Tag: community

Where Do You Find Yourself? Space, Play, and Duty in the Australian Digital Library

Mechanical Dolphin

Are there still cultural backwaters in the digital age? Three months in to my year-long residency at the State Library of Queensland, I’ve written about Australian libraries, regional engagement, and digital literature for The Writing Platform.

I’m very interested in the vogue for locative literature, where texts are linked to physical spaces through digital or conventional media. But there are questions still to be asked: not just whether we add a virtual layer of story and literature to physical spaces, but who gets to create the content in that virtual layer.

Forest comic for Fun Palace

If writers are having a creative and critical conversation about the world, and in the locative age we are venturing outside of traditional venues, we still need to ask: who are “we” having those conversations with? And how could a simple online comic maker start expanding that circle of storytelling, literary production, and critical discussion?

You can read the full article, ‘Where Do You Find Yourself? Space, Play, and Duty in the Australian Digital Library’, at The Writing Platform.

Future Libraries: Towards a presenterless workshop?

Mechanical Dolphin

This week I spoke at the Future Libraries two-day event at the State Library of Queensland. It was an opportunity for public librarians from across Australia’s Sunshine State to discuss plans, dreams, and schemes for the coming year.

There’s always a tension at such sessions, though hopefully it’s a productive one. On one hand, people like to be engaged, inspired, and provoked by speakers who they might not otherwise get a chance to hear or question. On the other, Powerpoint preachers don’t always make a lasting change, they don’t necessarily listen to the experience and creativity already in the room, and all too often those voices broadcasting from the stage are drawn from the same pool.

So, at Future Libraries, with just seventy-five minutes in the “naptime slot” straight after lunch, I tried to give Queensland librarians the best of both worlds.

We made comics together, but I also shared stories of the Lambeth library siege and Birmingham’s library cuts alongside the threats faced in Australia. We celebrated how public librarians are at their best under pressure, from Christchurch to Ferguson, but then it was time to get the whole room talking.

So we tried a version of the Presenterless Workshop.

This is an activity I’ve piloted with various groups, including library staff development sessions in London and regional England. Participants are each given one sheet of instructions from a set of five. By following the instructions on their sheet, they form groups which discuss what libraries should and can do from a range of perspectives. Those groups then share their discussion as a presentation or exhibition, and even the ways in which they interpret the instructions can be provocative and productive.

Rebel Rebel

As libraries evolve to meet today’s needs, and transform their own institutional processes and bureaucracy, we so often hear the mantra “Don’t ask permission, beg forgiveness”. Even I’ve said it in presentations, but I now I see that the spirit of the phrase is not quite right.

Although it encourages people to be less hesitant about trying new things, and has a rebellious ring to it, it also forces innovators into the position of the naughty schoolboy, breaking the rules but still ultimately desirous of, and dependent on, the institution’s resources, support, and long-term approval.

Instead, this presenterless workshop encourages participants to consider that organizational rules are more like guidelines to be interpreted than rules to be either obeyed or broken. A lot of the work I do is finding ways to marry up bright ideas and inspiring fun – like zombie sieges or time travel workshops – with the policies, plans, and success measures of big bureaucratic organizations. There’s almost always some wiggle room somewhere for you to justify creative activities, it just takes a little negotiation.

If you want to listen to a library superstar who is not your typical rebel-posing white bloke, I recommend Wellington Libraries’ Adrienne Hannan, a reservist combat medic and children’s librarian who compares library policies to military rules of engagement – not laws to be transgressed, but a framework within which soldiers must make serious practical decisions, under pressure, in a timely way.

Presenterless Workshop Resources

If you fancy running a presenterless staff development workshop in your library, I’ve included the relevant worksheets as free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF files in this blog post. Download them, play with them, give them a go — and let me know how you get on.

Presenterless Workshop Organizer Notes – PDF download

Presenterless Workshop Participant Sheets – PDF download

Libraries: the seven-fingered fist?

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Last week saw the first of my guest columns for Library as Incubator in the US, following my experiences as Creative in Residence at the State Library of Queensland, Australia.

This first piece explores libraries as gateways to other worlds, showcases the work of Queensland’s Signature Team, and explores the challenges of working with a cultural institution that serves a region three times the size of France.

You can read my guest column over at Library as Incubator.

Library under siege

Mechanical Dolphin

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 →

We The Humanities: Reflections

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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?

I wrote on these questions, and my experience at the helm of @wethehumanities, for City University London, here.

We The Humanities: Interview with Ludi Price, City University London

Mechanical Dolphin

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 →

We The Humanities: Interview with Natasha Barrett, University of Leicester

Mechanical Dolphin

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 →

We The Humanities: Interview with Daisy Johnson, University of York

Mechanical Dolphin

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.

Read more →

Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical: (Un)comfortable Defiance

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1968 Mexico Olympics, Men's 200m winners' podium

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?

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