OF SPACES IN-BETWEEN

Introductory blog on digital mapping…

https://humdigi.wordpress.com/2015/05/02/inside-the-digital-humanities-digital-mapping/

As it was described in the last post, Digital Humanities is, in short terms, much more than computational processing data. It is about designing new ways of scholarship, with infinite potentialities and always open to new possibilities and new worlds.

From now on, lets talk about some ramifications inside the Digital Humanities. The topic of today will be Digital Mapping!…

Stuart Elden has put together a very useful beginner’s guide to Henri Lefebvre which I’ve re-posted below from his Progressive Geographies blog:

http://progressivegeographies.com/resources/lefebvre-resources/where-to-start-with-reading-henri-lefebvre/

What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned? Exploring the pristine ruins of Second Life and other online spaces

Laura E. Hall, The Atlantic

The Atlantic, 13 July 2014

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/what-happens-when-digital-cities-are-abandoned/373941/

Co-habiting with Ghosts: Knowledge, Experience,
Belief and the Domestic Uncanny

Caron Lipman (Ashgate, 2014)

How does it feel to
live in a ‘haunted home’? How do people negotiate their everyday lives with the
experience of uncanny, anomalous or strange events within the domestic
interior? What do such experiences reveal of the intersection between the
material, immaterial and temporal within the home? How do people interpret,
share and narrate experiences which are uncertain and unpredictable? What does
this reveal about contested beliefs and different forms of knowledge? And about
how people ‘co-habit’ with ghosts, a distinctive self – other relationship
within such close quarters?

This book sets out to explore these questions. It applies a non-reductive
middle-ground approach which steers beyond an uncritical exploration of supernatural
experiences without explaining them away by recourse only to wider social and
cultural contexts. The book attends to the ways in which households in England
and Wales understand their experience of haunting in relation to ideas of
subjectivity, gender, materiality, memory, knowledge and belief. It explores
home as a place both dynamic and differentiated, illuminating the complexity of
‘everyday’ experience – the familiarity of the strange as well as the
strangeness of the familiar – and the ways in which home continues to be
configured as a distinctive space.

Contents: Approaching
the ghost. Part I Spaces and Times of the Haunted Home: The material uncanny;
The temporalities of the haunted home. Part II Strategies of Cohabitation:
Embodying, domesticating, gendering the ghost; Strategies of distance and
communication. Part III Belief, Knowledge and Experience: Knowledge and
uncertainty; Belief, evidence and experience; Conclusion: the liminal
home/self; Appendix: the households; References; Index.

About
the Author: Dr Caron Lipman is Research Fellow at
the School of Geography, University of London, UK.

Reviews: ‘Most people have heard of ghosts: popular culture
is full of them. Many people will know of someone who has seen a ghost or had a
ghostly experience. Sometimes, people feel haunted, whether by tragedy or by a
sense of loss. But, for a few, paranormal activity is normal activity. People
do not just live with ghosts as a cultural or metaphorical or emotional figure:
they actually live with ghosts. In this extraordinary book, Caron Lipman deals
with extraordinary phenomena in ordinary life, in the home. Rich in testimony,
ever sensitive to people’s experience, she reveals how the people who live with
ghosts learn to accommodate them – and how, consequently, we all deal with
strangers and strangeness in our lives.’
Steve Pile, The Open University, UK

‘What does it mean to share your home with a ghost? Caron Lipman’s answers to
this question are thought-provoking and insightful. Foregrounding people’s own
experiences and beliefs in her exploration of the uncertain boundary between
material and immaterial geographies, she challenges much current thinking about
home and subjectivity in this highly original and beautifully written book.’
Ann Varley, UCL (University College London), UK

‘Large portions of this book, especially the interviews with the experients,
will be of great interest to students of folklore, and should be of interest to
psychical researchers and one often gets the sense that there are important
insights here’. The Magonia Review of Books

Society and Space review: http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/lipman/

From Pink Floyd to PJ Harvey, our Street View specialist shows us the world’s cities through the lens of famous album covers…

The Guardian, 7 April 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/07/classic-album-covers-in-google-street-view-in-pictures

