I have just received word that Ms Raina Konstantinova, is now stepping down as head of the radio section of the European Broadcasting Union. The organization is re-organizing into a new ‘media’ section that consolidates Radio and Television.
I have had a lot of inspirational moments in my (somewhat intermittent) career as a radio scholar, but one of my fondest was getting to interview Ms Konstantinova, together with my Eindhoven colleague Suzanne Lommers. Two topics shone through in talking to her: her own fascinating career in broadcasting in Bulgaria – including being labelled an ‘enemy of the state’ – and her passion for radio. She recounted the days and weeks surrounding the collapse of communism in Bulgaria, how everyone was walking around with radios glued to their ear, trying to keep abreast of what was happening, even while they themselves were becoming what was happening.
And to her, that’s what radio is: it is the medium that can be anywhere, that can multiply your presence, that can change and adapt. She insisted repeatedly: the format and the platform don’t matter. Radio is, and needs to be, everywhere, whether online, broadcast, analogue or digital. It needs to be involved. She pushed the EBU to develop all possible technical platforms, and at the same time she helped leverage the EBU’s economies of scale to preserve a wide range of content as well. Due to efforts from her department, musical forms like jazz and classical music were made viable and valuable in European radio landscapes.
In some ways, during her tenure as the head of radio, Ms Konstantinova developed the post in similar ways to her earliest predecessor, Robert Wangermée of Belgium. Both worked very hard to explore the properties of the medium of radio, and establish its profile within the organization, and within the member organizations. After the EBU was founded in 1950, radio faded into the shadow of television for many years. The organization’s programme committee, ostensibly for both radio and television, concentrated mostly on television. In the late 1950s, due in large part to the lobbying efforts of Wangermée, a radio ‘study group’ was formed to investigate the new role of radio in the face of television. This group became an official programme committee in 1964 – nearly a decade after Eurovision was formed. They began a number of programmes that helped public service radio stations to keep themselves on the map during periods of rapid change in the European radio landscape.
In many ways, these changes were nothing compared to those that occurred since Ms Konstantinova took up her post at the EBU in the early 2000s. Again, there were lots of questions about what radio would become in an era of internet jukeboxes, podcasts, etc. – not to mention still dealing with the political changes that had occurred with the collapse of state socialism. Ms Konstantinova was both the first woman to head a department at the EBU, but also the first from one of the former State Socialist countries. A journalist by training, her drive while at the EBU has been to keep radio current and up to date.
Not many listeners to public service radio stations will know the name Raina Konstinova, but their experience will have been shaped the work she has been doing. I am curious to hear what she will do next.
New article: “Harmonized Spaces, Dissonant Objects, Inventing Europe? Mobilizing Digital Heritage”
My new article on digital heritage in Europe has just been published in a special theme section of Culture Unbound on “Exhibiting Europe”.
“Harmonized Spaces, Dissonant Objects, Inventing Europe? Mobilizing Digital Heritage”, Culture Unbound, Volume 3, 2011: 295–315
Abstract
Technology, particularly digitization and the online availability of cultural heritage collections, provides new possibilities for creating new forms of
‘European cultural heritage’. This essay analyzes the emerging sphere of European digital heritage as a project of technological harmonization. Drawing on Andrew Barry’s concepts of technological zones, it examines the various ways in which agency and European citizenship are being reconfigured around cultural heritage. It explores the “Europeanization” of digital heritage in three areas. In the first section, it analyzes the recent agenda for digital heritage of the European Union as a harmonizing project to create a smooth space of cultural heritage. In the next sections, the development of a harmonized virtual exhibit on the history of technology in Europe forms a case study to explore processes of harmonization at the level of the web platform, and in the aesthetics of digitized objects. It argues that rather than seeking to elide the points of unevenness and ‘dissonance’ that emerge in harmonization processes, we should instead look for ways to embrace them as points of dialogue and discovery.
You can read the article here.
Now, where was I….?
I AM still here, though sometimes I have felt like an electron: more a probability than a presence these last few months. (I keep hoping I might upgrade my status to neutrino – might make time planning a bit easier, though would seriously screw up my lessons on narrative…) My activity here on the blog has been inversely proportional to my activity in the world it seems. Now with the new term of teaching started in Utrecht, I have spent a rare month or so NOT travelling (much). It’s worth taking a brief moment to catch up.
