Working at the World Wilderness Congress
Leona helped to co-ordinate resources at the 9th World Wilderness Congress (WWC), in Merida, Mexico between the 6th and 13th of November.
“Launched by The WILD Foundation in 1977, the World Wilderness Congress (WWC) is now the longest-running, public, international environmental forum. With over 30 years of conservation achievements, the WWC has become a high-profile platform for acting on complex wilderness and wildlands issues.
“WWCs include senior-level representation from governments, the private sector, native peoples, non-governmental organizations, academia and the arts in a structure carefully designed to bring together the full spectrum of wilderness-related views. Broad-based participation, combined with the spirit of open and balanced debate, creates a constructive, objective oriented environment, and generates practical conservation outcomes.
“The Congress convenes every three to four years around the world. Past WWCs have been held in South Africa (1977, 2001), Australia (1980), Scotland (1983), USA (1987, 2005), Norway (1993), and India (1998).
“Since its origins, the World Wilderness Congress has been a result-oriented conservation project that begins long before the actual convention of delegates takes place, and WILD 9 will be no different. In the months leading up to Merida, several committees, groups, agencies and organizations are working on models, objectives and targets that address a global agenda and aim to achieve practical conservation results through a diverse and interesting program –with a Latin rhythm!”
Click here for more information.
Last day’s feed from the Congress:
Video clips at Ustream
November 4, 2009 Comments Off on Working at the World Wilderness Congress
Oxford University’s virtual First World War site opens in Second Life
I’d like to draw your attention to the following press release regarding the opening of the Second Life presence of Oxford University’s First World War Poetry Digital Archive. I was involved in recording some of the audio for this project, including several poetry readings, tutorials and the introduction and epilogue to the installation. More details here; video at foot of this article.
An exciting new project in interactive education will launch on 2nd November 2009, drawing together the resources and expertise of the University of Oxford, and the possibilities for immersion and interactivity offered by the virtual world of Second Life.
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive and the Learning Technologies Group at the University of Oxford have collaborated to bring together a wealth of digitised archival material from the First World War into an environment that allows this powerful material to be explored and experienced in a radically new way.
“The aim of the initiative is to place the poetry of the Great War in context,” explains Stuart Lee, Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, “It allows the visitors to the exhibition to visualise archival materials in an environment that fosters deeper understandings. Visitors also have the opportunity to take advantage of the social and interactive aspects that the environment offers.”
The project has imported into the Second Life environment a range of digitised archival materials from the major poets of the First World War (including poetry manuscripts, letters and diaries) along with contextual primary source materials. These have been positioned within an environment which has been modelled to represent areas of the Western Front, 1914 — 1918.
The materials have been supplemented with new interpretative content and a spectrum of interactive tools and tutorials, streaming video and audio effects to create a vivid immersive experience that is, according to visitors, deeply moving.
“I had, of course, read about the First World War, and seen archive news footage too,” says Saffia Widdershins, a Second Life resident. “But to have the feeling of walking along narrow trenches on duckboards half covered in mud, to see the dugouts, or to stand in a dressing station, hearing the voices of people who had been there describing their own experiences – this is all incredibly powerful.”
There will be a Second Life Press Launch at 4.30am SLT (12.30 UK time) and again at 2pm SLT (22:00 UK time) on Monday 2nd November. Come to the landing point at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Frideswide/219/199/646/ and take the TP to Theatre.
The installation will be open for exploration from 2am Monday 2nd November 2009. We ask visitors to preserve the atmosphere of this environment by wearing the clothing provided at the landing area.
November 1, 2009 Comments Off on Oxford University’s virtual First World War site opens in Second Life
Steampunk in Oxford
This weekend I had the pleasure of spending a day with a colloquy of friends in the venerable University city of Oxford, centred around a visit to the Museum of the History of Science to see their Steampunk Art exhibition.
I’d been past this building before – it’s the original home of the Ashmolean – but never inside. Turns out it’s a wonderful little museum on about three floors and a veritable storehouse of ancient scientific instruments of all shapes and size, with an emphasis on brass and the odd bit of mahogany.
The museum would be worth visiting at any time just to take in the development of scientific and technological instruments over the last few hundred years – there are microscopes, telescopes, astrolabes, electrical machines and a great deal more – but it also made the perfect location for the first UK museum exhibit of Steampunk Art, which runs until February 21, 2010. I would recommend a visit if you’re in the area or can arrange to be.