A lament for the death of bohemian London
John Harris

The eviction of the 12 Bar Club squatters is just the latest chapter in a devastating saga of politics aligning with business…

The Guardian, 6 February 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/06/death-bohemian-london-12-bar-club-squatters?CMP=share_btn_link

Toward an Urban Cultural Studies: Henri Lefebvre and the Humanities
Benjamin Fraser

Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ISBN: 9781137498557
Toward an Urban Cultural Studies is a call for a new interdisciplinary area of research and teaching. Blending Urban Studies and Cultural Studies, this book grounds readers in the extensive theory of the prolific French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Appropriate for both beginners and specialists, the first half of this book builds from a general introduction to Lefebvre and his methodological contribution toward a focus on the concept of urban alienation and his underexplored theory of the work of art. The second half merges Lefebvrian urban thought with literary studies, film studies and popular music studies, successively, before turning to the videogame and the digital humanities. Benjamin Fraser’s approach consistently emphasizes the interrelationship between cities, culture, and capital.

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/toward-an-urban-cultural-studies-benjamin-fraser/?K=9781137498557

Cartographica

Volume 50, Number 1, Spring 2015

Special issue – “Deconstructing the Map”: 25 Years On

Articles to include:

Introduction: The Limits to Deconstructing the Map

Reuben Rose-Redwood

This
special issue marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of
J.B. Harley’s “Deconstructing the Map” (1989), which has had a major
influence in the fields of critical cartography, the history of
cartography, and human geography more generally. Over the last quarter
century, this essay and related works have also been widely cited by
scholars from a broad range of disciplines across the social sciences
and humanities, serving as a key reference for those seeking to theorize
the spatial politics of maps and mapping. Through such citational
practices, “Deconstructing the Map” has acquired a canonical status as
one of the classics of critical cartographic theory, yet the limitations
of its theoretical and methodological analyses are widely acknowledged
even by Harley’s strongest supporters. The contributors to this special
issue discuss their own critical engagements with this foundational text
as well as the extent to which Harley’s work still resonates with
contemporary perspectives in the field of critical cartography today.
The broader aim of this collection is therefore not to further canonize
Harley as the patron saint of critical cartography but rather to think
through the limits of “Deconstructing the Map” to ensure that current
and future theorizations of the power of mapping remain open to
self-critique and new becomings.

Cartography and Its Discontents

Matthew H. Edney

This Is Not about Old Maps

Denis Wood

“Snapshots of a Moving Target”: Harley/Foucault/Colonialism

Daniel Clayton

Reflections on J.B. Harley’s “Deconstructing the Map”

John Krygier

Harley and Friday Harbor: A Conversation with John Pickles

Jeremy Crampton and Matthew W. Wilson

Reflecting on J.B. Harley’s Influence and What He Missed in “Deconstructing the Map”

Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins

Tracing the Map in the Age of Web 2.0

Wen Lin

Still Deconstructing the Map: Microfinance Mapping and the Visual Politics of Intimate Abstraction

Sarah Elwood

Deconstructing the Map after 25 Years: Furthering Engagements with Social Theory

Leila M. Harris

Looking “beyond” Power: J.B. Harley’s Legacy and the Powers of Cartographic World-Making

Reuben Rose-Redwood

_______________________________________

Cartographica is available online at:

Project MUSE – http://bit.ly/cartopm

Cartographica Online – http://bit.ly/cartonline

Deep
Maps and Spatial Narratives

Edited by David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan and Trevor M. Harris

“Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives sets out to describe ‘deep mapping,’ an enhanced environment of data from widely distributed sources used to create a contextual view of a place, a network of social aspects, and environment, as the next step forward in the use of geo-referenced information. It spells out the state-of-the art in the use of new technology in mapping and geo-registration and its ramifications for history, geography, social sciences, cultural studies, environment research, and the humanities. The articles are filled with suggestions and viewpoints that are stimulating [and] the questions raised numerous and complex.”—Lewis Lancaster, University of California Berkeley

Deep maps are finely detailed, multimedia depictions of a place and the people, buildings, objects, flora, and fauna that exist within it and which are inseparable from the activities of everyday life. These depictions may encompass the beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears of residents and help show what ties one place to another. A deep map is a way to engage evidence within its spatio-temporal context and to provide a platform for a spatially-embedded argument. The essays in this book investigate deep mapping and the spatial narratives that stem from it. The authors come from a variety of disciplines: history, religious studies, geography and geographic information science, and computer science. Each applies the concepts of space, time, and place to problems central to an understanding of society and culture, employing deep maps to reveal the confluence of actions and evidence and to trace paths of intellectual exploration by making use of a new creative space that is visual, structurally open, multi-media, and multi-layered.

