Through a Glass Darkly :Connecting Schools and Universities at Glamorgan Archives

On 4^th September I’ll be speaking at the ‘Enhancing Impact, Inspiring Excellence’ Conference at the University of Birmingham.  The Conference, organised by the National Archives and the University of Birmingham in association with Research Libraries UK, aims to examine collaborative approaches between archives and universities.

 

Delegates will include academics, students and archivists who will be discussing existing partnerships and identifying new partnerships for the future.  The Conference will showcase collaborative projects between archives and academia, highlight good practice, and emphasise the benefits to both archives and universities that result from partnership working.

 

The day will be filled with a series of papers combined with shorter, more intensive case studies of particular projects.  As a non-academic I’m glad that I’ll be delivering one of the latter!  In my case study, I aim to explain how Charlotte Boman and I came to work together in partnership with support and funding from Afterlife of Heritage, the challenges we faced, and the opportunities offered by our collaboration.

 

More details on ‘Enhancing Impact, Inspiring Excellence’ can be found at :

 

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/events/enhancing-impact-inspiring-excellence-birmingham.htm

 

Rhian Phillips

Glamorgan Archives

Sarah Younan – blog post 3

Towards a digital dream space

 Museums create fictional universes, much like the original cabinet of curiosities they aim  they construct model universes by collecting, ordering and displaying overviews of the external world. These have been used over time to support and reinforce current understandings of the world. Despite their emphasis on real and original items museums ultimately produce fiction, their very own brand of surrealism. In my project with digital scans of museum objects I have covetted and encouraged this museum surrealism and found myself straying into the ‘museum dream space’…

 Objects can become staging grounds for symbolic action. When objects enter the museum, they are removed from primary experience and embeded in narrative; their practical value is replaced by “exhibition value” (Benjamin, 1973).  There is no guarantee that the story told by the museum is identical with the viewer’s reading (Hein, 2000). Museum objects can elucidate historical or scientific knowledge, they can be of aesthetic and educational value. However they can also elicit personal memories (Kavanagh, 2000), blending inner and outer experience into one. In my work with digital models of museum artefacts I have sought to explore how digital models of museum objects can trigger our imagination, emotions, senses and memories.

 Going into the museum storage to scan objects I was confronted with a myriad of pieces to choose from. I selected objects based on how they ‘called out’ to me. The emotional impact or “push” of an object (Thrift, 2004: 64) is variable, my response to the museum pieces was influenced by my place within history and culture (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000) and the emotional state I was in at the time of the encounter. The objects I found myself attracted to became the chosen ones, and were digitized in order to be shared with a number of artists used to create new artworks based on the historical artefacts.

 In this context the scans can be seen as moulds, shaped voids into which artists could pour their emotions, creativity and memories. Often the artists interaction with the digital models and the works they create from them have little to do with the original historic artefacts, I found the artists where tapping into what Gaynor Kavanagh describes as the museum “dream space” (Kavanagh, 2000). In her book Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum Kavanagh describes the dream space as a level of interaction with museum objects, which triggers private associations, thoughts and memories.

 In dream space many things might tumble through our minds: bits of songs, half-written shopping lists, things left unsaid. (Kavanagh, 2000)

 Kavanagh is building on theories on symbolic museum interaction put forward by Sheldon Annis in his essay The museum as a staging ground for symbolic action (1986).  In this essay Annis examines ways in which viewers construct meaning from museum objects and describes three levels of object-viewer interaction, which he calls ‘spaces’; the cognitive space, the pragmatic space, and the dream space (Annis, 1986).  The cognitive space describes the rational contemplation of the museum.  This space is informed by signage and display design, meaning is assigned to objects through curative choices. The pragmatic, or “social” space (Kavanagh, 2000) is the field in which the viewer moves and interacts with other people, and in which we act out our social roles in the museum. The dream space is the field of interaction between the object and the viewer’s subrational consciousness.

 The viewer’s mind and eye subrationally seize upon certain objects that jolt memory or recognition and provoke internal associations of fantasy, desire and anxiety. (Annis, 1986)

 3D scanning allowed me to take these emotional triggers home, and to share them with artists internationally. The digital models of the museum artefacts became gateways into the dream space; they acted as “liminal objects” (Murray, 1997). Liminal objects are located “on the threshold between external reality and our own minds” (Murray, 1997). The concept of the liminal object has its origins in Winicott’s notion of the “transitional object”, a material object to which an infant attributes special emotional value (Winnicott, 1971). Liminal objects exist on the threshold of reality and imagination, through creatively re-imagining the museum artefacts the dreamspace can take form.