After my visit to THATCamp in Florence (previous post) it was off to Oslo for the Exhibiting Europe conference 7-9 April, where I gave a paper about the problems and possibilities of ’Europeanizing’ digital content, based in part on my experiences building “Inventing Europe”. I suggest that as much as the goal of radical access to cultural heritage is a laudable goal, ‘Europeanization’ must not be thought of in terms of frictionless mobility
1930s radio in the Norsk Teknisk Museum
in a uniform European space. Instead, we need to think of platforms for exploration and display that actually highlight and promote acts of translation and transgression. An article based on this talk will appear this year in a special issue of the online journal Culture Unbound. The day after, had a wonderful tour of the Norsk Teknisk Museum, with whom I am working on the Inventing Europe project, where of course I indulged in my habit of taking photos of old radios…
A few weeks later, I was off to Munich 28-30 April for a conference in honour of the 60th anniversay of Radio Free Europe, Voices of Freedom – Western Interference organized by the Collegium Carolinum in Munich, together with the Czech Centre and the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (Prague). It was a fascinating conference (a full report by Julia Metger from Berlin can be found here), where the reminiscences of former employeees and directors – including the president of Estonia – combined with the work of a new generations scholarly historical researchers – which is occasionally a volatile mixture. My own talk (partially scuppered by a corrupted powerpoint file) talked about the complex layering of spaces – technological, administrative and lived – generated by broadcasting during the Cold War. I will publish a chapter based on the talk in a book based on the conference, edited by Anna Bischof and Zuzana Jürgens. It became abundantly clear the schizoid world that many of the exiled employees were living in: on the one hand having to deliver a ‘surrogate home service’ to a country to which they could not return, and live daily lives in Munich, where their work was often not valued and where their lives were under threat.
A week later, it was off to London for a talk at the Victoria and Albert museum to give a talk called “Black Magic, White Magic: Chocolate as Medicine from Aphrodisiacs to Anti-oxidants” at a “Chocolate Study Day”. This was in connection with their display “So noble a confection: Producing and consuming chocolate 1600-2000″, and also included a wonderful tasting. The audience were enthusiastic, and of course the talk was great fun.
Then, it was back into the world of radio. At the start of July, I went to the IAMHIST conference in Copenhagen. The theme of the conference this year was cultural memory. I had put together a panel together with my old pal and co-conspirator David Dault, now of Christian Brothers University, and the independent scholar and translator Katy Scrogin, where we explored the appropriation of new technologies within conservative social movements. The papers looked at the intersection of media, freedom and commemoration. David looked at the long tradition of Biblical footnotes, in which the Protestant tradition of free engagement with the text is coupled with lengthy exegetical glosses designed to shut down possible readings (usually those which poke at current relations of power). Katy looked at the use of blogs and discussion forums in combination with the Tea Party movement, and in particular their engagement with the US Constitution and its meanings. I, perhaps the odd man out a bit, looked at the commemoration of offshore radio. I pointed to the specific (and limited) visual and aural vocabulary that turns the story into a
l to r Katy Scrogin, Erin Bell and David Dault at the Danish Architecture Museum for a nice lunch after our panel
narrative of neo-liberal triumph. We had the good sense and fortune to be able to have Erin Bell from Lincoln University as a commentator, who managed to tie things together inquisitively and elegantly. I also got to make the acquaintance of the LARM project, a very exciting project aimed at making Denmark’s audio heritage available. (Read the report on the conference by Sian Barber on the EUScreen blog).
July was still young, however. Next stop was the UK once more, first London, for a meeting with one of my other co-conspirators, Kristin Skoog from Bournemouth University, with whom I am developing a programme of transnational research on women and radio. Together, we went over the materials we had found on the early years of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television, mostly in the correspondence of Willimien Hendrika (Lilian) Posthumus-van der Goot (1897-1989), which is held in the Aletta archives in Amsterdam. This was fascinating work, where we traced the developing relationships between a number of women broadcasters throughout the world, including Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie of the BBC, Gabriele Strecker of the Hessischer Rundfunk in Germany, and the American Dorothy Lewis (of UNESCO) – and we even found a letter by my great aunt Nena Badenoch, then president of the American Women in Radio and Television. Then we were off to Gregynog Hall, Wales for the Broadcasting in the 1950s conference, where we presented our paper. It was a very inspiring and intensive conference, including a fascinating keynote lecture by Michele Hilmes, based on her recent book on transnational broadcasting history, a great talk on listening by the brilliant Kate Lacey, and a whole programme that really opened up new transnational perspectives on broadcasting that are going to be keeping us busy for years.
