I’m sure there’ll be some feedback and writeup of the day on their site, and there was also some use of the hashtag, but I thought I’d offer some of my personal thoughts.

I was one of a few people coming from BCU’s Media School, and it made me realise the attendees were either arts based researchers, or media and communications. And by the end of the day I was wondering if creative research methods mean different things to those two distinct areas, and whether they should. It seemed that creative research methods for artists can be quite reflexive, and very personalised, often dealing with physical objects. Whereas media might typically be deploying methods more specifically to gather required data, and are more likely to be how about how participants relate to the outside world.

I also take ‘creative’ in the context of research methods to mean unexepected, disruptive, surprising, unsettling and unusual. I think innovation slightly different, but that was another term that came up. I definitely think there is something to be said for taking research participants / subjects slightly out of their comfort zone to produce unexpected and emotional results. We all know how to respond to a questionnaire, but what would you do if someone gave you a box of Lego?

That’s another aspect, playfulness. We also talked about ‘making’ as a research method, whether that’s drawing or collage, or even something digital. An act which pulls us out of the normal routine of our day and pushes us in some other creative direction seems likely to provide interesting results. ‘Honest’ responses? Maybe, maybe not. If an activity is to alienating and awkward, most of us would probably place up some kind of barrier. So there should be balance, between creating unexpected experiences, but not so much that the participant is distressed.

A question of data came up too. It was unclear to some how an audio recording from a walking tour, or a lego model could be usefully analysed. Having explored various methods for my own studies recently, I’d imagine a narrative analysis would be more useful than a strict content analysis. e.g. an analysis that simply thematically coded up the points of discussion on a walking tour’s audio wouldn’t be taking into account such factors as: who held the recorder; how did they feel about recording themselves; were they confident operating the recorder, and was this something they were used to; pauses in discussion; inflection in the language; slang, etc.

Typically, the day posed as many questions as answers, but it was hugely enjoyable, always nice to rub shoulders with people from other disciplines, seeing Professor Richard Coles introduced to Lego for the first time in his life. It certainly has got me thinking about how creative methods might be of use in my own studies. 

Charles Parker

Course work by students at the Birmingham School of Media have been recognised in two major radio awards.

Third year student Jim Kerwood received a commendation from judges of the Charles Parker Prize for outstanding radio documentary production. Jim’s documentary about “Panthers in Hereford” was broadcast on BBC Hereford & Worcester and was recently included in a BBC Radio 4 feature about the awards.

Dan Collins, a student on the Foundation Degree in Radio Production, has been nominated in the Documentary finalist category of the New York Radio Awards.

Dan’s feature, titled “Binge Drinking: Don’t Do It“, is a powerful piece of radio. As Dan describes it; “A documentary made about my brother. The effects a young person binge drinking has on the whole family. Espically when the worst thing imaginable happens”.

Also nominated in the NY Radio Awards was a BCU produced documentary series broadcast on the community radio station “Switch 107.5″. The series, titled “West Midlands Stories”, featured examples of past and present radio students’ course work alongside staff productions.

The documentaries were presented by Radio Studies lecturer Siobhan Stevenson, and the series has been nominated in the “Information / Documentary” category. Winners will be announced at a Radio Awards Gala on June the 17^th at Manhattan Penthouse in New York City.

Wednesday 1/05/13 3:00-4:00pm
3pm – Speaker: Oliver Carter Title: Short term pain for long term gain”: A pragmatic approach to completing a PhD while working full time.

Click here for full PDF.

Wednesday 15/05/13 2:00-4.00pm
2pm – Speaker: Dr John Mercer - BCU Title: Acting and Behaving Like a Man: Rock
Hudson’s Performance Style

3pm – Speaker: Annette Naudin - BCU Title: An exploration of personal agency in
cultural entrepreneurs

Click here for full PDF.

And yet spatial and transportation metaphors abound when it comes to online retail. If we want to buy a book, we ‘go to’ Amazon. Websites ‘take you to’ their store. Email sales messages ask us to ‘visit’ so that we can buy stuff.

Breaking that spatial metaphor is the key central innovation of the iTunes Store (the iTunes Music Store when it launched, but they’ve diversified). Yes, you’re still paying money online and downloading music from the internet in exchange for that money paid – but you do not go anywhere to do so. The store is on your desktop. It’s right here. Part of the player.

“Shall I go download it from Amazon?”
“No need, I can get it right here on iTunes.”

Fundamentally the transaction and the mechanics of the process are virtually indistinguishable – except for two important things. First, you had to ‘navigate’ to a website. And second, if you download the music from “elsewhere”, you still then have to import the music into iTunes, if that’s your music player (and it is most people’s).