 Digital media enable audiences to step into museum fiction and re-imagine events. My favorite example from this project is a pre-hispanic Mexican clay mask from the storage at the National Museum of Wales. This artefact lacks background information; the museum has no infromation on when the piece was aquired and from whom. It is presumed to be Mexican, perhaps from the Teotihuacán region in the Central highlands, and dated to around AD 500. Mario Padilla, a Mexican artist who is working with me on this project, has chosen to work with this mask, he sees it as his ‘cultural responsibility’ and will be contacting experts in Mexico to try and discover more information on the piece. 

 Not only will the mask be taken out of storage and exhibited for the first time, it is also gaining a story, and has, in some way, even made its way back to Mexico.

 Step by step the digital models are feeding information, emotions and stories back into the museum. This project will conclude with an exhibition at the National Museum of Wales in April 2014. I am still taking on new participants, for more information and to access scans contact sayounan(at)cardiffmet.ac.uk by December 2013.

 ANNIS, S. 1986. The museum as a staging ground for symbolic action. Museum International, 38, 168-171.

BENJAMIN, W. 1973. Illuminations, London, Fontana.

HEIN, H. S. 2000. The Museum in Transition; A Philosophical Perspective, Washington and London, Smithsonian Institution Press.

HOOPER-GREENHILL, E. 2000. Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, Routledge.

KAVANAGH, G. 2000. Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum, London, Continuum.

MURRAY, J. H. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, New York, Free Press.

WINNICOTT, D. W. 1971. Playing and reality, London, Tavisctock Publications.

 

‘An Evening of Art, Music, Fashion and Marcel Proust’ Reflective blog #3

‘An Evening of Art, Music, Fashion and Marcel Proust’ Reflective blog #3

By Wendy Ligon Smith and Sophie Preston

On the day

After getting little sleep the night before, the day of ‘An Evening of Art, Music, Fashion and Marcel Proust’ arrived. Wendy and I were both excited but anxious due to the gallery’s concern regarding the potential number of people set to attend the event. With 180 free tickets accounted for, MAG emailed preparing us for the worst, explaining visitors might feel underwhelmed if they could not hear or see what was happening due to throngs of visitors. We were also informed on the morning of the event, we needed to attend a meeting that afternoon. Sophie went along to this meeting and met with the team and together they discussed the format of the evening. The gallery asked if we could create a playlist and a PowerPoint presentation for the evening, Wendy and I were able to complete the latter task, but felt it was too late notice to make a playlist for the evening.

After the meeting we spent some time with Ben and Andy from Bellevue Productions who were filming the evening on behalf of Heritage Afterlife. We took the crew on a tour of the gallery, allowing them to plan their shots and were interviewed by Ben and Andy who asked us about the development of the tour. Time went quickly and the entrance foyer of the gallery soon began to fill up. Unfortunately no sign had been made by the gallery stating there would be two tours and where they would start, the visitor assistant welcoming guests was also unclear on the night’s proceedings – this was a shame as this had been discussed in the earlier meeting.

Nevertheless, all went to plan. Over 85 people assembled on the balcony and listened to the solo violinist create the right mood.  The tour then began, with Sophie welcoming the visitors and explaining the format of the tour, contextualising Proust’s relationship to Manchester and discussing the first painting. The violinist played again and the crowds filtered through into the next room where Wendy discussed Proust and Venice using the Canaletto paintings on display. Next, he harpist played three beautiful pieces and Sophie led the tour into the next room and discussed Proust’s relationship to Pre–Raphaelite art. The tour continued in the final gallery where the flute trio played and Wendy and Sophie discussed episodes of the novel using relevant art works, and finally Wendy finished the tour discussing Proust and the dress designer Mariano Fortuny, whose famous ‘delphos’ gown is on display in the gallery. We received excellent feedback after the tour and greatly enjoyed chatting  to visitors afterwards. The tours apparent success was a huge relief. We quickly composed ourselves and began the next tour with a crowd of over 45. This tour went just as well, but  we had to finish a little sooner due to the gallery needing to close. For us both, It was a wonderful evening that went far too quickly.

