Train thoughts

October 11, 2012 //

At the moment I am commuting between Nottingham and Manchester at least once a week. Although this is inconvenient and expensive, it does have the advantage that I am forced to sit and read for a minimum of four hours a week! It’s a good way of devouring those pesky one-week-loan library books.

But the reading has to stop while the train rattles along the Hope valley through the Pennines and I drink in the passing landscape, which is splendid even on days when the clouds crouch low on the hilltops. We’ve ambled along many of the muddy footpaths that either transect the railway or that can be seen snaking across fields and sneaking along hedgerows. I look forward to the next hike…

Categories PhD Research

The importance of “bits of things”

October 7, 2012 //

I’ve come across this passage referred to in two books in the last week. In her work Homes of the London Poor, Octavia Hill, writing of trying to persuade “the poor” to move from what she regarded as “miserable” accommodation to slightly less horrible surroundings wrote:

“Our plan of removing the inhabitants of the miserable underground kitchens to rooms in the upper parts of the houses, did not, strange as it may seem, meet with any approbation at first. They had been so long in the semi-darkness that they felt it an effort to move. One woman, in particular, I remember, pleaded hard with me to let her stop, saying, “My bits of things won’t look anything if you bring them to the light.” By degrees, however, we effected the change.”

For me, the woman’s concern that her “bits of things” should be seen to best advantage is very revealing, and I believe supports my contention that even the poorest (these were people living in dark and dingy cellars and basements) wished to display some objects (a collection?) that reflected well on their owners.

Hill, Octavia. Homes of the London Poor. Fortnightly Review, November 1866.

Tags miniatures, nineteenth century, research, working-class

Categories Collections, Historical archaeology, Miniatures, Nineteenth Century, PhD Research

Books and beginnings

October 7, 2012 //

So, I arrived at the end of my first “proper” week as a postgraduate student, clutching my brand-new ID card (which bears a strangely vertically distorted image of my previously-handsome visage) and an armful of books wrestled from MMU library. As was bound to happen, something in my pile of books set off the alarm at the exit barrier and I was leapt on by a gleeful security guard (it was the slimmest volume that was the culprit). At Leicester University library one is apparently regarded as more trustworthy – there the exit gates open without one having to use one’s card, and there are no hovering security staff. If the alarm goes off you simply go over to the desk to have the book rescanned. At MMU, you have to clutch your teetering pyramid of volumes in one hand and wield your ID card with the other. The barrier sulkily refuses to recognise you until you have done this at least three times. It is also noteworthy that the card scanner is set at a height obviously intended for use by small people. Then, when the alarm beeps, you are escorted to the desk to join a queue of cowering miscreants. It’s a good job that the desk staff are mostly motherly types, obviously chosen for their skills in dealing with potential book thieves…

Apart from this minor tussle with technology, my first week at MIRIAD was an excellent one. I indulged in cheerful and positive fraternisation with my peers, who are already generating exciting ideas within my overheated brain. I enjoyed seminars, and was inspired and energised. Several of us who share an interest in the recent past decided to create a Thursday afternoon work-group, which will be informal at first but may well develop.

I drank beer.

I met with my Director of Studies and one of my supervisors, who are both encouraging and full of interest as well as being nice people. I learned what oramatronics were/are. I earned a little kudos by volunteering to register people for a lecture. I decided to try to become involved in some aspects of the Designing our Futures initiative. I have a lengthening task list.

All very wonderful.

I also attended my first and last rehearsal of the universities wind orchestra. Last because there were already too many oboes (several of whom are more technically practiced than I) surrounded by a million flutes and clarinets. Not really my scene… I shall have to create my own ensemble – Aeolus II?

Categories Uncategorized

My first unconference

October 1, 2012 //

Having got up criminally early, I spent today at The Bond Company, Birmingham, at what was called “Museum Camp 2012” and described as an “unconference.”

About 100 delegates turned up to discuss a range of topics and issues the details of which none of knew about in advance – we made it up as we went along. Or rather we organised ourselves into about 20 different sessions to talk about things that people felt strongly enough about to declare their interest and to volunteer to lead the small group discussions. I put myself forward to lead a session on volunteers – how to attract and retain them, describing the challenges faced by Nottingham Industrial Museum and my experiences of being a member of the management group.

I acted as rather a devil’s advocate, and was rewarded with a veritable torrent of advice, suggestions and ideas from about 20 vocal and lively delegates who ranged from students through museum volunteers to seasoned professionals. Great stuff! It was good to hear different opinions and experiences, and to feel supported and encouraged. I shall take a lot back to the management group.

I also attended other sessions which related more to my PhD research. I’m keen to use as great a range of media, digital and otherwise, as I can in both collecting, interpreting and communicating my findings, and so it was good to hear people talking about the roles of play and games (lo-tech as well as digital) in accessing collections and the things in them. It was interesting that we have become so steeped in the digital world that I would say a majority of people had a knee-jerk games=digital response, when in fact, as researcher Rebecca Shelley reminded us, museum play can be as simple as “happy families.” She’s looking at “engaging with heritage through play and performance” and transforming the museum into an “unplayground.”

