daveharte.com

A list, decided by me, of the 10 best blogs by people based in Birmingham (as of now – May 2013). Sometimes they talk about Birmingham, sometimes not. In order of bestness.

1. But She’s a Girl
“In respects other than my interests, I am resolutely female [...] I don’t find farting amusing”. Geek, film buff, Kate Bush fan, collector of fountain pens. This is simply the most useful blog I read as it veers from advice on which RSS reader to read in the post-Google Reader era to useful reviews of cheap speakers. But it also covers the personal and domestic in a refreshing, witty tone. In all, it’s quite rambling and unexpected, with a tendency to use footnotes of which I approve. The author moved to Birmingham in 2004 and has been blogging ever since.

2. Birmingham Central
Planning porn. Tons of detail about the endless changes to Birmingham’s landscape. It rarely editorialises which is refreshing, instead presenting plenty of pics and distilling details from submitted planning documents. It’s the work of Simon Felton who is partly doing a really good job of saving us from having to trawl the Skyscraper City forum for useful Birmingham stuff, and partly making sense of a city which changes so fast it’s difficult to keep up. Blogging since 2008. To note: the Urban Buildings blog does a great job in a similar vein whilst UrbanPivot covers a wider strategic view of the city.

3. B31 Voices
I’ve written about B31′s extraordinariness before. My point in that post was that B31 was more than a so-called ‘hyperlocal’ blog, it was a powerful, citizen-led network of knowledge that offers a genuine challenge to ‘official’ knowledge. It’s the ‘networked public sphere‘ (PDF) in action. Run by Sas and Marty Taylor it covers news and events in a big chunk of South Birmingham – the poorer bits. They write a dozen or more stories a week and have excellent links with the Birmingham Mail who increasingly rely on them as their ‘beat’ reporting duo.

4. Two Brides to Two Mummies
“Mum, I’m bisexual, I’m in love with the blonde lady in Casualty”. Regularly updated since January 2012 to chart the progress towards the civil partnership of two women (due in July 2013). It’s the detail and honesty that’s refreshing and of course what makes it unlike any other wedding planning blog is that in this instance the personal is also political. ‘Straight’ couples don’t have ‘coming out‘ stories or detail the ways in which they won’t in fact be married at all. The charming, bubbly protagonists just want to be wed – if only we lived in a country sensible enough to let that happen.

5. Mark Steadman
I’m drawn to Mark’s blog partly because he’s a former student that I taught briefly in the early noughties – I like to see former students getting on and doing okay, I’m fatherly like that. The main reason though is that Mark is my barometer for Birmingham’s tech scene. If Mark is buoyed up and working on one of his many side projects then I always presume the scene around him is in a good way too. His blog switches from the personal to the professional, sometimes discussing his journey into entrepreneurship and sometimes declaring he’s giving it all up (an April Fool it turns out…). Like a few of the blogs I enjoy I’m never sure what’s coming next.

6. SmokeandUmami
Having been lauded by The Observer’s food critic (and TV person) Jay Rayner, this blog hardly needs further endorsement. I like that it veers from restaurant reviews to cake recipes. It’s run by a ‘bioinformatician’ based at University of Birmingham with a thing for barbecued ribs. The restaurants he chooses to eat at are the places I might end up going to – kebab houses, chip shops, a decent place to get a fry-up. Also worth a read is Brummie Tummy.

7. The Hearing Aid
At one level just a whole load of gig/music reviews but given there’s been over a 1000 of them since 2006, all by one person, this is obviously a whole lot more. I’m not even a big gig-goer myself yet I find this a must-read. Birmingham seems to be a good place for seeing half-decent bands in small suburban pubs. Wish I could see that said in more glitzy City brochures and websites. Similar stuff with multiple authors and nice pics at Gig Junkies.

8. Bread and Circus
This was tweeted in my direction when I mentioned I was creating this list. It turns out it was in my RSS Reader anyway but its miscellaneousness means I sometimes mistake it for being multiple blogs rather than one. Surely everyone needs a blog in their feed reader that is generally just nice to look at? It’s curation of art, music, food, travel feels hip without being hipster. In a similar space but just focused on design is cmykern (who once attacked my allotment with an industrial-strength strimmer, for which I am forever grateful).