 

Working together

With having the same supervisor and similar research interests, Wendy and Sophie have been the perfect team to work on this project. Wendy, on seeing the application for an AHRC funded public engagement event asked Sophie if she would like to work together on a project. Sophie was thrilled at the opportunity and from day one, working together has been nothing but a positive experience. Wendy has taken overall charge of the event due to her experience as final year PhD researcher and Sophie feels, as only a first year PhD researcher, she has benefitted a lot from Wendy’s knowledge.  Both Wendy and Sophie wrote their own scripts, while Wendy took charge of the paperwork and organised the music for the evening. Together they created the tour’s format.

Working with the musicians

It was convenient that RNCM has an efficient program for booking musicians.  Wendy’s contact, Abigail Collins, organises the student bookings and made the process quite easy.  She gave us every confidence that the musicians would be professional quality, on time, and eager to make to contributing to making the event a success.  We signed a contract with them and specific music and dress, and timings were agreed. All of the business end of the agreement was handled with Abigail, in whom we trusted greatly, which put us at ease.

On the night the musicians were on time, friendly, prepared, and knowledgeable.  Their performances enhanced the event dramatically.  So many guests commented on their enjoyment of the music and how it was so interesting and unique to bring other senses into their experiences of visual art.  We would, without hesitation, work with these musicians and with RNCM again. It was such a positive experience.

Interactive Research! – Niki Black second post

Interactive Research!

The start of July and I’m drawing to the end of my engagement with both the Afterlife of heritage project and my own intense period of data gathering for my PhD research. As the sun continues to shine and the university empties of its undergraduates, my own work load has intensified and the constant battle between the urge (and the need) to engage with my research and the temptation of getting out into the garden rages!

I’m actually very lucky. The events at which I’m engaging the public are my case study festivals, the majority of which take place during the summer. So, I’ve been blessed by this gorgeous weather and can’t complain!

So what can I report?! It’s been very interesting how varied the public response has been, depending on the location of the events, both physically and geographically. Although all events are held predominantly outdoors, I have had a variety of bases, indoor as well as outdoor. The practicalities of setting up an exhibition stand and carrying out paper-based arts activities on a windy day can probably be imagined. The last festival I attended was in a field – beautiful sunshine but quite a stiff breeze. We entertained the adjacent stall holders with our attempts to set up and then eventually had to abandon the art activities as the wind increased or risk losing all our materials round the festival field! When we’d been based indoors, we obviously didn’t have this problem. However, although we’d had a good response to the bunting making indoors, it was much harder to engage with the public in interview and discussion. Interesting!

Very varied response from the public and certainly not always what was expected. It goes to show as a reminder to try not to judge a book by its cover! Some of whom I presumed would be the least ‘likely-to-be-engaged’ members of the public, turned out to have a huge amount of interest and interesting things to say. And vice-a-versa.

Off to my final event this weekend which I hope will come off well.

Niki Black, PhD Researcher mailto:nicola.black@ncl.ac.uk  (ICCHS, Newcastle University)

Burning Bright: Part 2, Burning Gold – Naomi Billingsley

read my first post about my project here.

My first activity, back in May, was a workshop for school groups which explored different ways of interpreting the Bible, taking Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job as inspiration. The timing of the exhibition and space in the education programme meant that it would be difficult to work with year groups who would be taking exams, so I decided to target Key Stage 3 (ages 11-15). I focussed the workshop on the story of the Good Samaritan which appears on the Religious Studies syllabus and is depicted by Blake in his illustrations to Night Thoughts (you can view it via LUNA). In the end I had two groups – one of eight year 10s (so actually early Key Stage 4, aged 15-16), and the other of thirty year 9s. Needless to say the dynamics were very different with the two groups. The larger group were more challenging in many respects (for instance, I was surprised how short their attention span was when I gave them time to produce a piece of work), but they were more talkative, so we ended up having a lengthy discussion in the exhibition about one of the books and the issues around displaying works in an exhibition. Conversely, the smaller group were a bit shy at first but became more talkative as the workshop went on and they produced some really nice work.

 

My second activity, at the end of June, was a tour of the exhibition and collection encounter focussing on Blake’s fascination with the Gothic, inspired by the John Rylands Library itself which is a magnificent neo-Gothic edifice. The photograph above is from one of two tours I did – the lady on the left was the only taker on this tour (I suspect because the advertising was not released very far in advance because it came right at the start of the library’s summer programme). I think she was a little overwhelmed at first to have a personal tour, plus photographer (Jamie Robinson of the Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care), plus another member of staff (Stella Halkyard, my main contact at the Library, who curated the exhibition and organised the items for the collection encounters), but it meant that it became more of a conversation than with a larger group and she seemed very happy at the end. In the photograph we are looking at an engraving of Henry Fuseli’s spooky painting of the witches and Macbeth from Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. 