Steampunk, one could say, is a genre that imagines what might have happened if the technology of the 19th century had not been eclipsed by that of the 20th. It’s Jules Verne and H G Wells’ vision of technology; you also get a certain feeling of it from Oxfordian Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.
Thus the basement of the Museum is currently filled with all manner of mysterious contraptions with glowing incandescent filaments, whirling (or potentially whirling) mechanisms, and mechanical prosthetics. Some of them are shown in the accompanying photographs.
I was joined by Oxford resident Polly (with whom I work on Designing Worlds), Lynne (my collaborator on the iPhys projects for Sunderland City College) and her husband Richard, and also, at least for part of the day, by Ann and Knick who it was lovely to see again and kindly put me up for the weekend.
After the exhibition and some refreshment, we took in the last full day of a fascinating exhibition on book-binding at the Bodleian, followed by the open-top bus tour of the city, which is worth the effort. Mid-afternoon we ended up at Blackwells’ where we all seemed to acquire a set of John Grant’s series of science books, Discarded, Corrupted and Bogus Science. We then retired to the coffee shop upstairs to discuss falling standards in British secondary and further education.
In the evening, an excellent dinner at the Trout in Wolvercote.
November 1, 2009 Comments Off on Steampunk in Oxford
“…And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.”
As readers may know, one of my several activities is audio production, both voice-over work and the production of complete packages with voice, music, effects and so on.
Recently many of these productions have been particularly associated with educational programmes, clients including the British Library and City of Sunderland College. Interestingly, all these projects have resulted from meeting people in the virtual world of Second Life. (Partially as a result, incidentally, I do not have a great deal of time for people who criticise me for “playing” in SL or try to convince me that nothing significant will come of it.)
I have a teaching qualification myself, and I’m particularly interested in the educational possibilities of virtual worlds: Second Life is by far the most popular and widely-used of the virtual worlds currently available, although there is increasing activity in “OpenSim” variants using essentially the same technology.
Most recently I was introduced to some of the staff of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, based at the University of Oxford. They are on the point of launching (on 2 November) a new region in Second Life (named Frideswide after the patron saint of Oxford) which is home to a painstakingly-built environment designed to shed light on aspects of the life of soldiers in the trenches along the Western Front during the First World War. Students can visit the site and learn not only about the conditions endured by infantrymen during the Great War but also hear poetry from the ‘War Poets’, along with interviews and tutorials.
Here’s how they describe the installation:
This tour of a stylised version of the trench systems in the Western Front has … two objectives:
• to show you the physical context of the trench systems
• to expose items held in the First World War Poetry Digital Archive in a three-dimensional environment…This [is] not an attempt to give you a realistic experience of what it was like to be on the Western Front. The physical depravation, or the chance of serious injury or death, cannot be replicated, and this should always be remembered.
More importantly perhaps, this is but one view of the War – and it would be safe to say this is a view open to discussion. …we have presented rain-sodden trenches, infested by rats, in gloomy surroundings. But this was not always the case. The opening day of the Battle of the Somme, for example, was a beautiful summer’s morning in stark contrast to the depictions we often see of the muddy hell of Paaschendaele.
Chris Stephens, who has been instrumental in putting the simulation together, commissioned me initially to provide an audio version of an A‑level/University-level Tutorial on “Remembrance” along with four poems: Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen, Does It Matter? by Siegfried Sassoon, plus Louse Hunting and Dead Man’s Dump by Isaac Rosenberg.
I’ve now recorded some additional poetry readings – Repression of War Experience, Aftermath, and On Passing the New Menin Gate, all by Siegfried Sassoon; plus 1916 Seen From 1921 and Can You Remember by Edmund Blunden – and an introduction and epilogue.
These poems have a great deal to tell us about the feelings of their authors, and many of them are powerfully moving. Dead Man’s Dump in particular is full of vivid, detailed imagery.
The tutorial, on the other hand, encourages us to ask a number of questions about our conception of what the Great War was like, and uncovers where much of our information has come from. It also challenges some of our assumptions about the conflict. At the time of writing, there are only three veterans of the First World War left alive, so we rely increasingly on indirect sources.
In the Second Life representation, you start off at an army camp and then proceed to the trenches via a floating bubble, during which you hear the introduction to the installation.