David Bodenhamer is Executive Director of The Polis Center at IUPUI and Professor of History. He is co-editor (with John Corrigan and Trevor M. Harris) of The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (IUP, 2010).

John Corrigan is the Lucius Moody Bristol Distinguished Professor of Religion and Professor of History at Florida State University. He has authored or edited numerous books on the history of religion, including
Religion and Space in the Atlantic World (forthcoming).

Trevor M. Harris is Eberly Professor of Geography at West Virginia University. He is one of the early contributors to the GIS and Society critique of spatial technologies.

Indiana University Press

February 2015 256pp 36 b&w illus., 5 maps, 2 tables 9780253015600
£21.99 now only £16.49 when you quote CSL215DEEP when you order.

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/deep-maps-and-spatial-narratives

Cultural Mapping and the Digital Sphere: Place and Space

Ruth Panofsky & Kathleen Kellett, Editors

University of Alberta Press (May 2015) ISBN: 9781772120493

“Notwithstanding their differing approaches—digital, archival, historical, iterative, critical, creative, reflective—the essays gathered here articulate new ways of seeing, investigating, and apprehending literature and culture.” – From the Preface

This collection of fourteen essays enriches digital humanities research by examining various Canadian cultural works and the advances in technologies that facilitate these interdisciplinary collaborations. Fourteen essays in English or French survey the helix of place and space: While contributors to Part 1 chart new archival and storytelling methodologies, those in Part 2 venture forth to explore specific cultural and literary texts. Cultural Mapping and the Digital Sphere will serve as an indispensable road map for researchers and those interested in the digital humanities, women’s writing, and Canadian culture and literature.

http://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/cultural-mapping-and-digital-sphere

Nightwalking: a subversive stroll through the city streets

Walking at night has always been the pursuit of the lost, the lonely, the deviant and dispossessed. Yet in today’s cities it can have a rebellious role…

The Guardian, 27 March 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/27/nightwalking-subversive-city-streets-london-matthew-beaumont

Edinburgh’s literary history mapped at the click of a button ‘Lit Long’, a searchable interactive map of the city, will take users to locations made famous by Scottish writers from Walter Scott to Irvine Welsh – and tell you what they wrote
The Guardian, 28 March 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/28/edinburgh-literary-history-online-map-lit-long?CMP=share_btn_link

What is the most private city in the world?

The proliferation of high-security, privatised plazas is making parts of world cities such as London and Dubai reminiscent of an airport lounge

The Guardian, 26 March 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/26/what-most-private-city-world

ECREA TWG MEDIA & THE CITY 2015 CONFERENCE

Urban Media Studies: Concerns, intersections and challenges
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Political Science, 24–25 September 2015

Confirmed keynote speaker: Ole B. Jensen, Professor of Urban Theory, Dept. of
Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University. Other keynote
speakers to be announced soon.

Call for papers and panels

Media related practices are grounded in the city – where the majority of human
population today lives – and media as both technologies and representations
pervade nearly all aspects of urban living, cutting through diverse forms of
public appearance, community, control, resistance and habitation.

As a result, none of the established perspectives in media studies, whether
that of democracy and participation, production and technology, representation
and use, or belonging and identity, can claim to have an exhaustive
understanding of their problematics without appreciating the urban context. In
the same way, no urban process can be fruitfully tackled without taking into
account the involvement of media and media related practices.

Yet, despite being closely – though unevenly – entwined, from small towns to
megalopolises, the two complexes, media and the city, have remained disjointed
in the scholarly analyses. In fact, it can be argued that for media scholars in
particular, the city has remained a terra incognita.