 

Tips for working with schools and public audiences

 

–         Be prepared to be flexible: you never know what to expect in terms of numbers, personality and knowledge base of your groups.

–         If your advertising is to be done through your partner, talk to them about their lead-in times to make sure there is sufficient time for take-up

–         If you are taking bookings for your event, especially if it is free, anticipate people dropping out without telling you

–         Always have something extra up your sleeve in case things go faster than you expected.

 

The third part of my project is an online version of the exhibition, which will be a virtual incarnation of the physical exhibition, as well as incorporating the fruits of various activities run alongside (including my own workshops and tours). It’s now in the final technical stages and will be launching soon. I’ll say more about the process of working on it in my final post for this project.

Research to Profession – Time is going too fast here! – Blog Post by Veronica Pizzarotti

I honestly can’t believe I’m already half way through this internship. I’ve had really exciting days packed with activities and I’ve  also started putting the preparatory work I had done in the first few days in shape to be inputted into the new collection management system.

I feel really grateful for the opportunity I have been given to use a system that is new to everybody and to comment on it. Given the opportunity  I have been given  I will work even harder to complete this pilot project in a satisfactory way.

Narrative writing is really hard. It pushes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to rethink years of research to explain in a coherent an cohesive way your point about the peculiarities of a given book,  and then to transform this summary  in a shorter one,  first to produce an overview of the edition I am analysing, then a summary outlining how this edition could be used for students, and finally an account for the general public.  The policy for the Library for material aimed at the general public is 80 words, and this limit is really daunting! At first I thought ‘How can I possibly say something relevant about a 46-books-long poem in 80 words?’ But this in reality is an amazingly good exercise as it forced me to really think to the relevant aspects of my research and how they could cast light on the focus of my research and its possible appeal to a non-academic audience. This exercise has  worked very well so far, as I feel I have also found new applications of my research and I hope the will take shape in the form of collection encounters in the future.

I have spent quite a lot of time familiarising myself with the new collection management system, to try and understand the terminology and its various components, in order  to use them for my own project. Now I feel I am confident in the use terminology to designate the collections and its components and how to populate fields with information relevant for my task. The interactive nature of the system has enabled me to explore its different parts and their interaction with one another (i.e. the links between the catalogue and the narrative writing and how to generate keywords and bibliography records to be attached to the narrative).

 

I have received positive feedback on my work so far and I am looking forward to work with more editions over the next few days. I hope that my contribution will cast light on the use of a repository of narratives to be used by the library in the future.

 Veronica Pizzarotti – PhD  Candidate in Italian Studies

Blog 3. Charlotte Bomam – Exploring the Archive and 19th Century Photographs:

The day was staged as a series of events that would together form a kind of narrative: the journey everyday objects undergo in order to become objet d’art (or at least, items homed in national archives).  We began by going ‘behind the scenes’ with 30 (year 10) students to investigate the various ways in which objects are physically handled as they are cleaned, preserved, dated, classified, boxed and so on. Rhian’s approach to touring the various workstations in the archival hinterland is very much about demystifying the pristine and orderly exterior of the archival space by explaining about the mundane realities of dust, bugs and mould that tend to accompany historical objects.

Ending up in the search room, students had the opportunity to explore a variety of historical sources and documents that tell social stories connected to their local geographical environment: 19^th century police records (with photographs of inmates); detailed accounts from the city’s asylum; a Victorian school diary from the 1880s (some things, it seems, never change); an ordinance map of the now highly developed area of Cardiff where the college is located (then mostly farm land and open fields). The weird otherness of some of this material certainly featured in these conversations, but also, I think, a sense that this is somehow familiar, part of the story of ordinary life. As a way of bringing these strands together, the students used the Glamorgan online collections to have a go at researching their own ancestry.

The second part of the day focused specifically on the importance of photography as an autobiographical and familial narrative. Using images from the Thompson family collection, I wanted to stimulate thoughts (in smaller groups of 4-5) about how ideas relating to gender, social status and personality are encoded in a series of formal photographs from the mid-19^th century. It was interesting to find that in feeding back ideas, the groups were generally very comfortable with reading photographs in terms of clothing, posture and so on. The responses opened up plenty of opportunities for drawing on their experiences of taking, selecting and collating digital images through social media. That is, the idea that we use photographs to construct an identity and a social context is as self-evident (and problematic) now as it was then.