At the start of September, we had our last workshop surrounding the book I will be editing together with Andreas Fickers and Christian Henrich-Franke, called Airy Curtains in the European Ether: Broadcasting and the Cold War, which will be appearing with Nomos. This book will be based on a research collaboration called “Transmitting and Receiving Europe” that has been running since 2008. The book takes a new look at Cold War history by unpacking the densely-layered spaces of broadcasting constructed by technological, administrative and ideological regimes of circulation. Broadcasting is viewed here as part of a dense, multi-media ensemble, that created a series of unexpected and shifting interconnections throughout the Cold War. We expect the book to come out next year: watch this space!
I have also had a round of presentations of the soon-to-be completed online virtual exhibit, “Inventing Europe” . First was the ICOHTEC Conference in Glasgow 2-6 August together with Slawomir Lotysz of Zielona Gora and Kimmo Antila of the Museum Centre Vapriikki, then at the Artefacts Conference in Leiden on 25 September, together with professor Johan W. Schot.
In short, it has been a very full Spring and Summer.
Now, where was I…?
User generated content @ THATCamp
So here I am at THATcamp Florence, and I actually proposed a session on user-generated content. You see, I am working on this here virtual exhibit on the history of technology in Europe from 1850 to the present. It is a collaborative effort with a number of cultural heritage partners, but for a number of reasons, we think it will be important to enable users to generate and add items, comments (stories), tags, links, etc. There are plenty of good reasons to do this:
1) such content will help us to show and explore the way various groups of people both currently and in the past have appropriated technologies
2) it can help add voices that are not represented by our research or the collections of our partners
3) it can help to enrich the content of our partner collections
4)it’s cool. You can get some great things going, especially at the local level.
While we do think it is important to add content, we are also creating a site based on up-to-date skilled historical research, and that is authority we feel we should maintain, BUT we also want to make it transparent and bring it into dialogue with other forms and spaces of knowledge;
We don’t really have time/resources to monitor every addition – especially if there are potentially comments/users from all over Europe.
There are options we are working on developing, and questions we are encountering:
1) allowing user log-ins, to allow them to save trajectories, notes, links, possibly objects, but not publish them without permission.
2) move the user-generated platform outside the exhibit platform, onto place like facebook. Projects like this one seem to have great promise. But how do we bring this effectively into dialogue with our own site? What would be the best platforms for this?
3) how do we deal with the language issue?
You can either leave comments below, (which I will add to the summary of the session - after monitoring) or post them – or anything else on the facebook page
but of course, the main thing is to have a chat.
“Sound Bridges, Sound Walls” conference in Hilversum
A few months ago, I posted the call for papers from the first joint conference of the Vereniging Beeld en Geluid and the Studienkries Rundfunk und Geschichte. It has been a bit of a ride putting it together due to a range of unforeseeable cicrumstances, but it is my very great pleasure to announce it is really and truly happening:
Sound Bridges, Sound Walls
Annual Conference of the Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte
and the Vereniging Beeld en Geluid
in co-operation with the Institute for Sound and Vision, Hilversum
The area of sound studies has broadened greatly over the last decade, opening up new narratives in social, cultural and media history. In this symposium, we focus this renewed interest in sound specifically on the historical role of broadcasting, understood here as programme-oriented auditive or audiovisual distribution. In particular, papers have been accepted that help us to consider the role of broadcast sound in constructing and/or transgressing borders and boundaries.