Wishing to revive the initial enthusiasm in media studies, which started as an
interdisciplinary endeavour, Urban Media Studies conference aspires to provide
a dialogic space for disciplines interested in mediated urbanism. We also hope
to stimulate critical reflections on the challenges of collaborating across
disciplinary boundaries. Thus, though speaking from the position of media
studies, we invite submissions from scholars who work in all relevant fields that
interface with the key issue of media and the city. These include, but are not
limited to, such fields as urban geography, urban sociology, architecture,
anthropology, science and technology studies, visual and sound/auditory culture
studies, sociology of the senses, and other related subfields.

We specifically welcome submissions which deal with the following themes and
approach them with an interdisciplinary curiosity – as potential intersections
between two or more fields of research:

Historical connections between urban studies and media studies
Urban spaces and media practices
Urban sociality and media
Mediation of urban daily life
Media, architecture and urban design
‘Media cities’ as production clusters and complexes
Performing and audiencing (in) the mediated city
Media, urban power, resistance and conflict
Media, gender and the city
Media, ethnicity and the city
Urban spaces of media consumption
Urban law in the digitally sustained cities
Mediated urban sensescapes
Urban, outdoor and ambient advertising
Fashion as urban communication
Urban gaming
Journalism and the city
The city as a mediated ecosystem
Urban mediation and spatial negotiations
Methodologies of urban media studies
Teaching about media and the city

We welcome both individual and multi-authored abstracts, and full panel
proposals (with four presentations; 15–20 minutes per presentation). In the
case of panel proposals, the candidate chair should provide a title and a short
general description of the proposed panel, together with the abstracts of all
presenters.

In addition to conventional academic presentations of original theoretical,
methodological and/or empirical research of any of the above or other related
themes, we encourage practice-based presentations, like urban films and
documentaries, sonic projects and other exploratory artwork that probe issues
of media and the city.

Abstract proposals (300 words) for presentations and panels, together with
short bios, should be submitted tomediacity.twg@gmail.com
by May 1st, 2015. Authors will be informed of acceptance by June 1st, 2015.

The conference will also feature a special dialogic plenary where participants
from different disciplines will be invited to share views on their work in the
context of media and the city.

As part of our commitment to stimulate interaction between scholars from
different disciplines, we shall also be organising a guided urban exploration
of Zagreb’s industrial, modernist/utopian architectural heritage, and
post-industrial urban developments.

A selection of papers will be published in an edited book and/or in a journal
special issue.

Conference fee is 50 Euros for ECREA members, 70 Euros for non-members. The fee
will cover conference materials, and coffee and lunch both days.

Any queries should be sent to conference organizers Seija Ridell (University of
Tampere, Finland), Simone Tosoni (Catholic University of Milan, Italy) and
Zlatan Krajina (University of Zagreb, Croatia). Please use the conference
e-mail address:mediacity.twg@gmail.com.

OBS. For the conference updates, please follow the Media& the City
websites onhttp://twg.ecrea.eu/MC/ andhttps://www.facebook.com/mediaandthecity

In the two years that have passed since the broadcast of the ITV documentary Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy in October 2012 the impact of the posthumous revelations about the scale and depravity of Jimmy Savile’s crimes, which precipitated the launch of the police investigation Operation Yewtree, has been far-reaching. At the beginning of December, Ray Teret, a DJ and long-standing friend of Savile was the latest public figure to be found guilty of sexual abuse allegations that stretched back decades. And just this week yet another former Radio 1 DJ, Chris Denning, was convicted of the sexual abuse of young boys in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Other household names that have similarly fallen precipitously from grace include musician and entertainer Rolf Harris, DJ Dave Lee Travis, radio and television presenter Stuart Hall, and the public relations advisor Max Clifford. That the likes of Savile, Harris, Hall and, to a lesser extent, Travis have at various times all been prominent fixtures in British popular culture has meant that their ‘legacy’ as entertainers and celebrities – for decades so indelibly entwined with the BBC and its broadcasting heritage – now casts a much darker shadow; a legacy that is no less part of this putative ‘heritage’, however much audiences may now wish to erase it from the nation’s collective memory banks.