It’s no wonder that the iTunes store is so phenomenally successful. I can not only buy music without leaving my house – I can buy music without leaving my music player. Faced with that kind of simplicity and the frictionless purchasing that results from having an iTunes account already tied to your credit card, the miracle is that it’s not more successful than it is.

Say what you like about them – but we appear to like shopping malls, as a culture. Having a device that enables us to visit those shopping malls from the comfort of our home feels like progress to us. What Apple have done with the iTunes store is to remove the need to visit. The shopping mall is now right here, right now.

Of course, they’ve made some pretty good self sabotage attempts by deliberately breaking their products (restrictive digital rights management), stocking low-quality goods (insisting on low-resolution files – though AAC is measurably better than mp3 encoded at the same low rate), and moving all the shelves around so we can’t find what we want (some appalling user interface decisions on certain upgrade versions) – but even so, on the whole, it seems like the one thing Apple simply cannot get wrong no matter how hard they try.

The overarching logic and design of the iTunes store has had some unintended consequences for music retail: the predominance of the individual track over the album sale. The characteristics of the environment and the deliberate removing of all points of purchasing friction has led to the musical equivalent of grabbing a candy bar because it happens to be right there.

“How did that song go? Oh wait – I have iTunes open – I’ll just grab it.”

To suggest that iTunes has been a positive or negative force for the Music Industry is to first believe that there’s such a thing (I don’t happen to) and second to believe that it matters (likewise). The iTunes Store is not something that happened to the music industries, the software application industries, the magazine, film, book and television industries – but instead represent a (now rather established and settled) shift in the context within which those industries operate.

And now it’s been here for ten years. Normalised. Embedded in the culture with a range of accessories, gadgets and devices that require that we use that same environment, and for which we can, without effort or pause for reflection, simply purchase new sounds, activities, and entertainments.

Not only that, but the ease of use and seamless, convenient integration also drives the hardware sales which, of course, is where the real margins lie. If it wasn’t quite so profitable and popular, you’d almost be forced to conclude that music was nothing more than the bait in this setup.

But ten years is three lifetimes in internet years. A measure of something which, almost like email, is so seamlessly integrated into our daily lives that for it to suddenly go away would be unthinkable.

It turns out we quite like having a shopping mall on our laps.

1. Trolling

One of the things that YouTube is often linked with is trolling – the practice (or the art) of being mean or controversial to get a reaction. The rest of the media, particularly non web-native media outlets, love to talk about trolling because it suits particular techno-dystopian narratives and it relates to things like cyber-bullying (or bullying in general). At it’s worst trolling is of course very damaging and is often implicated in tragic stories where bullying has got out of hand. YouTube is like the Premier League of trolling: nothing good comes from reading YouTube comments.

2. The YouTube Generation

I hear these words a lot – a few months ago Wired ran a big feature on it, and last week the Guardian wrote a rather gushing piece about the YouTube generation too. Commentary on the YouTube Generation is focussed around a strand of youth produced and youth oriented YouTube channels. The YouTube Generation tends to be presented as evidence of a major disruption in media production and consumption which reduces to “the kids like making and watching their own TV”.

At the heart of the YouTube Generation lies a number of prominent video bloggers who discuss their personal and cultural lives in pieces to (web) camera. For various reasons these few have risen to be the most watched and the most talked about (the talking and the watching fuelling one another) and this begins to afford them the opportunity to make money. The bedroom producer, like the Internet Troll, is a bankable character for a feature writer and so these video bloggers have become of interest to the wider media. Discussion of this blogging sub-culture in wider media tends to be simplistic, overlooking the wider picture: the video bloggers’ successes are offered as indicative not of a sub-culture but of an homogenised, monolithic youth culture and video blogging is presented as being the sum total of those young peoples’ media lives. In fact youth engagement with television, radio, music, and many other aspects of cultural life remains full and diverse. Kids who engage with YouTube content are also doing other things. They are consuming long form video content (films, TV) they are going to gigs, performing in bands and buying music on iTunes (and bandcamp, and independent record shops and all manner of places). Many more kids are doing all of those things and not engaging in YouTube video blogging at all.

3. “The second biggest search engine” – and other ways to explain what YouTube is for

I don’t have the data to hand to check where we are with this, it may not be still, but out there in the real world people tell you that YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. Even if it’s no longer true, it’s a useful enough aphorism which gets people thinking when they first hear it.

For many people YouTube is the first port of call for a search, especially if it’s a video search. For that reason YouTube is a valuable place to put good content if you want people to engage with your ideas.

