ Manchester histories, spaces and places with sound.

The Manchester Histories Festival 2012 Claire Turner

Claire is the Director of MHF and is develop an exciting 10-day programme along with the city’s heritage partners and higher education institutions. She told us how the objectives for 2012 include changing the ways histories programming and engagement is perceived and received, to demonstrate how different partners and audiences can work together to make history more exciting and engaging as well as to promote various interests which will benefit the city, including cultural tourism and teaching and learning curriculums. She also spoke of the aims to grow and embed these activities outside the 10-day period and revealed that the next edition’s theme will be Manchester Entertainments in 2014. Watch out for Festival news on their website – www.manchesterhistoriesfestival.org.uk

Postscript

Interestingly,  on the same day as the workshop, the European Commission announced a proposal to amend the European Directive on the re-use of Public Sector Information. The aim of the proposal is to boost research, development and industry by removing barriers to the re-use of information held by public sector bodies. The outcomes of the proposal will involve public sector archives, libraries (including university libraries) and museums – although services forming part of broadcasting or performing arts organisations will not generally be included. The majority of archives, libraries and museums already permit a wide range of commercial and non-commercial re-use of information, for example by licensing reproduction of images from collections. This, and particular circumstances of cultural institutions, will be taken into account in relation to permissions for charge-setting, and wide consultation with public sector stakeholders, led by the National Archives, is due to take place.

For further information see link here – thanks to Dave Govier and to the National Archives for this information.

Histonauts Results

We ran the second iteration of the campus QR code game yesterday evening at Contact. The night was hosted by Larkin’ About, Manchester’s only pervasive gaming collective.

It was loads of fun, and we had a really positive response to the game. Everyone learned a bit about the history of the campus, and hopefully made some new friends. It was raining a little bit but that didn’t seem to bother people.

Teams followed a basic map to 4 buildings on campus that are named after famous academics from the University’s past. At each location there was a challenge: a maths challenge, a drawing challenge, a limerick-writing challenge, and a kind of interpretive theatrical tableau photo challenge.

Check out the results below…

2nd – Kyle and Friends with 49 points

3rd – @IanHayles with 48 points

4th – @marisensy with 44 points

5th – @play_ARK with 41 points

6th – @_jennabee with 0 points :’(  <— minor BlackBerry technical issues

Limericks/comic poems written about Samuel Alexander in response to this anecdote

“An eccentric, bike-loving, Australian-born philosopher, and the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college, who worked in aesthetics and metaphysics. Once Samuel Alexander arrived, after a long bike trip during which he was caught in a storm, wet and muddy at the home of his friends who had invited him to dinner. When the maid answered his knock, he asked if he might have a bath. Since he looked every inch a tramp, the maid curtly turned him down and shut him out.”

@leengayu
There once was an old man from Australia
Whose theories on God were a failure;
He wrote lots of books
But his roguish good looks
Were masked by his trampish regalia.

Kyle and Friends
There once was a man from down-under
Who thought he could ride through the thunder
Asked the maid for a bath
She said “you’re having a laugh”
And she threw him outside for his blunder

@IanHayles
There was an aesthete called Sam,
Who had an aversion to ham,
On his bike he got dirty,
For a date at 6:30,
And the maid turned him out with a slam

@marisensy
Dear Uncle Sam,
Who cycling down under
Got soaking wet
And looked like a rambler.
The maid of the place
With a strange face
Turned you down
When you asked for a dry gown.

@play_ARK
There was a nice chap called Sammy
He was always cleaning his bike with a chamois.
He wanted a bath,
The maid had to laugh,
Because he got himself a bit clammy.

Ellen Wilkinson Challenge

Ellen Wilkinson was the first female Minister for Education, she brought in the 1946 School Milk Act giving 1/3 pint a day to all school children in the UK under 18. In 1971 Margaret Thatcher changed the act to only provide milk for children under 7. Teams had to take a photo of themselves acting out the notorious moniker “Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”

Thanks to everyone who played, and to Contact and Larkin’ About who were great hosts.

Grave Secrets: small but beautiful

Last week I attended the opening of Grave Secrets: Tales of the Ancient Nubians, Manchester Museum’s latest temporary exhibition. This exhibition is up on the 3rd floor next to the resources centre. It is basically a small display of bones and other artefacts excavated by the Archaeological Survey of Nubia between 1907 and 1911. The main focus is on how these bones have been used to tell us more about life, death and particularly disease in Ancient Nubia. Having passed it several times as it was being set up I was not sure how much information such as small space could contain.

