During my 2016 residency, staff at the State Library of Queensland and Griffith University have been joining forces to explore news ways for communities to engage with research.
Read about our Fun Palace, Turkey Science, and Giant Robot adventures at the SLQ Today blog.
I say giant: these were the ten-dollar Transformers you can get from K-Mart or Toys ‘R’ Us.
I spent Friday working with third-year Occupational Therapy (OT) students at Griffith University’s School of Allied Health Sciences.
This morning I gave the opening address at the annual conference of ALIA Queensland. The theme this year was “Library Hacks”.
Hacking’s such a funny term, still threatening and techy and futuristic, and yet also so familiar; the stuff of cheesy mid-90s techno-thrillers as much as today’s headlines about Wikileaks and massive DNS attacks.
The New Yorker tells us that the word originates in the house slang of MIT, way back in the 1950s:
The minutes of an April, 1955, meeting of the Tech Model Railroad Club state that “Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.”
Taking “hack” to mean tinkering with machines and procedures, not following the manual, I wanted to both hack the keynote and offer attendees an opportunity that wouldn’t exist at M.I.T.
So, we gave them craft materials, tinfoil and paperclips, food decorating kits, a basic electronics set…
…and Kinder Surprise Eggs.
What does a man have to do to be accepted as a true Australian?
We took a walk through the suburbs to Brisbane’s Toowong Cemetery, exploring the legacy of the 19th century champion boxer – and adopted Aussie – Peter Jackson.
I’ll be speaking at ALIA Queensland‘s mini-conference “Library Hacks” in a couple of weeks.
American-style model railway. Photo by Graham Causer, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 Licence
My keynote’s called Revenge of the Model Railway Club and it takes the form of a hands-on workshop. It should be fun – if you’re in the area, you should come!
Library Hacks runs 9am to 5pm at Brisbane Square Library on Wednesday 26th October.
Today sees the official release of the Ozofarm game and game development competition for Queensland’s public libraries.
As I discovered on my visit out to the cotton fields of the Darling Downs, digital technology is changing the way we farm. Cows are milked in robotic dairies. Drones are herding and surveying cattle from the skies. Self-driving machines are steering across Queensland’s fields, tending crops and baling cotton.
I worked with Eva Ruggiero and Tammy Morley of the State Library’s Regional and Public Libraries Team to devise a game which explored robotics in agriculture.
The long-awaited Fun Palaces weekend has arrived.
After months of planning and preparation, communities across Queensland are gearing up to celebrate the arts and sciences in all their forms, partnered with a range of libraries and other institutions.
From the islands of the Torres Strait to the cotton fields of the Darling Downs, plus every library in the city of Brisbane, and of course our own State Library on the city’s South Bank, the first weekend in October will see a swathe of venues open their doors for community-led events celebrating the Fun Palace motto “everyone an artist, everyone a scientist.”
We’ve come along way since Parkes Library hosted Australia’s first ever Fun Palace back in 2014.
I’ll be with the State Library team on Saturday, supporting events including our Scrub Turkey Sessions devised with urban ecologist Professor Darryl Jones of Griffith University.
Wherever you are in the world, check the Fun Palaces website for your nearest event, or join in online with the Comic Maker built for Fun Palaces by the State Library. (We’ve also put the code behind the site online, if you feel like a bit of digital tinkering).
What does it mean to have a creative relationship with the past?
How do 21st century institutions manage our cultural heritage?
I asked Jacinta Sutton, Gavin Bannerman, and Laura Daenke of the State Library of Queensland.
Call them the Memory Squad.
On Sunday, I hosted the Science and Belonging panel at Brisbane Writers Festival.
Scientists Tamara Davis and Maggie Hardy joined writers Ellen van Neerven and Maree Kimberley for a conversation about their work and the crossovers between art, science, storytelling, and identity.
We wanted the people attending our event to be participants, not just an audience – so I helped the library devise an “anti-panel” session inspired by our Broadband and Heritage workshops earlier this year.
In the “anti-panel”, the audience split up into four groups. Each group got to spend ten minutes in conversation with each of our four guests. At the end of that forty-minute session, we held a plenary panel where our guests reflected on the discussions they’d had, and more questions could be fielded from the floor.
The aim was to change audiences’ experience at a festival panel from “sitting watching VIPs have a conversation, with maybe a few questions at the end” to full interaction and engagement.
Our tools weren’t digital devices or social media apps, but wheelie chairs and a stopwatch.
The experiment in event design was part of a broader conversation I’ve been having with David Robertson around audience participation and public engagement. You can read more of his work at the Beyond Panels website, a great one-stop shop for alternative event formats.
The 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival will be notorious for Lionel Shriver’s controversial keynote, which challenged notions of cultural appropriation, and the powerful response to it from Yassmin Abdel-Magied.
Festival organisers quickly organised a right-to-reply for Yassmin and other writers, which you can watch on Yassmin’s Facebook page. (The live stream was filmed by Yen-Rong Wong, whose account of the dispute is also worth reading).
Our Science and Belonging event, presented by the State Library of Queensland for the Festival, was part of the library’s year-long theme of Belonging – an exploration of many different Queensland identities and experiences.
During the event, we were asked if we had deliberately chosen an all-women panel of experts. We hadn’t – we simply wanted outstanding practitioners of science and science-fiction – but we also acknowledged the importance of bringing together women, migrants, and Indigenous people as experts on a panel which was not “the token diversity panel”.
I’m proud that the Library and the Festival were able to deliver this special celebration of science and speculative fiction with a distinctive Queensland flavour. See more from Brisbane Writers Festival via the #bwf16 hashtag on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/DrMattFinch/status/759213810062336001
The first of a three-part series: VW Beetles, artistry, engineering, and stories of migration at Marvellous, Electrical this week.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