Once at ground level in the trenches, you can walk around and visit different aspects of the trench network. Along the way, images of soldiers flicker into view and you might hear an interview or a piece of poetry. The tutorials are accessed via a “HUD” (Head-Up Display) enabling you to proceed through the material and exercises at your own pace. Additional audio extracts are initiated by clicking on loudspeaker symbols.
Overall, the Second Life representation is quite an intense and powerful experience, and I can imagine it will be a particularly effective educational tool.
The challenge for an environment like this is that there is a fairly steep learning curve before visitors can fully experience what a virtual world like Second Life can offer – before you can experience an installation like this you have to learn how to move around, activate things and generally operate successfully in the environment. However in this case you really need to be able to do little more than walk around and click on objects, so most people will require no more than a few minutes of training to be able to get the most out of virtual re-creations like this.
I wish the First World War Poetry Digital Archive every success with this project and am very pleased to have been able to make a small contribution to it. This installation will also be featured in the 10 November edition of the Designing Worlds show on Treet.TV.
*“…And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.” is the final line of Anthem for Doomed Youth by World War I poet Wilfred Owen – one of the WWI poems I’ve recorded for this project. Photos courtesy of First World War Poetry Digital Archive.
October 26, 2009 Comments Off on “…And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.”
Ironbridge Gorge Museums
Ironbridge, near Telford in Shropshire, is rightly regarded as one of the foundations of the Industrial Revolution. Here in 1707, Abraham Darby perfected (and patented) a method of smelting iron ore using coke.
Previously, the process required charcoal, which takes a great deal of time and effort to produce, first growing the trees (!), then burning the wood under the right conditions. As a result, the amount of iron that could be smelted was limited by the supply of charcoal. The discovery of a means of using coke – which is derived from coal – meant that iron could be produced as quickly as the coal could be mined. This enabled the Industrial Revolution to take off.
In 1779 the great Iron Bridge across the Severn, after which the town is named, was built by Abraham Darby III. It was the first cast-iron bridge in the world.
Today, the industry that characterised the area for hundreds of years is largely silent, but in its place is a collection of nearly a dozen different museums and attractions that help us to understand our industrial heritage. You can find out more about them here. In 1986 the Gorge was one of the first seven UK sites awarded World Heritage Site status by UNESCO.
To see all the major locations will take you more than a day, particularly as a result of the extensiveness of Blists Hill Victorian Town. However, I suggest you start at the Museum of the Gorge, which boasts one of the most detailed dioramas I’ve ever seen, in this case of the stretch of the Severn and the enormous collection of industrial activities carried out here from mediæval times onwards.
In addition, you might like to take in the Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron. However the most extensive location to visit in the area is Blists Hill Victorian Town. Based around the site of an old brick works, the town consists of buildings either restored, relocated or specially built following detailed research.
You enter the town via a very impressive (and recent) audiovisual presentation which highlights the region’s industrial heritage, and then you’re on the main street, where the first building is a Lloyds Bank. Here you can exchange modern money for traditional pre-1971 £.s.d. that you can use to buy items in the shops on the site (they also take modern money, unlike the Kentwell Hall’s Tudor re-enactments, where beyond the “time tunnel”, all transactions have to be done with the traditional coinage).
There are working steam engines, including one used to raise and lower a mine cage and a replica of Richard Trevithick’s 1802 Pen-y-Darren locomotive. There are a couple of very impressive beam engines originally used to blow air into blast furnaces, but regrettably these will never steam again and are demonstrated by driving with an electric motor.
Costumed staff are on hand to describe the businesses, shops and industry of the Victorian era and I was very tempted to turn up in costume – though I was not sure how they would react. Some places love you to do that, while others (notably Kentwell) abhor it, as you might be mistaken for staff and, not knowing the back-story, might let them down (at Kentwell the back-story is so detailed that this is a real possibility). Beamish, I seem to recall, lets you turn up in costume and they give you a special tag (suitably printed in letterpress fonts of the period, presumably in their print shop) to indicate that you’re a “Visitor”.
Indeed, the obvious comparison with Blists Hill is Beamish, and there is apparently a little rivalry between the two sites, it was hinted, but in fact the two, while there is some obvious overlap, have some significant differences – the money at Blists Hill and the trams at Beamish for example. At Blists Hill, you get around on foot or by horse-drawn wagon.
Blists Hill has a wide selection of shops, sometimes producing and selling items; there are also some performances by a pair of actors who present hilarious excerpts from Shakespeare (with the help of the audience) and there are music-hall songs in the pub from time to time.