In August the near fever-pitch excitement that greeted Kate Bush’s first live performances since 1979 was marred only by the realisation that Rolf Harris’s contribution to Bush’s 2005 album Aerial (and 1982’s The Dreaming) might now be seen in a different and altogether less palatable light (Harris was convicted in June for a series of indecent assaults). If programming one’s CD player or iPod to skip (or delete) the offending tracks offers one way of ‘wiping’ a now despoiled musical legacy, then it is a formula similar to that which TV programmers and archivists have found themselves increasingly having to adopt. Such are the expectations placed upon broadcasters to ensure that all archival traces of Savile and his ilk remain buried in the vaults (outside, that is, of the discursive context of their shaming), that when an otherwise innocuous item slips through (as with the impersonation of Savile that appeared in a repeated episode of the children’s television programme The Tweenies) it is almost as if BBC heads are expected to roll.

In its capacity as curator of Britain’s televised popular music heritage, the BBC’s reliance on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of archival footage to draw on for inexpensive nostalgia programming content has, post-Savile, been severely tested. From 2011, BBC4 started repeating weekly episodes of the long-running BBC chart show Top of the Pops originally aired in 1976. The brief was relatively straightforward: the repeats would mirror those transmitted twenty-five years earlier with episodes shown in succession on a week-by-week basis. However, the appearance of regular hosts Savile and Travis, or disgraced 1970s pop star Gary Glitter (who has convictions for child sexual abuse and possession of child pornography) has resulted in certain episodes having to be omitted. In the wake of the Savile scandal in 2012 the then BBC4 controller Richard Klein considered axing the classic re-runs from the 1970s, but in response to reportedly ‘overwhelming’ public demand he decided to maintain the repeats ‘for the foreseeable future’. The more pragmatic calculation that, on balance, there was still a sufficient amount of unsullied archival material to draw on no doubt also informed Klein’s decision: ‘Looking at it, we decided we will not be showing either the DLT or Jimmy Savile fronted shows but that left us plenty of Top of the Pops to show’.

Not that any of this can, of course, be confined just to Top of the Pops. Indeed, an episode of Savile’s own Clunk Click programme from the 1970s, featuring Savile and Gary Glitter ‘helping themselves’ to a group of girls from the studio audience, makes for particularly disturbing viewing. But just as the Savile scandal and others like it bring the wider culture, customs and practices of the BBC as an institution into the frame of discussion and debate, so too does consideration of these otherwise ‘aberrant’ or isolated cases throw a critical spotlight across the wider broadcasting landscape and culture of the 1960s and 70s. As much as it is easy or desirable to heap the pathological dysfunction squarely on the perpetrators themselves, there is nevertheless a broader societal context that has bearing on questions of why or how such actions were able to be perpetrated at such a scale over such long periods (especially in view of the fact that, as many testimonies have since demonstrated, there was considerable rumour and suspicion about what was going on as far back, in the case of Savile, as the 1960s).

If framed just in terms of ‘the 1970s’, there has emerged, post-Savile, a sense that the decade itself can or perhaps should be held to account in order to fully expunge certain values, cultural norms and attitudes which ‘we’ (i.e. hose who inhabit the 2010s) now recognise as completely and utterly abhorrent. Such temporal ‘othering’, while on the one hand functioning to demarcate a clear line of acceptability and unacceptability, on the other carries with it the risk of complacency insofar as what has been morally consigned to an earlier era is deemed to be something from which the 2010s have become in some way immune. A barometer by which these shifts in attitudes towards a more ambivalent sense of a popular cultural past can be measured (at least in part) is that of ‘nostalgia’.