Entering the space I was surprised by what I found. The whole display is enclosed and all the walls are black. This creates a slightly mysterious, secretive atmosphere but not in a gimmicky way. Along one wall are a series of text panels explaining the exhibition and how the bones have been used for research. Down the centre of the room and on the other wall is a long case containing examples of the bones and other artefacts. Each object is accompanied by a short text panel explaining what it is and what has been found out about it. There is a relatively small number of objects but they are chosen and used carefully to tell a powerful story. From each bone you get a sense of the life the person may have lived, whether it’s the severe pain of a person with arthritis or a broken bone that has not healed straight or the sense of love that comes from seeing that someone with a severe physical deformity lived a long life and so must have been cared for by their family. The simple presentation of the objects allows them to speak for themselves and tell their own, human, story. A screen on the end wall displayed revolving images of the bones to allow visitors to see them from all angles.

The only thing that did not seem to fit was the comptuer. This seemed to be there for people to find out more about the Centre for Biological Egyptology at the University. However, it did not seem to say much and I felt the techonology could have been better used to allow visitors to find out more about the specimins and the processes used to analyse them.

Appart from this the exhibition is a small but beautifully desgined display that manages to blend science and Egyptology into an engaging human story.

Xtremuseology

“What is xtremuseology?”

Xtremuseology is a student-oriented initiative by the Centre for Museology, Manchester Museum and Whitworth Art Gallery at the University of Manchester that aims to encourage students to think critically about practices, behaviours and conventions of museums, galleries and other cultural and heritage environments.

“What does it involve?”

It involves participating in fun activities that aim to intervene with, enhance or disrupt and so reveal cultural conventions and their characteristics and boundaries.

“Is this only for museum studies students?”

No! Any University of Manchester students are welcome to get xtremuseological!

“What am I expected to do?”

Our motto is: “Turn up – have fun – share and reflect”! It’s as simple as that!

“OK, sounds intriguing; tell me more!”

First, we ask people to sign up in xtremuseology. Participants will then receive information about the date and place of the xtremuseological event(s) and further instructions on what you are expected to do. Oh yes, you are expected to actively participate! We can’t reveal more now, but we can say that the first event will be a flash mob!

“Cool! How can I get involved?”

Email Naomi at naomikashiwagi@gmail.com to sign up. We’ll then get in touch with you with more info. We may be asking for some help with the organisation, but more about this in due course. Also, you can follow xtremuseology on Twitter

“Fab! Anything else that I need to know?”

Yes, xtremuseological events will be filmed/photographed and shared on social media, including this blog. If you participate in the events, we’ll assume that you are happy to be filmed.

***
Download the xtremuseology poster

Doing a PhD at the University of Manchester – a session for prospective applicants

Postgraduate Researcher Information Session
Monday 5th December 2011
Provisional Programme

12:00 – 12:30: Registration / Exhibition Area Opened (Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre Atrium)
12:30 – 13:00: Welcome and overview of PGR study at the University of Manchester (Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre
Lecture Theatre)
13:00 – 13:30: Life as a Research Student (Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre Lecture Theatre)
13:30 – 14:00: PGR Funding Opportunities (Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre Lecture Theatre)
14:00 – 14:30: Why undertake PGR study? (Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre Lecture Theatre)
14:30 onwards: Meet staff

Campus and City Maps (the Interdisciplinary Biocentre is No 16 in the campus map)

CPD Open Day

Are you a museum or arts management professional interested in developing your career?

The professional development programme at the University of Manchester’s Institute for Cultural Practices offers flexible access to MA modules, intensive spring and summer courses and professional doctorates.

Come and talk to us over tea and coffee to find out more about the programme and how it might benefit your career directly.

Professional Development Open Day
3-5pm, Wednesday 23rd November
Room 4.10, Mansfield Cooper
Institute for Cultural Practices, University of Manchester
Maps

Visitors are welcome to attend the Museology research seminar from 5-6.30pm after the open day:

‘Creating the new Museum of Liverpool’ Zelda Baveystock, Museum of Liverpool, National Museums Liverpool.

To book a place at the open day please contact:
sophie.everest@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Find out more

Museum of Liverpool: Some Emotional Reactions

Should museums aim to make people angry?

The new Museum of Liverpool has received a lot of press since it’s opening, both good and bad. Ten years and millions of pounds in the making, it was always going to inspire a range of feelings. What was interesting was that on our tour we were told that in the brief for the People’s Republic Gallery ‘emotional specifications’ had been included. They wanted to shock people; make people laugh, cry, and most interestingly, angry.