I’m thinking that I’d like my research to be “playable,” in the sense that a game can have the same cards or dice or tokens but be completely different every time it is played. Perhaps that is unrealistic, but it is worth exploring. I am far from being able to visualise the end-product of this approach, or even if there is one, but that’s the fun of exploration and being open to, if not only serendipity, but to that lord of games, chance..

Tags Birmingham, museum camp 2012

Categories Collections, MIRIAD, Museums, PhD Research, Play

The Times (New Roman) are a’changing…or perhaps not

September 29, 2012 //

The other day we research newbies heard the plaint of an almost-finished PhD candidate who had been instructed by his external examiner to reformat his entire thesis using Times New Roman font “because that’s what a thesis should be set in.”

Although I can see the point in discouraging difficult-to-read fonts from hefty documents, and I am as snooty about Comic Sans as the next person, the incident made me think about the relevance of a chunk of reconstituted cellulose splattered with carbon in this digital age. Today, need a thesis even be necessarily communicated via such an old-fashioned medium such as ink on paper?

When I submitted my MA dissertation I had to courier three bound copies from Canada to England, which involved several days and not insignificant cost, while at the same time I emailed, in a few seconds, the same pdf file from which the copies had been printed to the department just in case the hard copy got lost. The cost of this latter process was, of course, negligible. But the same information could have been presented in other easily accessible and shareable ways, for example as a html file, easily searchable, with dynamic links to images and other resources that could have included video, and audio. I could have included 360 degree images of the objects about which I was writing.

But even this might not be ambitious enough. What about something that records the process of research from day one, and includes all the discussions, head scratchings, failures, successes, frustrations, triumphs, discoveries, mysteries, losses and findings that a research project involves? I get some of my best ideas/brainwaves,lightbulb moments whilst sitting in a noisy pub or during a hike. Those eureka moments are rarely recorded in published research. OK, an e-thesis might be difficult to “mark” in the traditional manner of course, but why should assessing something that has absorbed three years or so of someone’s life and which we hope will contribute to and enhance human knowledge, be easy?

In addition, something as potentially dynamic as a digital thesis might also be accessed, read and used by many more people than the handful (if you are lucky) who will glance at the bound copy mouldering in the university archive.

Hmmm, Plantagenet Cherokee sounds like a fun typeface!

Categories Historical archaeology, Manchester Metropolitan University, MIRIAD, PhD Research

Designing my future

September 28, 2012 //

..or, could you speak up please, we can’t hear you at the back!

Along with some of my new fellow students, yesterday I attended the launch of Designing Our Futures, a Practice as Research Consortium North West (PARCNorthWest) initiative in which we are being encouraged to become involved over the next year. I think it is something in which I shall become involved, once I’ve worked out quite what it means.

As I listened to the various speakers discussing the theoretical and practical issues raised by our hopes and fears for the future, ironically I broke one of my personal rules and thought instead about my past. While I was at Imperial College in the late 1960s I often used to walk up Queens Gate on my way to the zoology department and pass a large, rounded fibreglass capsule, tucked in behind what I think was the chemistry department. This was, as far as I can remember, an experimental living “pod,” an indication, perhaps, of how and where we imagined we’d be living in the future. I have often wondered what happened to that project. Of course, brought up on The Eagle comic, Meccano Magazine and Scientific American, at that time I assumed that by the year 2012 we’d all be clad in transparent skin-tight all-weather suits that would show off our perfectly-proportioned and disease-free bodies, we would zip around in personal flying machines, work just a few hours a week surrounded by machines that provided us with almost-limitless leisure and live in glass-walled homes served by robots.

But significantly then, even in science fiction, we had no words that defined and described what we now call the Internet, the worldwide web and the knowledge economy. We also naively assumed that human existence would simply continue rapidly to improve. Hmmm. That improvement has been patchy, and not at all inclusive . Instead of a super-efficient capsule I live in a crumbling Victorian building. I drive around in an earth-bound vehicle with a wheel at each corner, based on nineteenth century technologies. The train in which I travelled from Manchester to Nottingham this afternoon would seem familiar to Robert Stephenson and the Wright brothers would easily recognise the form and function of the “modern” aircraft in which I flew back from Spain last weekend.

So, are we going to design futures that are merely enhancements of past and present technologies? Are we merely going to tinker with economics and politics? Are we going to be manacled to the balls and chains of religious and political fundamentalism? Are we going to continue to be (apparently willingly) dumbed down further and further? Will the futures designed by us, a privileged few, really include those millions without fresh water and sustainable food supplies to which Professor Hyatt alluded during the debate? Will we do more than just shuffle words we already know,,,

Or, are we going to design ways of living that we cannot yet imagine, for which we have as yet no words, no vocabulary, no language? I wonder! At the launch, people talked optimistically of us reaching a point in time of significant change and opportunity presented by advances in the technologies of the knowledge society. Yet we were sitting in a low-ceiling, gloomy room struggling to hear discussants who were not using microphones.

