Tag: interview

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

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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

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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

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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 →

We The Humanities: Interview with Matti Bunzl, Vienna Museum

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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.

One such person is Matti Bunzl, a personal hero of mine. Back when I was a postgraduate studying Austrian identity and refugees from the Nazis, Bunzl was an brave and innovative Chicago-based anthropologist whose careful, critical works captured the ways in which Austria had manipulated the representation of its past.

Today, Bunzl is director of the Wien Museum in Vienna: a triumphant step in his ongoing adventures in history and anthropology. He agreed to answer a few questions for my @wethehumanities session. Read more →

Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical: Dinner at the Circus

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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.

Radio, radio: Australian Broadcasting Corporation coverage of Central West Comics Fest

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The final preparations are being made for the first Central West Comics Fest this weekend, bringing together retailers, comics creators, and fans from across New South Wales to celebrate the art of graphic storytelling.

You can hear an interview with me and Parkes branch librarian Tracie Mauro on the ABC website by clicking on this link (mp3 audio). You can also read more about the festival on the ABC website.

If you live in the Central West and love comics, we look forward to seeing you on Saturday!

Information for the 2014 Central West Comics Fest

Library Chat from VALA Red Carpet

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Last week, I was one of six keynote speakers at the biennial Australasian culture-and-technology conference, VALA.

My speech will be online later this week, and I’ll post a written version on this blog shortly, but in the meantime you can hear me being interviewed by Corin Haines in a special VALA Red Carpet edition of Library Chat.

Central West Comics Fest, VALA, Parkes Writers’ Group, Sci-Fi and Squeam

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Aaaand we’re……back from the long summer holidays in the sweltering Aussie heat! And straight into the whirlwind of adventure.

Saturday, February 15th 2014 is a historic date for comics fans of all ages from across the Central West region of New South Wales – marking the first comics festival for this part of rural Australia.

Australian comics creator Pat Grant, author of the acclaimed meditation on youth, migration, and coastal identity Blue, will be offering workshops to adults and older teens alongside Marcelo Baez, who has drawn for everyone from Marvel to Microsoft, National Geographic to GQ Magazine, and will be schooling us in the ways of comic-book storytelling. In addition, the lovely folk at Sydney’s Kings Comics are venturing out of the CBD to offer their wares to people from across the region – a chance to peruse and purchase the latest comics, merch, and memorabilia without making the epic voyage all the way to Sydney.

More information can be found on the Central West Comics Fest poster:

Information for the 2014 Central West Comics Fest

In related news, I was recently interviewed for Melbournian radio station Joy FM’s Sci-Fi and Squeam podcast, talking about pop culture, libraries, and, inevitably, zombies, with the smart and suave Emmet O’Cuana – you can find my segment on their podcast, from 26:50 on the Joy FM website.

There were also some kind words for Parkes Writers’ Group from 2013 Banjo Patterson Poetry Award winner Jim Cassidy (although I’m not sure how I feel about being compared to Andrew Flintoff!) – you can read them at the Parkes Champion Post website here and see the kind of strange, all-ages, continent-hopping, Barbra Streisand-themed activities we get up to at the group here.

Finally, next week sees my keynote speech to the biennial Australasian culture-and-technology conference VALA – expect Doctor Who references, current affairs, the history of librarianship, and musings on hipsterity alongside the usual celebration and championing of public libraries.

<vworp vworp!>

Popcorn? Connor Tomas O’Brien and Chris Cormack on the battle for libraries’ future

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Find an update to this blog debate at Popcorn Complacency: Supporting Readers and Writers at Australia’s Margins, on this site.

Today on the blog I’m joined by writer, web developer, and Australian creative-man-about-town Connor Tomas O’Brien plus Kiwi open source advocate (and fellow developer) Chris Cormack of Koha.

Connor is the director of the EWF Digital Writers’ Festival. He came to my attention after a Twitter conversation which led to his article “A very quiet battle” for the journal Kill Your Darlings. In it, he addressed sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin’s argument that publishers are deliberately making it untenable for public libraries to loan e-books to their patrons.