These emotions have certainly been achieved in and through the varied displays. Noticeably the statistics on the sides of the large display cases, not all of which show Liverpool in the best light, have provoked angry responses. This anger may be because of the issues raised, or it may be directed at the museum for giving them such a prominent position.  

This emotional specification idea seems to make the visitor more active rather than passive. Of course the museum has done this in a number of other ways too; through consultation with the community, interactivties, and community display cases. However evoking strong emotion is a sure way of opening dialogue between the visitor, the display and the museum; a shift toward the forum and away from the temple, as Duncan Cameron may have it. It seems rather brave to accept that in exciting strong emotion the institution should not shy away from creating anger along with any other feelings.

Hopefully it will largely be the sort of anger that will drive social change rather than anger directed toward the museum.

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/mol/

Roy Stringer Lecture: Democratising the Role of the Web

Roy Stringer Lecture: Democratising the Role of the Web @ FACT Liverpool, Tuesday 1 November 2011.

Chair: Herb Kim (Codeworks)

Martha Lane Fox (Race Online)

Peter Barron (Google)

Andy Miah (University of West Scotland)

John Egan (It’s Liverpool)

Natalie Gross (Amaze)

Patrick Fox (FACT/Arena Housing)

In England, 9 million people out of the 50 million population do not have access to the Internet.

In Liverpool, 70,000 out of the 450,000 plus population do not have access to the Internet.

These two sweeping facts set the backdrop for the annual Roy Stringer memorial lecture at FACT.

Keynote speaker and UK Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox opened the event, focusing on the amount of people who have no access to the internet. It is estimated that if the economic value of the 9 million people who are offline were harnessed through jobs, education or business purposes, it would equate to £22 billion. Lane Fox then spoke about her most famous venture Lastminute.com founded during the dot-com bubble in the late nineties. The rating systems featured on the site were, in her opinion, a vital tool in understanding the true potential of the internet at the time – even if she admitted she made up the majority of the ratings up at the beginning!

Chair Herb Kim quizzed Lane Fox on her role as the UK Digital Champion for the government, a role that she stressed she isn’t funded for. It was clear that Lane Fox cares deeply about reaching out to people who have no internet access. The boundaries that prevent people from getting online include the failure to see any benefit of themselves being online, the perception of the price and lack of technical skills. These factors often overlap and are linked to impoverished social conditions and areas were resources are limited. Lane Fox cited initiatives of bringing computer hubs to social and community centres, such as Post Offices and pubs. Partnerships that allow special reconditioned PCs and telephone packages for under £100 are practical methods of attempting to address this problem.

The GO ON Give an Hour campaign, to encourage active internet users to give an hour of their time to help to educate people who are offline, was widely discussed. It seems a good initiative. I’m sure there will be no shortage of people lining up to demonstrate the unrivalled procrastination powers of Facebook…

Patrick Fox, who has worked heavily with FACT’s in-house community orientated internet TV channel Tenantspin, discussed how the collaborative focus on content generation has enabled Tenantspin to successful impact on a wider community in the North West. Tenantspin is the oldest internet TV channel in the world and Fox spoke of how developments such as Skype have enabled projects to reach new social groups and evolve their way of reaching new audiences. (Below is a video from their project during Vancouver Winter Olympics last year.)

It was genuinely thought provoking to hear Kim’s figures that 3.5 million people don’t encounter another person in their daily life and that 1.5 million people can go up to a month without any real person-to-person contact. These statistics backed up his proposition that helping to widen the demographic of internet users, including the elderly, can help to make a social impact of the Give an Hour campaign.

Peter Barron, whose corporate rhetoric would have been labelled an ‘assured batting display’ if he had held the crease during a cricket match, represented the powerhouse that is Google. Barron and Kim held an engaging discussion about the rise of the smart phone and how it is reshaping how we access the internet. Android, Google’s mobile operating system, is the market leader in smartphones. Barron, in response to questions about the role of smartphones played recent Egyptian/Libyan revolutions, said Google always advocated access of information and freedom seen in these instances. This interestingly led into Kim’s clarification of the recurring theme of ‘walled garden’s’ defined as the few websites that harbour abnormal amounts of traffic such as Facebook and Amazon. When listing a few companies, he neglected to mention Google. If this were an oversight borne of politeness towards Barron, it would have been as safe chairing, which is a shame. Before he and Lane Fox left early to catch the Euston train, Barron did address this, commenting that it was Google wish to remove these online bastions. I think that Barron will have quite a large demolition job on your hands if that is the case…

John Egan spoke of the Go ON it’s Liverpool campaign, campaign commissioned by Liverpool Vision to create a new identity for Liverpool heavily routed in social content generation. It was clear Egan and his team have put together a quite forward thinking project driven by the brief, especially as there was no money to pay for the campaign.