Location: Institute for Sound and Vision, Hilversum (map)
Theaterzaal (zaal 1)
Date: March, 18th and 19th, 2011
Friday, March, 18th, 2011
09.00 – 09.30 Welcome Address
Bas Agterberg, Institute for Sound and Vision
Thunnis van Oort, Vereniging Beeld en Geluid
Hans-Ulrich Wagner, Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte
09.30 – 10.15 Keynote: Andreas Fickers (Maastricht): Between international interferences and European fine-tuning: Broadcasting infrastructures in the Age of Extremes
10.15 – 10.30 Coffee (outside the Theaterzaal)
10.30 – 12.30 Panel 1: Analysis / Tools
(Alexander Badenoch, moderator)
Golo Föllmer (Berlin): Broadcast Sound Design. Entwicklung eines Analyse-Instrumentariums
Ines Bose (Halle): Radiostimmen – Beschreibung, Analyse und Bewertung
Luise Halank (Halle): Der Begriff der Radioästhetik
Heiner Stahl (Erfurt): Geräuschemacher. Die Verschaltung akustischer Räume
12.30 – 13.30 Lunch break (Restaurant of the Institute for Sound and Vision)
13.30 – 15.00 Panel 2: Music (Golo Föllmer, moderator)
Thomas Schopp (Oldenburg): The Deejay Show in the Context of a Sound History of Radio
Alexander Badenoch (Utrecht): Of relays and records: technology and the configurations of eventfulness in the European circulation of music
Tatjana Böhme-Mehner (Leipzig): “… die Radiowellen kamen doch immer herüber“. Die Rolle des Radios bei der Entwicklung elektroakustischen Musizierens in der DDR
15.00 – 15.30 Coffee break
15.30 – 17.00 Panel 3: Qualities (Hans-Ulrich Wagner, moderator)
Carolyn Birdsall (Amsterdam): Sonic Events: (Re)Constructing Local Festivals as Media Events in Interwar German Radio
Katja Rothe (Wien): Topologien eines globalen “Jetzt”. Zur Geografie des frühen deutschen Radios
Kristoffer Jul-Larsen (Trondheim): The Literary Address in Early Norwegian Radio
17.00 – 17.30 Borrel
17.30 – 19.00 General Assembly of the Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte
19.30 Dinner: Luno Kitchen, Hilversum
Saturday, March 19th, 2011
09.15 – 10.00 Andy O’Dwyer, (BBC):
BBC Genome Project: Digitising the Radio Times
10.00 – 12.00 Panel 4: Structures (Gerlinde Frey-Vor, moderator)
Bas de Jong (Groningen): Arbeiter Radio Internationale
Huub Wijfjes (Amsterdam): Sound amplification, radio and political rhetoric 1900-1945
Dana Mustata (Utrecht): Televising Sound: The Rise and fall of a Totalitarian Regime
Florian Bayer und Hans-Ulrich Wagner (Hamburg): The Auschwitz Trial on air: West and East German attempts to voice the Holocaust
12.00 – 12.15 Farewell Address
12.15 – 13.15 Institute for Sound and Vision. Guided Tour
Conference Fee
50,- € Conference fee (regular)
25,- € Conference fee (for students and those in part-time positions; please bring proof)
Free for presenters
The Conference fee includes lunch and drinks during the conference.
Registration
Registration is compulsory, and can be done via symposium@beeldengeluid.nl. Payment is on arrival at the ticket box at the entrance.
New publications part II: Materializing Europe
I am pleased to announce the publication of the volume edited by me and Andreas Fickers of Maastricht University: Materializing Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Project of Europe. This book is the product of the “Transnational Infrastructures and the Rise of Contemporary Europe” (TIE) project at the Technical University of Eindhoven (www.tie-project.nl), on which I was a post-doc 2004-8, and more specifically two workshops held in 2006 and 2007, respectively. We launched the book formally at NIAS on 16 November.
Everybody knows that material infrastructures are the foundation of European unification. The removal of border controls on roads was the big sign of the Maastricht treaty, the European Coal and Steel Community was ushered in with a train, bedecked with flags of six nations rolling over borders. Even before that, the US Marshall Plan sponsored a rolling “Europe Train” exhibition to try to sell both the plan and European integration to Western countries. All of these gestures were in part convincing because the material structures for them – the roads and railways across the border - had already been in place for decades. The notion that creating faster and smoother material connections will better unify the continent and promote unprecedented economic growth is still a driving (if contested) argument in today’s Europe. Just ask the folks supposedly at the “new heart of Europe” in Stuttgart.
But for all of this effective symbolism, what role do infrastructures actually play in unifying Europe? In this book, we take a long term perspective on this question, looking at the complex role that infrastructures have played in uniting Europe. We argue in the introduction that you can only understand the complicated ways in which infrastructures mediate Europe by understanding them not only as material structures, but as complex material, institutional and discursive bundles. Sometimes what at the material level seems complete disarray can still be made to seem like a smooth network on a discursive level. On the other hand, institutions like the EU can mobilise discursive constructions such as ’the imbalance of territory’ or ‘a bottleneck in the network’ to demand greater power and authority for very material interventions. We argue that the best way to see these three dimensions in systems like infrastructures – which are meant to be ignored most of the time – are best examined during infrastuctural events: that is moments of linking or breakdown when they are made to perform as a whole structure.