Nostalgia shows have become a staple of television programme schedules, not least for the appeal they offer to broadcasters looking to plunder the archive for cheap recyclable content (and for whom ‘the past’ is an inexhaustible commodity that just keeps on giving). Programmes such as BBC’s I Love the 70s (or their 1980s or 90s variants) have since the early 2000s traded on a reflective nostalgia that music journalist Simon Reynolds has dubbed ‘retromania’. Despite its adherence to the same formulaic narrative style (consisting of celebrity ‘talking heads’ commenting on items or programme clips the producers had pre-selected), a marked departure from the genre was the recent Channel Four two-part documentary It Was Alright in the 1970s¸ broadcast in November 2014. The playful and irreverent take on all things ‘retro’ that was evident in I Love the 1970s gives way, in It Was Alright in the 1970s to an examination of the social and cultural mores of decade now seen through the prism of Savile and Operation Yewtree. Whereas in the earlier nostalgia shows questions of taste were typically pitched on aesthetic and kitsch terms, in this more recent example what is considered ‘distasteful’ relates more to prevailing attitudes of sexism, homophobia and racism. Participants are shown responding to footage taken from a range of 1970s television programmes (The Black and White Mistrels Show, Benny Hill, and Casanova ’73, to name but a few), their reactions typically ranging from jaw-dropping disbelief, to stunned silence or comic outrage. Despite the title, and overshadowed by the legacy of Savile, the shift in tone that is evident in the programme seems to stem from the realisation that things were clearly far from alright in the 1970s and that, with more prosecutions still to come and the reputation (and potential complicity) of the BBC under forensic scrutiny (the Dame Janet Smith Review is due in early 2015), the extent to which it wasn’t so has yet to fully unravel.

As well as the convictions of Teret and Denning that have been in the news ver the last couple of weeks, these issues have lurched their way back into my thoughts of late partly through the process of preparing a lecture called ‘Retromania! Popular Culture and Nostalgia’ as part of the new third year module Mediating the Past I am teaching. However unpalatable the subject matter, the issues raised nevertheless touch on debates surrounding the flip side of cultural memory – namely ‘erasure’ and the cultural politics of forgetting – and also the way in which a critical focus on nostalgia can shed valuable insights into the ambivalent relationships that bind present and past popular mediascapes.

Another factor that has prompted the reflections that have developed into this blog entry is the recent publication of the edited collection Sites of Popular Music Heritage (Routledge, 2014), which I co-edited with Sara Cohen and Marion Leonard from the School of Music, and Rob Knifton, formerly a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Music and now based at Kingston University. In the book, Sara and I contribute a chapter called ‘Unveiling Memory: Blue Plaques as In/tangible Markers of Popular Music Heritage’ that briefly discusses the Savile case, albeit in the context of material markers of heritage and memory. As with the process of ‘unmarking’ or erasing memory in the digital domain, the removal of
heritage plaques becomes a deeply symbolic gesture in itself. In the case of Savile, a plaque that had been erected at his former home in North Yorkshire by Scarborough Civic Society was removed by the local authorities who also stripped Savile of all other honours that had been bestowed on him over the years. This official gesture followed on from the display of more ‘unofficial’ gestures in the form of graffiti that had been daubed on the memorial plaque. Alongside the words ‘philanthropist and entertainer lived here’ had been added ‘paedophile’ and ‘rapist’. In addition to this, and to complete the official dishonouring of the former television star, Savile’s ostentatious headstone was removed and dumped in a skip to be used as landfill, leaving the body lying in an unmarked grave.

Lastly, Savile reared his ugly head once more recently when revisiting the Merseybeat-era film Ferry Cross the Mersey (Jeremy Summers, 1965), in which he appears in a lengthy scene shot in the Locarno Ballroom (now The Liverpool Olympia). The film has been little seen since its 1960s release (nor has it been officially released on video or DVD) and in this respect the appearance of Savile will have no doubt sealed its fate for good. That said, despite or because of this I would be interested to gauge what local public reaction to the film is or would be, if for no other reason that it is one of the few Liverpool feature films made in the 1960s and as such is an important part of the city’s filmic (and Merseybeat) heritage, irrespective of any cinematic or aesthetic merits (it has few) or its corrosive association with Savile. While the temptation to bury the film for good or edit out the scenes involving Savile is certainly a valid and persuasive option, a more honest and appropriate response would be to recognise it as a part of a legacy or heritage that, warts and all, is what it is. In this respect – and if, as I hope, a public screening can be organised – the film might provide a focus of discussion that productively explores the role of nostalgia and cultural memory – in all its facets and forms – in shaping narratives of a city’s popular cultural past and the ways these are refracted through the mediascapes of the present.