Connor Tomas O'Brien at Kill Your Darlings

“That’s probably true, and actually not very surprising,” Connor replied, suggesting that “ebooks and public libraries fundamentally just don’t mix”:

After all, if we accept that one of the core roles of the public library system is to make work freely available, and to make that work as convenient as possible to access… well, it’s already extremely easy to acquire ebooks freely and easily online without paying a cent. If we ignore the copyright implications, the torrenting website The Pirate Bay is, in a sense, like a modern day Library of Alexandria […D]igital lending systems are so complex, restrictive, and counterintuitive that it’s far more convenient for somebody with a limited income to pirate an ebook than rent it from their public library. The Pirate Bay, though illicit, offers a superior system of unrestricted free digital access to written work than any public library in existence. (For reference, here’s a breakdown of a typical library’s ebook checkout restrictions).

It’s hard to see things improving. Public libraries were established to facilitate the distribution of physical objects, not digital files. The conceptual framework for lending – involving one patron visiting a physical space, removing a book from the collection for a limited period, then returning it for others to enjoy – breaks down when it comes to ebooks, which can be accessed anywhere and endlessly duplicated.

Connor acknowledged that “The public library […] is nowhere near obsolete. In some cases, it’s more important than ever”, but without giving examples of what he expected the library to do in this brave new world. And when he signed off the article like this:

For now, there’s not much to do, really, but grab the popcorn and sit back and watch as publishers and librarians battle it out (very, very quietly, of course).

Well, of course this got my dander up. I was minded of Edward Burke’s “All that is necessary for the triumph of Evil is that good men do nothing.” If people complacently munch popcorn while public libraries ail and the smallest, most disadvantaged communities lose their free point of access to human knowledge and culture, they’re actually helping a deeper slide into inequality across the nation.

So I got in touch with Connor and asked him to talk through his ideas about the future of public libraries – and to bolster my limited technical knowledge, I talked also with Chris Cormack of Koha, an open-source software developer who spoke at this year’s Auckland Libraries Youth Hui. I won’t deny I’ve got a soft spot for Chris ever since I found out he arranged for the Māori hero Maui to attend his son’s birthday party – the kind of parenting that chimes so well with the spirit of playful learning.

The following interview comes from stitching together e-mail discussions with Connor and Chris. Connor ran out of time because of his work with the Digital Writers’ Festival, but I hope interested readers will be able to pursue the issue further online – you can find Connor online as @mrconnorobrien and Chris as @ranginui.

After reading Connor’s article, I asked him: “Aren’t the systems around e-book lending only so complex because publishers are trying to enforce unenforceable, outdated business systems? It’s so easy to publish an ebook now: aren’t publishers trying to create an artificial scarcity, because the traditional business model was based on scarcity of the physical text? I’ve heard it argued that libraries should directly value and reward authors for the work that they do, rather than the distributors who might be increasingly irrelevant. Rather than the problem being libraries, isn’t the problem a publishing business model which places intrinsic value not on the work, but on its transmission?”

Read more →

Matt and His Week of Wonders

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I alluded to my busy Auckland week in Friday’s post announcing my New Zealand Book Domino Challenge – for which the prize is cake, so if you are a Kiwi librarian and feeling adventurous, please join in.

Portal Cake
The Cake Is Not A Lie

Last Saturday saw Auckland Libraries take their services into the city’s comic stores for Free Comic Book Day, as part of my project to expand librarianship beyond the walls of individual institutions into the wider community.

I was then interviewed by the erudite and wonderfully geeky Emmet O’Cuana for his podcast The Momus Report, with the discussion ranging widely from the educational value of pop culture to the Kierkegaardian implications of the 1978 movie Star Crash.

This week also included a visit to Auckland Libraries from Tracie Mauro of Parkes, NSW – a daring and innovative librarian whose work appeared on Monday’s Library as Incubator Project. Tracie and I travelled the Far North District in New Zealand, exploring library services and programmes in rural areas far from my usual Auckland beat.

Yesterday I was quoted in the New Zealand Herald, in a satisfyingly positive article which recognises that the 21st century library is about so much more than just shelves…and I also took some time out for a trip to the Christchurch vs. Auckland roller derby match, which reminded me of this neat guest post on roller derby and librarianship from Melbourne’s Jordi Kerr.

If you’ll excuse me all, it’s Sunday evening, so I will now go for a lie down…

sleepy