The chapters in this book show how the processes that many assume only started after the Second World War are actually part of an ongoing set of connections – and disconnections – that can be traced back to the transport and communication revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century. Chapters by Dirk van Laak and Eda Kranakis show, among other things, how transnational infrastructures have just as often been about connecting to (and extracting from) colonies as they have been about unifying Europe. Other chapters, such as those by Joahn Schot, and Frank Schipper, Vincent Lagendijk and Irene Anastasiadou, point to a range of international institutions and people who have created such international connections. Taken as a whole, the book opens up new ways of understanding the way those two compelling, yet protean entities ‘Europe’ and ‘networks’ have shaped each other.
New publications – part I: Rundfunk und Geschichte
There is another publication to be mentioned at length very soon, but before that happens, I want to mention the new issue of Rundfunk und Geschichte (click on the link for the Table of Contents) which just appeared.
Several parts of this I find worthy of note (if I do say so myself).
The first is my new article Die europäische Wiedergeburt des Radios? Die Entwicklung und Arbeit des EBU-Radioprogrammkomitees [Radio's European rebirth? The development and work of the EBU's radio programme committee]. This is based on several archive visits to the European Broadcasting Union in Geneva, and tells the story of how the EBU began to take up the question of radio, a full decade after it began its television exchange activities. It is my first-ever full-length article in German (ironically this one is not specifically about Germany – all of that stuff I have published in English)
The abstract in English:
In the face of growing competition from television and international commercial radio, the public service broadcasters in Europe began to consider seriously the future of radio. The radio programme committee of the European Broadcasting Union, founded in 1964, soon became an important forum where this future was debated and formed. This essay sketches the prehistory and first decade of the committee. It views the programme committee as a privileged observer and important mediator in a transnational sphere that allows us to make visible the circulation of ideas, people and programmes. It explores the initial discussion within the organization about the very nature of the medium and the programme activities that resulted. It points to the technical, institutional, legal and discursive bridges and obstacles to programme exchange using examples such as pop music records and exchange with countries in the Soviet Bloc.
Next is the second instalment of the journal’s new feature: descriptions of current PhD projects. This time it features that of my clever colleague and fellow TViTter Dana Mustata From Modernizing to Subversive Television: Historical Practices of Romanian Television (some of her good work is to be found in Bignell and Fickers, A European Television History); as well as the research (now a brilliant dissertation) on women’s radio at the BBC of my friend and now co-conspirator (mwa ha ha ha) at the University of Westminster, Kristin Skoog.
And finally, there is yours truly’s review (again in German) of Ari Y. Kelman’s Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States (Berkeley: UC Press 2009). To put it in a nutshell: I liked it. A lot. It does a brilliant job of showing the tensions that arose around a mass medium’s address to a minority public, and the ways in which it negotiated those tensions, sometimes in surprising ways.
Exciting times, these.
Sound Bridges, Sound Walls – call for papers
During a break of the 2009 IAMHIST conference in Aberystwyth, Wales, I sat down to coffee with my colleague Thunnis van Oort and it soon came up that he sat on the board of the Dutch/Flemish Vereniging Geschiedenis Beeld en Geluid (Association for the History of Sound and Vision) and I on the board of the Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte (the German Society for the Study of Broadcasting and History). So we got to talking, as one does, about whether the two organizations might want to collaborate on something, someday…
And voilà:
Call for Papers
The Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte and the Vereniging Geschiedenis Beeld en Geluid, in cooperation with the Institute for Sound and Vision (Hilversum) are pleased to announce this call for papers for their first joint symposium
Sound Bridges, Sound Walls
Broadcasting in the Historical Formation, Mediatization and Localization of Sound
18-19 March 2011, Hilversum
The area of sound studies has broadened greatly over the last decade, opening up new narratives in social, cultural and media history. In this symposium, we seek to focus this renewed interest in sound specifically on the historical role of broadcasting, understood here as programme-oriented auditive or audiovisual distribution. In particular, we welcome papers that help us to consider the role of broadcast sound in constructing and/or transgressing borders and boundaries.
Key themes to be explored historically in the symposium include:
Technologies of sound: How have technologies of (re)production, transmission or reception shaped and been shaped by practices of producing and consuming sound?
Digitality: How has the rise of digital sound with its new recombinatory, distributional and archival possibilities changed sound practice, and how have digital sound practices changed the notion of production, distribution and archiving in broadcasting?
The notion of acoustics: How have domestic, local, regional and national spaces for sound been normalized by and for broadcast sound, and how have physical spaces shaped broadcast phenomena?