The concluding part of this story of Victorian family photography sits less comfortably with our modern notions, however: The practice of memento mori photography. These photographs are really well suited to thinking about how attitudes to death have been transformed, but also changes to family patterns. So, with these questions/thoughts in mind we ended the day by watching sections from two fairly recent films that deal with this topic: Troell’s Everlasting Moments and Amenabar’s The Others.

 

The activities that took place during the course of the day were intended to tie in with the goals we had identified at the planning stage, such as to…

• Stimulate engagement and a sense of ownership in relationship to the cultural history of local communities  
• Make connections between past and present experiences
• Reflect on aspects of social identity, including gender, education and class
• Practice study and work related skills (research, communication, IT)
• Encourage critical and independent thinking

It has to be said that there were a few surprises (for instance, the group that came along were not A-level students, as we had been told, but first year GCSE!). This meant adjusting the pace and focus somewhat as we went along, but I felt that the comments and notes often suggested thoughtful, critical and (for me) sometimes surprising responses.   

            As the school year is drawing to a close, Rhian and I will meet up to discuss the feedback and consider ways of tweaking the planning. Hopefully there will be opportunities to continue with other workshops in the autumn term. I think we both feel that there is room for development of this collaboration. It was a very hectic, intense experience and I would, perhaps, aim to do less discussion-based work in the future. I have an idea about a mini-research project around photography that students could do individually (or in small groups) that is occupying my mind at the moment…  

Sarah Younan’s blog post

Things are starting to come together; I have scanned an eclectic range of museum objects from the ceramics collections at the National Museum of Wales (http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/), and shared the digital scans with a number of artists interested in participating in this project. Colaborating artists will use the 3d scans of historical artefacts to create new artworks. Andrew Renton, head of applied arts at the National Museum of Wales, has agreed to host a small exhibition of the submitted artworks in the ceramics galleries at the museum. I have never currated a show before and am quite excited about the possibilities. One thing is certain; in order for the digitally created artworks to enter into a dialogue with the original museum artefacts both will have to be displayed together. I would also like to go beyond simply displaying digital artworks on screen or as projection and am thinking of bringing tabletop 3D printers into the museum to allow digital artworks to manifest physically inside the museum.

Three participating artists have submitted initial sketches – none of these are finished pieces, but they already display a wide range of interpretations of the original artefacts.

In a little movie clip that M. Helmrich, an animator by trade, has put together the lid of a cup is transformed into a flying saucer, and sound has been added to bring the artefacts to life.

 

S. Haddad has sent a sketch, which references popular culture; a ceramic squirrel has been replaced with Scrat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etKCHLgW_o0) , an animated character from 20^th Century Fox’ Ice Age movies.

 

T. Pickup, from the digital arts collective Genetic Moo (http://www.geneticmoo.com/) on the other hand approaches the scans as digital data, rather than as three-dimensional models, and has written a programm which runs through the scans coordinate points and translates them into an abstract pattern.

 

These initial approaches can be read in the context of theories on the museum, on artefacts and the digital realm;

 

-Helmrich’s playfully associative connection of the ceramic tableware and flying saucers epitomizes the dream space – The dream space describes a field of subrational thought in which museum artefacts interact with viewers’ memories, imagination and emotions (Kavanagh, 2000). Within the museum it is an affective space and can provoke both emotional expression and creative free play in the minds of their visitors (Mills, 2011).

 

-Haddad’s piece connects the historic artefact with popular culture and illustrates how the mass media has become a source which feeds into our historical imagination (Wallace, 1995); visitors now enter the museum with well stocked mental film banks.

-Artefacts where historically made within a particular medium^[1], the level of the interface did not exist (Manovich, 2010). When working with 3D models the artists usually interact with data on the level of the interface. Pickup’s choice to work with the code data itself raises questions about the nature of digital objects.

 

As this project progresses it will surely offer more exciting approaches towards working with the digital scans of museum artefacts. I am looking forward to seeing how meanings shift and the public, physical object becomes personal and expressive of the artist’s interpretations. In this way the National Museum of Wales will hopefully become a place that inspires philosophical reflection on the impact of media on our understanding of museums and heritage.