Well, I guess this means that I’m going to have to do more than just sit here…

Tags design, future

Categories Uncategorized

A form of torture

September 28, 2012 //

In the midst of all the advice and encouragement we’ve received over the last few days I’ve experienced a personal paradox. Like everyone else, I’m being advised to hurry up and get down to defining and refining and sharpening my research proposal, to produce plans and hone methods, in order to satisfy my supervisors and, with their help, successfully complete a seemingly-dreaded RD1 form and leap my PhD’s first bureaucratic hurdle.

But at the same time I’m wanting to immerse myself in what I’ve imagined to be a warm sea of serendipity, in which floats a dense plankton of knowledge and the flotsam and jetsam of university life. To stick close, Remora-like, to the big fish of academia. (OK, enough marine metaphors). To pick the brains of those around me. To be inspired and energised. After all, as Professor T.R.E. Southwood told us on my first day as a zoology undergraduate, the word “university” is derived from “universe,” and suggests that this is a place where one can study without bounds.

I have a sort of form dyslexia. I am incapable of completing a form, however simple, without making a mistake and having to cross something out. My handwriting becomes instantly arthritic and tottering as soon as my pen meets the first form field. I even manage to make errors in online forms.

But writing this is diverting me from my research proposal! I must get on…

Categories Manchester Metropolitan University, MIRIAD, PhD Research

A beginning!

September 26, 2012 //

I’m sitting in a otherwise empty room in Manchester Metropolitan University’s Righton Building, at about the middle of my first week at MIRIAD, an induction week filled with a general feeling of being a little lost, a week spent meeting about 100 new people and immediately forgetting their names, being handed sheaves of forms, being frightened by an avalanche of acronyms and initialisms, shuffling to stuffy lecture rooms amongst crowds of equally confused students along corridors that range from brand-new to decrepit, and being reminded by a series of cheerful staff on the one hand what a daunting, if not terrifying challenge we are facing but also what a wonderful experience we are just beginning! Gulp!

I’ve happily explained my research topic to my new peers at least a dozen times, finding, interestingly, that my bumbling description of what I’m going to be doing is different every time! I’ve listened in turn to my 20 or so fellow newbies, who all are starting along fascinating paths to their various MAs or PhDs. Meeting them has been a great experience. We appear to be a friendly, relaxed bunch, refreshingly free of arty-farty bollocks and weirdness, and there seems to be plenty of chemistry amongst our personalities and synergy amongst our research areas. Phew! At least three other PhD researchers will be working on nineteenth century material. I hope some of the results of these parallels will not only appear here but will influence my final thesis. Exciting stuff!

I’ve met, briefly, my Director of Studies, with whom I am going to enjoy interacting (if that’s a suitable term for the supervisory relationship). One of my supervisors is on maternity leave, but, two days in, I’m confident that I’ll not only survive but will enjoy my own process of giving birth to my research project!

And today I learned that the journal World Archaeology is calling for papers for an issue focusing on miniaturisation, which gives me a fantastic and hopefully achievable goal for this time next year…

Oh, and it has rained almost continuously since I arrived in Manchester!

Categories Historical archaeology, Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, Miniatures, MIRIAD, Nineteenth Century, PhD Research

In Small Things (perhaps not) Forgotten

July 21, 2012 //

In Small Things Forgotten was the title of what is perhaps the most widely-known book on the historical archaeology of North America. Archaeologist James Deetz wrote it in 1977 as an enthusiastic, inspiring and energising introduction to his area of study, and it has been included in almost every historical archaeology reading list, and read and cited very many times ever since. In my reading of his work, Deetz used the word “small” to indicate that the objects and features he explored were unspectacular, ordinary, mundane, cheap, familiar, often discarded, perhaps easily overlooked and indeed forgotten. He was asking us as archaeologists to recognise and assign big meanings to things previously regarded as insignificant. Ironically, Deetz does not really look at small (as in diminutive) things, things that I call miniatures, objects that are small-scale versions of full-sized originals, real or imagined. It is these small things that I am researching. Mass-produced miniatures share all the characteristics of Deetz”s small things, but I suggest that they have been even more overlooked by archaeologists, especially in the Old World.

From September 2012 I shall be carrying out research for a PhD at Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design (MIRIAD). My broad and unedited scope (it will without doubt change and narrow once I begin to interact with staff and fellow-students) – Objects of Delight: Mass-produced miniatures from the nineteenth century to the present. This blog will parallel that activity, reflecting both my research and life as a (mature) student.

Tags historical archaeology, In Small Things Forgotten, James Deetz, mass-production, miniatures, MIRIAD, nineteenth century, research, working-class

Categories Historical archaeology, Miniatures, MIRIAD, Nineteenth Century, PhD Research