Queensland Public Libraries and the State Library of Queensland are holding a two-day professional development event, Future Libraries, on Monday 11 and Tuesday 12 April.
On Tuesday, I’ll be speaking on library futures in these days of fear and wonder.
Last week was a huge one for British public libraries. A BBC report highlighted the severity of cuts to library services in recent years, and library lovers in the borough of Lambeth made national news when they occupied a branch due for closure.
I believe that the battles happening in Lambeth, and across the UK, aren’t just about those communities. They have lessons for librarians around the world. Read more
I just finished a seven-day stint at the rotating Twitter account @wethehumanities, where scholars, researchers, and practitioners from across the arts and humanities get to share their work and thoughts with around four thousand people online.
If the humanities are a creative and critical conversation about what it means to be human, who are “we” having those conversations with?
What opportunities do scholars create for members of the public to have a go at what they do? And to *fall in love* with what they do?
This week you can find me over at @wethehumanities, a rotating Twitter account where people working in the humanities get to share ideas, experiences, and stories. I’m using my week to talk about the grey areas between fact and fiction, dream and experience, stories and everyday life – as well as people who cross back and forth over the walls of universities and academic institutions.
Today I’m joined by Ludi Price, who is a fanfiction writer, doctoral candidate at City University’s School of Library & Information Studies, and also works as a librarian in the Far Eastern Languages collection at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Ludi began by telling me about her doctoral thesis.
In a nutshell it’s about the information behaviour of fans on the internet. That means, how fans create, collect, organise, disseminate and share information on digital platforms. Of course, information can be instantiated in many different forms, from books to magazines to wikis to library catalogues – and much, much more. A lot of the information fans deal with are fanworks (what might be termed derivative, fan-created works, such as fanart and fanfiction), and, almost by their very nature, the circulation of these cultural artefacts is through, for and by informal channels. In an age of crowdsourcing and social tagging, this is something that is very interesting to me.
How did you come to choose fandom as a topic?
In short because I’m a fan myself! It’s been a huge part of my life since I was a child, when I used to write Malory Towers and Sailor Moon fanfiction, and draw Little Mermaid fanart. Read more
This week you can find me over at @wethehumanities, a rotating Twitter account where people working in the humanities get to share ideas, experiences, and stories. I’m using my week to talk about the grey areas between fact and fiction, dream and experience, stories and everyday life – as well as people who cross back and forth over the walls of universities and academic institutions.
Today I’m joined by Natasha Barrett, a British researcher and cultural heritage expert currently studying for a doctorate at the University of Leicester.
Natasha tells me:
I’m researching commercial colonial-era photographs (1860s-1914) of Māori (the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand) and their taonga/cultural treasures. Essentially I’m looking at the meaning of these photographs to Māori, and how they have been used over time both within and outside of museums. I’m also considering how Māori perspectives can inform the way these photographs are understood in museums. My approach treats photographs as three-dimensional objects. I pay close attention to their material qualities, such as the albums they are placed in, any writing on their surfaces. As well as, the sensorial or different ways people engage with photographs, inlcuding looking at, talking about and touching them.
You’ve returned to academia after a long time working in the cultural heritage sector; what’s it like returning to research and how have your experiences off-campus shaped what you do now? Read more
This week you can find me over at @wethehumanities, a rotating Twitter account where people working in the humanities get to share ideas, experiences, and stories. I’m using my week to talk about the grey areas between fact and fiction, dream and experience, stories and everyday life – as well as people who cross back and forth over the walls of universities and academic institutions.
Writer, researcher, and librarian Daisy Johnson blogs on children’s literature and literary tourism – which also happen to be her research topics as a doctoral candidate at the University of York. She began by telling me about her thesis.
I research children’s literature and literary tourism in the United Kingdom. I’m interested in what happens after the book; that moment when you visit somewhere in the real world that you’ve previously read about in a book.
I think I’ve always been interested in literary tourism without quite knowing what it is. I visited the Achensee in Austria when I was younger, solely because of my interest in the Chalet School series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, and ever since that point, I’ve been interested in the edges of the literary experience and what happens when you experience the fictional in the real world and vice-versa.
This week’s Marvellous, Electrical looks at Brisbane street art and how we remember a quiet gesture of defiance from 1968: 200m runner Peter Norman chose to wear a human rights badge in solidarity with black US athletes in the year of Martin Luther King’s death.
Ostracised by the Australian athletic community after this act, Norman descended into depression, painkiller addiction, and heavy drinking. The Australian government only apologised for his treatment six years after he died.
How can we remember Norman today, acknowledging his heroic act without hiding the grim reality of the years which followed?
You can subscribe to the Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical newsletter here.
You can subscribe to the Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical newsletter here.
Brisbane’s weird, in the best way. They’ve got portals into the past – actual physical gateways. Years ago, they had state-sponsored magicians who could make buildings disappear overnight. Their job was to erase the city’s history. These things happened right in the middle of town.
It’s all documented. The magic’s fading now, and when I first heard the stories, I assumed it was just people exaggerating. But I work in an archive, the place where records are kept, and it turns out Brisbane’s magic is real.
Check it out over at Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical.
You can subscribe to the Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical newsletter here.
This week’s newsletter features an interview with Dale Woodbridge-Brown, acrobat and ringmaster at Circus Oz.
While Dale gave me an unusual Australian cookery lesson, we talked about sport, storytelling, country childhoods, and indigenous identity.
Check it out over at Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical.
It’s been an eventful weekend, and I’m five days out from running a day-long experimental project here in the UK – more on that further down the line – but I wanted to share some of the excitement from yesterday’s International Games Day at the British Library (BL) in central London.
Gary Green of Surrey Libraries invited me to join the team of volunteers who were running events under the leadership of BL Digital Curator Stella Wisdom.
Stella is co-founder of the BL’s Off the Map video game competition, and Off the Map winners Fancy Crab were there with their offbeat riff on Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. The event was also tied in to this year’s 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland, and Ludi Price was in full cosplay mode as Alice herself.
There were video games, board games, and some that were just a little off the wall, including the bizarre German box-stacking game Ordnungswissenschaft:
We were able to play this by repurposing the boxes from the infamous Comic Book Dice, which had also made a visit to the BL.
I got introduced to the German game by gaming aficionado Ross Fowkes. Ross also showed me a digital jousting game which used motion sensors and the music of Bach in multi-player battles.
“Johann Sebastian Joust” was inspired by a party game played with lemons and spoons. One quick trip to the supermarket later and we had unleashed the Lemon Knights in the heart of the library.
Both the BL’s child-friendly daytime sessions and the later evening event were great successes, with lots of visitors trying their hand at games old and new. Stella and her team did an incredible job playing host to a wide range of people and offering some truly bizarre activities. (Libraries are sometimes cautious about wild play, so I was delighted that Stella gave us permission for a full-on lemon battle in the shadow of the venerable stacks).
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 