---

[1] The artefacts from the National Museum of Wales are all ceramic objects; their mode of production and materiality forms a great part of what these objects are. Not so with 3D scans of these artefacts; they are dematerialised and noted as data.

Kyra Pollitt reports on the first of her Research to Public events:

Action/Assemblage: Drawing Together

The weather forecast lied. The galleries of the Royal West of England Academy were pretty quiet on the Saturday afternoon of one of the few gloriously sunny bank holidays in living memory. This did not bode well for the first of the two Research to Public events I had been busily planning. Action/Assemblage: Drawing Together was scheduled as one of the activities running through the RWA’s Drawn exhibition. It was designed as an interactive visitor experience, and it wouldn’t work without visitors.

I was relying on a host of folks to help the event along. The most important members of the cast were Richard Carter and Paul Scott who had agreed to perform the poetic works they had created in the visual-gestural medium of British Sign Language. Then there were the interpreters, Pascale Moroney and Naomi Bearne, without whom the Signartists and visitors would not be able to communicate. Finally there were the members of the research-through-drawing collective HATCH who had volunteered to lead the graphic responses to Richard and Paul’s work, and Alice Hendy who was to record the event with her camera.

After arriving to arrange the Drawing Lab space far too early, and sweating through the superfluous empty minutes supported by my partner who had generously elected to lend a hand, the cast began to arrive. Fifteen minutes before the start of the event we were all assembled. All that was missing was a ‘public’. ‘Assemblage’, but not yet ‘Action’…

 But I needn’t have worried. Once the Signartists began to perform, their movements conjured visitors into the space as if by magic. 

The Drawing Lab quickly filled. What’s more, the visitors didn’t leave. Most stayed for the entire two hours of the event. As an inveterate wimp (see my first blog on this subject), the bravery of others never ceases to impress and I was bowled over by the readiness of casual visitors to engage with drawing practice. They drew, they wrote haikus, they asked questions, they made comments and appreciative noises, and observed long intense silences while Richard and Paul performed, and I scribed provocative quotes on the blackboards. And as the event drew to a close and artists and visitors mingled and chatted, the voluntary contributions box began to fill with drawings, comments and even a number of haikus!

 The success of the event was all the more rewarding because the whole was designed as a performance of the activity of my doctoral research. I’m looking at image in sign language poetry, and asking whether analysing this ‘Signart’ through art epistemologies can offer a greater understanding of the form than purely linguistic or literary analysis permits. So Richard and Paul were performing the subject of the research, the visitors were performing the research practice by drawing, thinking, writing and commenting, whilst I was performing academia by relating all of these to existing knowledge.

It seemed to work. I can only hope my thesis will be as well received. And perhaps the brightest planning idea – which came from Gemma Brace, the curator at the RWA – was to run the event twice. This offers the opportunity for ‘rewrites’ and ‘corrections’. The first event put a lot of pressure on the Signartists to perform continuously, whilst the position of the blackboards meant the content of my work could easily have been overlooked by visitors. In short, the three activities of the model were performed but could perhaps have interacted with each other more fully. At the next event, in a few weeks’ time, I’ll punctuate the Signartist’s performances by reading the statements I am writing and so help the visitors’ ‘research’ activities to be informed By the ‘academic’ content. I hope the turn out and the responses will be as satisfying.

 I enjoyed the experience enormously!I can’t tell you how fascinating I found the event. 

I’m an artist. I’ve lived in Bristol for six years and this is the first event that has attracted me to the RWA.

 It was really moving, and incredibly inspiring and thought provoking!

Fascinating.Where is the line drawn?

I have never seen sign poetry before, and I didn’t even know it existed

Brilliantly expressive and strong. Mesmerising!

Wow! Really interesting challenge. 

Haiku: with eye, hand, lip a concentration of  movement understanding will come soon Yes

Ed Owens – Blog 1: Trying to Bridge the Academic and Popular History Divide

Ed Owens – Blog 1: Trying to Bridge the Academic and Popular History Divide

Since beginning my PhD in Modern British History in 2011, it has become increasingly clear that if I am to enhance my eventual employment opportunities then my current project must engage a broad audience that extends beyond the academy. The keyword here is impact. Often banded about by policy-makers, higher education institutions and funding bodies without what appears to be any clear idea of its precise meaning, the ever-elusive ‘impact’ plays a crucial part in the government’s strategic investment in the Arts and Humanities http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/kei/impacts/Pages/meanbyimpact.aspx. Generally speaking, ‘impact’ requires that academic research is made relevant, tangible even, so that it might have a meaningful influence on life outside of the academy. In this way, generating ‘impact’ can range from increasing knowledge of a particular subject through public exhibitions to effecting government policy in health, housing or education. These are just a couple of examples, the broad umbrella term ‘impact’ encompassing such an extensive range of activities that at times it can appear overly vague and remote.