At this point it’s worth stopping to think about what YouTube is for, and how people use it. We can easily think of YouTube as:

• a search engine
• a content discovery platform (through suggestions based on your profile and the profile of people who watch and like what you like)
• a social network centred on video content (there are communities within the site, networks of friends, communities of practice, etc.)
• a primary channel for watching video content (especially through subscriptions to certain producer’s content channels)
• a video streaming service (a lot of web users place videos on YouTube with no intention of engaging with people on the YouTube website – they just want reliable hosting of video files that they can embed elsewhere)
• a way of gauging popularity (YouTube hits are a media shorthand for popularity – we only need to consider Gangnam style here)

4. Memes

YouTube is central to many Internet memes. From Rick Rolling to Keyboard Cat, YouTube provides a stable repository for the shareable content at the heart of many call and response or bait and switch jokes. YouTube’s ability to soak up traffic is particularly important here – would Leave Britney Alone or the Star Wars kid have managed to stay up and running for long had they been hosted on a cheap personal grade server package? Doubtful. The video owner’s bandwidth charges would also have gone through the roof, making it hard to sustain the content for long.

In addition to stability, YouTube also offered simplicity. Uploading streaming video used to be the sort of thing that only web designers did: you’d need to know a bit about code and file formats, you’d need a web server and a website to actually embed the video into; YouTube offered a simple way to upload, and simple ways to share the content including a webpage for the video on the YouTube website. That meant that, amongst other things, people could easily offer up their own take on memes, giving rise to the sort of phenomenon you see with the Harlem Shake or Hitler Reacts which add fresh twists to an original idea, mutating and spreading the meme further.

5. Business Models

OK it wasn’t the first, but YouTube was one of the big early splashes of the second dot com bubble. Alongside other early successes such as Flickr, YouTube has contributed to a commercial culture that is predicated on romantic story: that groups of friends can get together and put together million (and billion) dollar technology companies in their bedrooms. Of course, this story occurs throughout innovation history, but in its current telling the innovation doesn’t need to make money, it just needs to wait to be bought by a bigger fish, and hope it can keep attracting enough rounds of venture capital to stay afloat until then.

YouTube was started by a group of friends, and it was bought (for $1.65 billion) by a bigger fish. I was interested to read that its founders have distanced themselves from the more romantic elements of their own genesis story, stating that it makes for good marketing copy but isn’t strictly true. Of course we should also remember that they were already known and working on the ground in Silicone Valley – the technology was important, but the networks are part of the story too and we should all think about that before we bet the farm on our own start up ideas.

So that’s it. It’s not supposed to be an exhaustive list of things that are interesting or noteworthy about YouTube, it’s just some stuff that came out of my mind. Do please feel free to troll me below – I hope you can be first.

In the paper I used the anthropological work of Feld with African jazz musicians to open up a discussion regarding how we think about European jazz, and in particular the way in which the cultures and sounds of the movement are distinct from those which developed in the USA. As a media and cultural analyst, rather than an anthropologist, I gave particular attention to the role of European jazz media in this area.

The mediation and representation of jazz, and in particular jazz histories, is a theme I have explored in my work with Paul Long. I was delighted, then, to be invited to chair the ‘Jazz and the Media’ panel, which included Alyn Shipton and Alexander Kan from the BBC. We discussed the role of the organisation in light of changes to jazz consumption habits in the digital age, a topic which I have previously published work on with Andrew Dubber.

Also presenting at the Salford conference was my BCU colleague Simon Barber. As part of a BCMCR project Simon has recently been working with Dave Stapleton (Edition Records), on his engagement with digital and internet technologies. You can read more about Simon’s paper here.

The Salford event was a resounding success and greatly enjoyable, and as ever it was good to meet with colleagues and friends from across the world. The event was covered in great detail by the All About Jazz website, and also received some coverage in London Jazz News.

I decided that after my chapter on punk documentaries didn’t quite make the final print of Ben Halligan’s book “Sights and Sounds: Interrogating the Music Documentary”, and as an early career researcher with little publication experience, I would enlist the help of fellow research colleague and head of our centre for research Tim Wall to co-author the chapter as he has much experience in getting articles and chapters published. I also  recognised that Tim would not only bring a wealth of experience but also a c corpus of knowledge around popular music culture and the digital age from his work on Jazz in the digital age and other research projects he has been and is involved in.  We have recently had confirmation from Matt Worley that the chapter will make the publication and Tim and I are in the final stages of making some minor alterations based on comments from the editor and peer reviewers.