I did not take a great deal of video, but here is one extract. Down the bottom of the town there’s a Victorian funfair, including a merry-go-round, which originally, one presumes, would have been driven by a steam traction engine. There’s a nice little Pell organ on this one, playing various medleys of tunes of the era, of which you can hear a sample below.
October 1, 2009 Comments Off on Ironbridge Gorge Museums
Tour of a Victorian Bobbin Mill
This video takes you on a tour of a Victorian bobbin mill at Stott Park, near Lake Windermere, in the Lake District, Cumbria.
Tour of a Victorian Bobbin Mill, Stott Park, Cumbria from Richard Elen on Vimeo.
Stott Park Bobbin Mill was opened in 1835 to supply the cotton mills of Lancashire (of which this area was a part at the time) with bobbins to carry the thread which was spun into cloth. It was originally powered by a water wheel, later by a water turbine and then by a steam engine. Ultimately, electricity arrived. The mill finally closed in 1971 and then reopened in 1983 as a museum.
Today, Stott Park Bobbin Mill is in the care of English Heritage, and in this video you’ll be taken on a 20-minute guided tour of the mill by one of the English Heritage staff members to see the different stages of the bobbin-making process, including some of the machines being used by a veteran mill worker.
You’ll see the steam engine, although it was not, regrettably, in steam on this occasion, and get a feeling for what life was like for the mill workers – who, in this case, came mainly from the workhouses of Liverpool and Manchester.
For many years, the manager of this mill was a woman, and curiously she only had male workers in the mill; generally mills of this type were operated by women, who were widely believed to be better at the job.
I am grateful to the staff at Stott Park and to English Heritage for providing the tour depicted in this video.
This video is part of an ongoing series intended to give an insight into Britain’s early industrial technology.
September 28, 2009 Comments Off on Tour of a Victorian Bobbin Mill
Renaissance Music at Lincoln Castle
I was in Lincoln recently for the glorious Weekend at the Asylum Steampunk Convivial (you can find a selection of my pictures of that event here). Wandering around the centre of Lincoln as the event wound down on the Sunday afternoon, I stumbled across this group of musicians playing live in the heart of the old castle.
This video is very impromptu and hand-held – essentially little more than a stringing together of a few different shots – but you can experience the atmosphere of the performance (albeit with a touch of wind-noise from time to time).
Kudos to the City of Lincoln Waites for their excellent playing and for the fact that they persevered despite it being quite cool and breezy.
Instruments played include a variety of percussion instruments; the sackbut (predecessor to the trombone); various recorders; a rackett (the compact reed instrument played occasionally by one of the performers seated on the step); a shawm or two (predecessor of the oboe); and a sopranino rauschpfeife shown below (played in some pieces by the woman on the right in the video), which has no modern equivalent. It’s a capped reed instrument (like a bagpipe chanter: your lips do not touch the reed as in modern woodwinds) with a conical bore; it’s a relative of the crumhorn but a good deal louder and more difficult to play (as it easily overblows).
Apart from the recorders this would probably have been described as a “loud band”, playing the kind of instruments you would expect to hear outdoors at public events.
Postscript
I heard today (6 October) from Al Garrod, the Master of the City of Lincoln Waites – the name of the band playing in this video. Al is the sackbut player. Do please visit their site and if you get the chance to hear them, I recommend them highly.
September 23, 2009 Comments Off on Renaissance Music at Lincoln Castle
A Visit to Beamish
The other weekend I had the great opportunity to visit the Beamish open-air museum in County Durham. I was staying with friends near Sunderland for the weekend and their suggestion that we went there was a very good one. I can heartily recommend the museum to anyone interested in our industrial history – and particularly that of Northern England.
Not only that, the Museum is currently offering a special deal where for £16 you get a year’s admission. Well, it’s worth that for just one visit – you need to allocate an entire day to the site (and still you won’t get round it all).
Both my friends have been involved with Beamish over the years and as a result they knew all the cool places to go. There are quite a few buildings and other items on-site, each having been painstakingly dismantled, brought to the site, and rebuilt.
The centrepiece, I suppose, is a rebuilt town street, set in 1913, with a terrace of houses (including an early 20th century dentist, a pianoforte teacher’s house and much more) and shops including a Co-Op, a sweet shop with sweeties made on the premises, a garage, a bank, and the most recent addition, a Masonic Hall with a comprehensive display of artefacts and regalia. There’s also an excellent cafeteria!