Cue The Afterlife of Heritage Research Project – ‘Research to Public’ strand, which has presented researchers like me with a unique opportunity to explore the ways in which we can generate ‘impact’ with our work. Run by a team well-acquainted with the growing importance of public engagement, the scheme has allowed me to join with an external cultural partner to organise an event that will broaden public awareness and understanding on a number of key themes related to my research. The Afterlife Team ran two intensive and highly structured day-workshops that helped us formulate ideas both for possible events and potential collaborations. In the first workshop we were made to think in greater detail about how we can make our work more accessible and relevant in terms of public engagement. In part, this was about user-friendliness and the need to eschew academic jargon when communicating with groups of people less familiar with some of the complex terms involved in our research. It was also about trying to capture the essence of our research in a way that will ensure it appeals to those less familiar with the topic.

At the second workshop we met a number of cultural partners located by the Afterlife Team who were looking to meet researchers with whom they might collaborate. This proved very encouraging both in terms of the cultural partners’ approachability and their real enthusiasm for the kinds of ideas that we hoped to convert into public-orientated events. In the activities organised as part of this workshop we also learnt about the kind of influences cultural partners could exercise to benefit our collaborations, such as advertising for the event, and the building of other networking opportunities. At this point, we researchers had been shortlisted for the ‘Research to Public’ strand, though we were yet to submit our final proposals for the all-important funding that would allow us to run our projects. In respect of this, the second workshop instructed us how to prepare our proposals with special emphasis on imagination and innovation, and we also discussed the need to establish strong communications with our cultural partners so that we would fully benefit from the kind of assistance they could offer us. 

By this point, I had in fact already located a cultural partner in the Institute of Historical Research http://www.history.ac.uk/. The contacts I made at the IHR via email were very enthusiastic about collaborating with a postgraduate historian and were particularly open-minded in terms of the idea for the event that I proposed to run with their help. One of the major focuses of my PhD is the way new kinds of visual media changed how ordinary people experienced and understood the role of monarchy in the middle decades of twentieth-century Britain. The very contemporary nature of this study and the enduring public interest in the royal family means that discussion about my PhD usually leads to more informal gossiping on Prince William and Kate Middleton, royal babies, the likely succession of Prince Charles and the future of monarchy. In this way, monarchy’s unceasing presence in society has meant that my PhD topic often lends itself to stimulating the thoughts of people outside of academia, because almost everybody has an opinion on the royal family, be it positive or negative.

Accordingly, I’ve planned a one-day event that I feel will appeal to a broader public’s sensibilities. Focusing on royal weddings from the interwar years in Britain and their representation in the new visual media of the newsreels of this period, I have set out to demonstrate how a popular image of monarchy was very carefully constructed to draw special attention to the romance, the babies and the gossip, which have remained so integral to the royals’ image through to the present today. My aims are threefold: to introduce the monarchy as a topic worthy of serious scholarship, stressing that the popular image of the royal family requires investigation if we are to fully appreciate the enduring social and cultural power of the Crown as a focal point of British national identity and community. Secondly, I’m particularly interested in advancing how we think about visual images in history and the way they have been used by the national media to present narratives to audiences. My area of expertise is newsreel and, accompanied by a number of other researchers working in this field, I want to use this one-day event to publicise the importance of the newsreel as a historical source and the new kinds of methodologies with which they are being approached. Finally, I intend to use this workshop to highlight how the process of digitisation is providing researchers with increased access to sources like newsreels, and how this affects the way historians ‘do’ history.

The format for this one-day workshop hosted by the IHR at Senate House in London is varied, involving several speakers on the aforementioned subjects as well as a number of interactive group-based activities and discussions. Aimed at researchers working both in and outside of history, and notably, professionals working in the media industry (interested either in the royal family or who have utilised newsreels in their work), this event will bring together a diverse group of people to learn more about the monarchy’s long-lasting and vital relationship with visual media, and how newly available visual sources are changing how we think about history, and how it is subsequently produced.