The charismatic Andy Miah launched into his speech with a raised hands poll aimed at making everyone feel bad for not religiously poring over their Facebook privacy settings. Aside from detailing that you can amend the control that Facebook has over your information, Miah questioned if arts organisations should be on Twitter, attacking the inconsistency of ‘appropriate usage’ policies by organisations. His example that a specific Olympic planning department viewed a ‘re-tweet’ as an endorsement was interesting in showing that the ground is still being tested when it comes to defining the usage of Twitter. Personally, I think of course they should be. In most instances, the personality of the employee who runs the feed will inevitably shine through but I view this as a benefit and a possible selling point of a social media strategy. It can be a fine example of utilising staff resources, as long as that particular staff member in charge isn’t boring, inconsistent or irrelevant, of course. He elaborated on his involvement with the citizen journalism scheme for London 2012 and cited his previous work body of work on the matter at previous Summer and Winter games.

I did find the presentation of the event troubling. It would have been great to hear more from Lane Fox and Miah. Perhaps the event could be described as suffering from too many cooks, but no more so than when two of the head chefs had to leave half way through to catch their train.

NESTA: Cultural Value – creative industries in a digital world.

Conservative Party Conference: Cultural Value – creative industries in a digital world.

Tuesday 4 October 2011, Lecture Room, Manchester Art Gallery

Image: Charles Hunter & Geoff Mulgan. Copyright: Terry Kane.

Chair: Geoff Mulgan, NESTA CEO

The Hon Ed Vaizey MP, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries

Peter Tullin, Co-founder, Culture Label

Charles Hunter, Executive Director, Mudlark

NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) have again been holding court throughout the political conference season, hosting a series of discussions on business and the arts. The one session manifest at all three party conferences this year was Cultural Value – creative industries in a digital world.

Effectively chaired by NESTA CEO Geoff Mulgan, the Manchester session gave Peter Tullin, Charles Hunter and Ed Vaizey the opportunity to discuss how could new technologies could be embraced by creative organisations to engage prospective audiences and create new artistic and entrepreneurial opportunities?

Charles Hunter explained how his company Mudlark, who won acclaim with Such Tweet Sorrow – their contemporary scripting of Romeo & Juliet played out on Twitter – base their creative output on working with new technologies that users can interact with. Mudlark’s are currently working with ‘FourSquare’ technology manipulating existing components in Oyster travel cards to enable the card to act as a tracker for customers. Interestingly, Hunter admitted that Transport for London has often been uncooperative in development of the project.

Peter Tullin of Culture Label gave an assured talk, placing emphasis on his entrepreneurial approach in using online technologies to identify a profitable niche in the sale of art online while making a sustained investment in the arts. Identifying a lack of online merchandise for institutions for the ICA, Tullin described how Culture Label actively aggregated a portfolio of cultural organisations without online shops in the UK and created this service for them.

His well-rehearsed party trick line, that IKEA is the biggest seller of ‘art’ in the world, drew a collective murmur that must hit the target every time he wheels it out. Building a solid brand and making their initiatives accessible to a new audience was Tullin’s aim at Culture Label – a pop at his perception of the Own Art scheme rendered ineffective by its overly bureaucratic procedure.

Tullin gave numerous examples to back up his argument that online technologies can open up new audiences in the arts. A key example is the Google Art Project digitalising select works and using Google’s feted ‘street view’ within major galleries such as the Louvre.

Ed Vaizey emphasised the changing landscape acknowledging the age of self-publishing and content generation by users. Vaizey’s key message, that technology and culture need to be at the heart of government ‘technological’ revolution, was backed by examples of NESTA’s work and the need for the Arts Council to actively embrace technology in their working methods.

A Q&A session touched on a few issues; the most intriguing being a question regarding the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act, a stalled act concerning website archiving and protection. Ed Vaizey commented that the amended act is still to be presented but is hopeful of a conclusion.

Peter Tullin gave a few examples of what he perceives to be cultural organisations who are innovatively engaging with digital meda;

Saatchi online

Streets museum

Gagosian Gallery app

Papa Sangre

Beck’s – The Green Box Project

Punchdrunk

Kickstarter and Wedidthis.org.uk

Secret Cinema

Be-artsy.com