Transmedial, intermedial, and remediated aspects of sound: What is the role of broadcast sound in shaping (multi)media events? How does radio sound function in television or film? How did the coming of television or internet change radio practice, etc.?
Aesthetics of electronically mediated sound: How have various discursive constructions such as quality, authenticity, fidelity, intimacy, sincerity etc. of sound shaped and been shaped by practices and technologies of sound?
Geographies of sound: How have electronically communicated sounds formed bridges or walls between nations – particularly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany? How have broadcast and sound media contributed to the constitution of sub- or transnational acoustic communities?
Temporalities of sound and place: How does electronically-mediated sound mediate time and anchor and/or destabilize spatial narratives or boundaries?
Proposals, papers and presentations can be in German, Dutch or English.
Conference abstracts, slides and discussions must be in English.
Proposals (abstracts of max. 200 words plus an extra sheet with your name and address) should be sent to Dr. Veit Scheller (c/o ZDF ABD / Unternehmensarchiv, 55100 Mainz, Germany; scheller.v@zdf.de) by 15 December 2010 (Deadline). All proposals will be blind-reviewed.
Queries can be sent to
Alexander Badenoch, Utrecht University: a.w.badenoch@uu.nl
Golo Föllmer, University of Halle: golo.foellmer@medienkomm.uni-halle.de
Gerlinde Frey-Vor, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk: gerlinde.frey-vor@mdr.de
Thunnis van Oort, Utrecht University: T.vanOort@uu.nl
Hans-Ulrich Wagner, University of Hamburg: hans-ulrich.wagner@uni-hamburg.de
Additional reviewers:
Andreas Fickers, University of Maastricht
Frank Schätzlein, University of Hamburg
Holger Schulze, Universität der Künste, Berlin
www.rundfunkundgeschichte.de www.geschiedenisbeeldgeluid.nl
Driving Curiosity at EU Screen, Rome
It is now over a month ago, but I want to stop and note a fantastic conference, namely the First EU screen conference on content selection and contextualization. Not only was it at Cinecitta in the amazing city of Rome (they also fed us the most opulent lunches I ever hope to have at the Hotel Majetic on the Via Veneto) but it was an exciting gathering of scholars, archivists and a range of other practitioners.
The central, simple and profound question – that goes beyond TV history – boils down to: what do we do with the past, especially now that it seems to be proliferating? The answers and questions that flowed out of this were intriguing in their range – from a question mentioned by Andrew Hoskins whether the youth of today (hard to use that phrase with a straight face) are less able to re-invent themselves now that past photos still circulate on social networking sites, to John Ellis’s ideas about how the vast archive of television history might be used for something other than ‘heritage’. A full report can be found here.
My own stab at this, called “What’s the (European) story? Making sense of the digital heritage environment” was to wonder how to drive curiosity about the past on a broad level while at the same time still making available some of the interpretive skills and frameworks of those who engage with it on a scholarly level. Practically speaking: how do we create online tools that can help make sense of the plenty? In part I was presenting my current virtual exhibit project, and was thinking through a blog post by Nina Simon on the new role of experts and authroity in presenting information. In my case I was also struck by a lovely example I found at the Dutch institute for Sound and Vision: a 1965 episode of the Dutch TV Dance party “Combo”, where the Swedish pop star Siw Malmkwist sings in German for a hall full of Dutch teenagers. There are a lot of interesting stories there to tell (hell, there’s a whole research project in there) but how do we make the skills and knowledge available to help explore them?
This same theme also was a key issue raised in my own workshop a few weeks later (more on that soon….)
Stuck in
Photo Dindy van Maanen /NIAS
So events major and minor have been coming thick and fast of late. I will try to catch up in a series of posts over the next few days.
The first of these is to say I am now ensconced for the academic year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, as part of the theme group Inventing Europe working to develop a six-volume bok series and – my part of this – a virtual exhibit on the history of Europe as told by following the tangled paths of technology.
NIAS is a strange and lovely place, tucked away in the trees, not far from the beach, and is populated by folks from all over the humanities, including lawyers, novellists, historians, philosophers, literary studies, art historians etc. We all introduced our work by way of a 5-minute talk – which turns out to be an extremely fruitful length of time for putting the core activities and question on the table for a general audience. Lunch is still filled with conversations about all and sundry.
Main trouble is that it is like being in a candy shop – there’s so many interesting things happening, one can almost forget the main work one is there to do…
… but in a good way.