The chapter is titled “Punk ‘zines – ‘symbols of defiance’ from the print to the digital age”

and as I mentioned at the beginning of this post is based around an exploration of the development of punk fanzines from the late 1970s to the present, exploring the role of these music fan-produced publications in giving meaning to the experience of a music community. Our aim was to consider and analyse the fanzine as a discursive practice.  In doing so we set out to encompass the usual emphasis on fanzines as channels of communication and symbols of wider punk practices, but to ensure we recognised that it was the fanzine which was one of the key ways in which punk and anarcho-punk was made meaningful. In doing so we argued that:

• fanzines became one of punk’s many ‘symbols of defiance’, not just in the way that they visually and verbally represented punk’s DIY ethos and activism, but also in the way they embodied the labour of ‘fan-eds’ as organic intellectuals undertaking ideological work in which discourses of defiance and opposition are constructed, signified and reinforced.

To enable this we focussed on two particular instances of the punk ‘zine; two moments in which the specific meanings of specific fanzines could be explored in a little greater detail than those offered in the grander narratives of the punk fanzine. In the first instance we conducted a case study of one early 1980s anarcho-punk fanzine and examined the way that such publications operated at the intersection of political activism and DIY music criticism, constructing idealised notions of music, politics and community against which the actual activity within local punk scenes were judged.

This for me was particularly interesting and nostalgic as I referred to copies of anarcho-punk fanzines from my personal collection from over 30 years ago. Many of these such as ‘Acts of Defiance’, which formed the basis of our case study, ‘Mucilage’ , ‘Guilty of What’ and ‘Necrology’? I hadn’t looked through for at least 20+ years. Without getting too nostalgic the experience brought back many fond memories from my youth and also made me consider how those fanzines informed and developed my own political position. More interestingly it also made be consider and reassess how those politics now inform my life as it could be argued that being in academia is being part of the ‘system’ that I was very much rallying against in my youth.

Anyway I digress so back to the chapter. In the second instance we examined the idea of the punk ‘zine as used in contemporary websites with a focus on punk from the 70s or 80s, or music or artists that continue its ethos and/or sound.

Without giving too much away, as we would like you too read the chapter when the book is published, we argued  that simply focusing on the characteristic visual deign of the print fanzine limits our understanding of its cultural role and the position of its ‘fan-ed’ cultural agents. This important point also allows us to understand the extent to which webzines replicate the discursive practices of the print fanzine. Overall, while many web sites or blogs may include visual references to fanzines, and may even use the term in their titles or primary banners, they do not include the sorts of editorial organisation, the cultural practices or the discursive constructions of identity and opposition which characterised print fanzines.

I am really pleased with the chapter and really enjoyed the experience of co-authoring, the support it enables and the different perspectives that another author can bring to the ‘mix’. This work on examining anarcho-punk fanzines has led to me developing some of those core ideas further for another chapter called “From Protest to Resistance: British anarcho-punk fanzines (1980-1984) as sites of resistance and symbols of defiance”, which will appear in a seminal book on anarcho-punk called “The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music, 1979-84” co edited by Mike Dines and Matt Worley due for publication by Autonomedia In early 2015.

-Wednesday 17/04/13 2:00-3:00pm

2pm – Speaker: Stephanie Pitts – University of Sheffield Title: Understanding live listening

Dr Stephanie Pitts is a Reader in Music with research interests in musical participation, concert audiences and music education. She is Director of Student Experience in the music department, having previously served a year as Acting Head of Department (2011-12) and three years as Assistant Director of Learning and Teaching for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

-Wednesday 17/04/13 3:00-4:00pm

3pm – Speaker: Dr Andy Williams – Cardiff University Title: The Value of UK Hyperlocal News: Findings form a content analysis

The crisis in local news in the UK has been developing for a long time, but it has worsened in the last decade. Mainstream newspaper publishers have primarily dealt with challenges to their business models, and declines in their audiences, by cutting staff and reducing the resources previously devoted to news. This has had serious consequences on the volume, nature, independence, and “localness” of the news people read about where they live.

The University of Liverpool School of Music has recently announced a new department blog from the staff and PhD students which you can find at http://music.liv.ac.uk

It is hoped that the blog will host a range of items to interest a variety of people: news items for those in the local area; reflections on current and future research projects, including PhD projects; ‘food for thought’ items. It should gradually become an online reflection of our offline world. There are only a few posts up at the moment, but a number of things are in the pipeline….

In case you’re interested, you can subscribe by email for updates. The blog is organised by Dr. Freya Jarman, Senior Lecturer, Director of Undergraduate Studies, School of Music, University of Liverpool