There’s also a Waggonway, set in 1825, where you can travel for a few hundred yards behind a replica early steam locomotive (see below); a Colliery Village circa 1913 and an old Manor on the hill. The different areas are linked by period buses and trams.
The period covered is broadly Victorian/Edwardian, but some locations (such as the Waggonway and the Manor, which are set in 1825) are set in earlier periods. Everywhere there are staff members (in costume) who will tell you about the old practices and explain what you’re seeing. I really couldn’t fault them.
This is a really tremendous place to visit and I can’t recommend it enough – I’ll be back as soon as I can.
I took some video while I was there and present them below. All three items are hand-held so I’m afraid they are a little wobbly at times, but hopefully they will give you a feel for some aspects of the place.
This first one is of the Pockerley Waggonway, where we travelled for a short distance behind the “Steam Elephant”, an early steam locomotive. We see the journey from an open coach and also from the track-side, and the trip is preceded by some background from a staff member.
Pockerley Waggonway at Beamish Museum from Richard Elen on Vimeo.
The second item is also from the Waggonway area: it’s a demonstration of a traditional Pole Lathe, used by a “bodger” to make things like table and chair legs and other items that could be turned from wood. The operator, William Slassor, describes its principles, operation, and how it was used.
Pole Lathe at Beamish Museum from Richard Elen on Vimeo.
And finally, a short video of a gentleman playing a German ‘Harmonipan’ street organ in the main street of the reconstructed town.
The instrument is hand-cranked, and turning the handle both operates the bellows that enable the pipes to sound; it also draws a roll of punched paper tape about 2in wide across a what we might call a “reader”, consisting of a row of holes, each connected to a pipe. The bellows pass air to the reader, and where there is a hole in the tape, air passes through and off to the corresponding pipe.
The music is a medley of American tunes, and ends with quite a flourish. I wasn’t able to capture the very beginning of the medley, but I got most of it and what there is effectively captures the feeling of this kind of street entertainment, common in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
‘Harmonipan’ Street Organ at Beamish Museum from Richard Elen on Vimeo.
September 2, 2009 Comments Off on A Visit to Beamish
Cambridge Geek Nights: Recommended
Last night I went along to the second Cambridge Geek Night, held upstairs at the Maypole pub in Park Street, Cambridge (right next to the Park Street car park) for an evening of networking, chatting and short presentations.
In addition to good company, the evening included free drinks (courtesy of The Guardian’s Open Platform!) and the pub serves excellent food. What more could you ask?
The three presentations consisted of Richard Boulton on Xapian, an interesting open-source search engine; a pair of local lawyers from Taylor Vintners solicitors giving an overview of the legalities of entrepreneurship (and although I knew some of it, it was most definitely directly useful); and finally Michael Brunton-Spall from The Guardian, who gave us a fascinating view of the paper’s API and what you can do with it, and a tiny glimpse into the future of what I believe is the best newspaper in the country. And between presentations, time for a good chat with a few of the (about 30+) attendees.
Kudos to Véro Pepperrell, “Social Media Consultant and Geekette”, aka “thatcanadiangirl” for a great evening: next event is in about six weeks, so if you live or work in the Cambridge area, keep an eye on the Cambridge Geek Night blog for details of the next one. Plus you can sign up for an email list here.
July 30, 2009 Comments Off on Cambridge Geek Nights: Recommended
Women in Technology – OpenTech 2009
Here’s the last of my video sequences from the OpenTech 2009 Conference, which I was pleased to both attend and speak at.
Women In Technology was a fascinating and useful consciousness-raising session that more men should have stayed for! It was a follow-up to this year’s Ada Lovelace Day.
Chaired by Zoe Margolis, the panel consisted of Sue Black, Janet Parkinson, Suw Charman-Anderson and Kathryn Korrick (right to left as you look at the screen). Each gave a short presentation and the session ended with questions from the floor.
The vast majority of most of the presentations is covered in this video, with the exception of Kathryn Corrick’s mini-workshop (which I participated in and thus couldn’t easily shoot) and a slight hiccup when the battery ran out – subsequent sections are hand-held as Sanyo thoughtfully placed the power input connector for my camcorder so as to obscure the tripod socket. Hmph.
However there is enough here to appreciate the majority of the content.
Women In Technology — OpenTech 2009 from Richard Elen on Vimeo.
July 10, 2009 Comments Off on Women in Technology – OpenTech 2009