On being a Programme Director

noreply@blogger.com (Evelyn Welch, Programme Director) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:14:00 +0000

Beyond Text has been running for a year, examining the different ways communication takes place both in the past and the present. As an addict of paper-based archives, it has taken me this long to gain the courage to take up new forms of communication. My children have taught me how to text and now I’m going to use blogs but I draw the line at Facebook.

I’m attracted by blogs (currently the topic of Tony Ross’s PhD: http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/socialnetworks/index.php) because of their combination of informality, immediacy and ability to generate comment and feedback. Ruth Hogarth, Programme co-ordinator, and I will be using this space to keep the wider community informed about the programme, its activities and the results as they emerge. We’ll also use it to comment on wider Beyond Text issues that we think may be of interest. Please feel free to post responses or to send us material that you want publicised.

I currently divide my time between roles as Programme Director for Beyond Text, as Dean of the Arts Faculty at Queen Mary, and as a specialist in Renaissance shopping and fashion. I also have a small side-line in being the mother of an increasingly successful pop-star (Florence of Florence and the Machine). Far from being contradictory, these cross-overs have proved very helpful. Alice Bayliss and Rebekka Kill’s work on music festival encounters (http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/stateofencounter/index.php) has taken on a whole new meaning and I have suddenly found a strong personal interest in digital downloading, copyright and piracy. This may seem very novel but I have also found that new ways of gaining attention (through tweets, texts, You Tube, etc) have remarkable similarities with centuries-old demands to create a reputation and to generate a profit.

Remarkably, the first year of Beyond Text research is now coming to an end and our workshops will be finishing soon. These short, intense events have generated exciting new initiatives including sessions where you can watch lawyers trying to move beyond the legal text through dance and visual arts (http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/legaleducation/index.php) or contemporary Welsh poets respond to medieval bardic traditions (http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/vernacularpoetry/index.php). We will be having a ‘wrap-up’ event in November and will let you know the results.

Finally, I’m off to Oxford for a very special event funded under the Beyond Text umbrella as part of the AHRC’s international agenda: ‘Pictures in Public: Online Collections, Research and Public Engagement.’ This day-long conference and workshop is a collaboration with the National Endowment for the Humanities. It will explore how the growing number of online collections and catalogues (in both the UK and USA but also more globally) is shaping our sense of national identity. Do we feel a greater sense of ownership and belonging because of online access; or does it simply reinforce the fact that only a very small number of visitors can actually see ‘the real thing’. What role do academics have in making these sites both usable and informative? How far should we really let the public play with a nation’s digitized heritage?

I’ll report back next week!

Launch of Beyond Text Programme blog

noreply@blogger.com (Programme Co-ordinator) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:34:00 +0000

The Beyond Text Programme blog will be launched in September 2009.

This is not a test, please remain seated.

noreply@blogger.com (Admin) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:30:00 +0000

This is a test post really...