Les Roberts

A side venture that has emerged from the Nick Cave film project ‘20000 Days on Earth’ is a virtual museum called ‘Museum of Important Shit’. Its creators are the film’s directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. It is a happy coincidence from my window on the world given that the new module I am writing called ‘Mediating the Past’ includes a practical exercise where students are required to curate and upload their own virtual shit (i.e. memories and pop culture memorabilia). I am very much looking forward to seeing the film this week as well…

Forsyth and Pollard explain the background to the museum project below:

“This virtual Museum catalogues the things that remind us of those transformative moments that make us who we are, and unlocks the stories connected to them.

This whole thing started with an old piece of chewing gum. Seriously.

We were shooting the film and Nick told us this spine-tingling story. Nina Simone had been a nightmare backstage at one of her final gigs. But when she walked on and sat down, she took the gum from her mouth and stuck it on the piano, and… transformed. It was one of those rare moments. Nick felt the gears of his heart change. We’ve all had experiences like this.

A few weeks later, we’re shooting another scene. Nick is asking bandmate Warren Ellis if he remembers that Nina Simone gig. Warren interrupts: “I have that gum” he says. And he really does. A pathetic looking dirty piece of gum, wrapped in a towel.

As Nick says in the film, “It’s shit, but it’s important shit. And that’s what this Museum is all about. We might not all have the masticated detritus of a jazz legend tucked away, but we all accumulate objects that have little financial value, but they hold the stories of the things that make us who we are. The Museum will unlock these transformative moments that define our very being. We urge you to share them with us, with the Museum, with the world.”

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard
London, September 2014.

http://www.20000daysonearth.com/museum/

This is quite an old Guardian article now (August 2012), but as I just found a print copy whilst sorting out some old papers I thought it worth posting to keep a record of it.

How Google and Apple’s digital mapping is mapping us

Digital maps on smartphones are brilliantly useful tools, but what sort of information do they gather about us – and how do they shape the way we look at the world?:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/28/google-apple-digital-mapping

I was very saddened to learn of the death from cancer of my PhD supervisor Elizabeth Lebas. While looking up details of her 2011 book Forgotten Futures: British Municipal Cinema 1920-1980 a couple of days ago I unexpectedly came across her obituary published in The Guardian on 1 July.

Geographical Imagination: Interpretations of Nature, Art and Politics
15 – 19 June 2015

TALLINN & TARTU, ESTONIA

The Nordic Geographers Meeting is a biennial meeting of originally Nordic geographers that has grown into a considerable international event and for its 6th meeting expand its geography to include Estonia. Previous meetings were held in Lund, Sweden (2005); Bergen, Norway (2007); Turku, Finland (2009); Roskilde, Denmark (2011), and Reykjavík, Iceland (2013).The meeting will thus be held in Tallinn & Tartu, Estonia on
 15 – 19 June 2015. It is jointly organised by the Estonian Geographical Society, Tallinn Univeristy, University of Tartu, and Estonian University of Life Sciences.

Estonian Geographical Society in cooperation with Estonian universities invites session proposals for the 6th Nordic Geographers Meeting in Tallinn & Tartu, Estonia on 
15 – 19 June 2015 on the theme “Geographical Imagination: Interpretations of Nature, Art and Politics“. Both human and physical geographers are encouraged to participate under this broad heading but the organisers aim at highlighting the connections between nature (climate) and imagination, culture contacts between East and West (across and beyond the Baltic to the Far East, the Americas and Oceania) including geographical explorations and the issues of interpretation and politics (including being lost or found in translation).

Conference information here.

http://www.tlu.ee/en/ngm2015

Interesting article by Will Self on English Heritage and the newly opened Stonehenge visitor centre.

The summer solstice, King Arthur, the Holy Grail … Stonehenge is supposed to be a site of myths and mystery. But with timed tickets and a £27m visitor centre, does it herald a rampant commercialisation of our heritage?…

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/21/from-heritage-to-heretics-stonehenge-making-history