9. The Iron Room
“You always find surprises in the archives”. The blog of the Archive and Heritage department of Birmingham Central Library Library of Birmingham. Likes others in this list it’s the unexpected that delights. I imagine (wrongly) the authors work in a crowded, unkept office where they occasionally trip over an uncatalogued box of photos and documents of Birmingham’s history. And in that way they choose what goes on the blog this week. However they decide it’s genuinely enriching to get an ongoing glimpse into Birmingham’s past. See also ‘Mapping Birmingham’s Georgian and Regency Streets‘ for more history goodies.

10. Paradise Circus
It’s a bit self-consciously writerly at times (though by that I also mean writerly in the Barthesian sense) and seems to have only male writers at present but Paradise Circus is at least attempting to curate a view of Birmingham that is a long way from the corporate gloss the city’s image has been subject to in recent times. It’s at its best when it’s most straightforward – Craig Hamilton’s seemingly throwaway anecdote about an encounter with a Hollywood star at Birmingham New Street station being a good example.

My colleague Annette Naudin occasionally posts updates about her progress in her PhD. I like it best when she excerpts from whichever section she’s currently work on. She writes so well. Go read: annettenaudin.wordpress.com.

So, inspired by Annette, from time to time I will use this blog to put sections of mine in the public domain. I fully expect that none of what I’m writing here will end up in the final thing but nonetheless, writing about writing may help me reflect and therefore redraft. Here’s something that I put into a paper that myself and my research colleague at work are presenting at a conference in May. I’m interested in Pink’s work about everyday stuff and also in notions of banality. The first paragraph is the preamble.

In what they describe as a “Genealogical Discourse Analysis’ of scholarship on participatory journalism, Borger et al. note that scholars display a “strong faith in the democratic potential of digital technologies” (Borger et al. 2012: 125) and that such technological optimism “can be traced back to internet enthusiasts of the 1990s who voiced great expectations regarding the reinvigoration of the public sphere” (Borger et al. 2012: 125). To some extent, we can see how hyperlocal is in danger of being caught up in what Curran warns is a tendency for ‘millenarian’ prophecies to accompany developments in new media (Curran 2010b). But there are other ways in which we might reframe discussions about Hyperlocal that take account of the role of technology but move beyond assessing its value as an aspect of the ‘networked’ fourth estate (Benkler 2011).

Sarah Pink’s work (2012) in calling for a study of the everyday through a theory of ‘place’ is useful. She notes that ‘place’ is an abstract concept and we might more usefully consider the idea of a ‘sense of place’ and thereby the ways in which ‘place-making’ happens (Pink 2012: 24). For Pink it’s a study of the everyday that matters. People access online in a multifaceted way, she argues: switching between platforms, reading from a wide range of sources, making contributions in social media updates or in posting photographs. As an ethnographer, Pink wants us to see that these online practices happen simultaneously with an offline engagement with place-making (Pink 2012: 131). This should make us rethink our approach to a study of online activism:

Contemporary social media platforms and the technologies through which we access them make digital activism interweave with our everyday media practices and the environment in which we participate (Pink 2012: 131).

Chris Atton likewise argues that we must study “the banality of the Internet and of the everyday practices that construct it and its relations to the wider world” (Atton 2004: 7). He makes the case that it is the ‘significant everyday’ that is of value to the cultural studies ethnographer interested in understanding how “the possibilities for meaning are organised” (Atton 2004: 8).

Costera Meijer (2012) is also concerned with the everyday and in particular the ways in which ‘participatory storytelling’ can help bring the everyday into media representations of neighbourhoods in order to strengthen community relations and work against the mainstream media’s dominant discourse of ‘‘the problem neighbourhood frame’’ (Costera Meijer 2012: 19). Such a framing, she argues, leads to social isolation and stigmatization (see also Chen et al. 2012). Postill argues that “banal activism has been neglected by internet scholars” (Postill 2008: 419). He draws on his own study conducted in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where the “vibrant Internet scene” (Postill 2008: 422) contributed to an active culture of participation and debate amongst residents on matters that mattered only to that specific locality. He critiques the tendency for researchers to over-simplify the notions of ‘network’ and ‘community’ – “[it] is a vague notion favoured in public rhetoric, not a sharp analytical tool” (Postill 2008: 421). He argues instead that we need to pay attention to the ways in which “people, technologies and other cultural artefacts are co-producing new forms of residential sociality in unpredictable ways” (Postill 2008: 426).

References:

Atton, C. (2004) An alternative Internet. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Benkler, Y. (2011) Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate. Harv. CR-CLL Rev., Vol 46, pp. 311.

Borger, M., Van Hoof, A., Costera Meijer, I. & Sanders, J. (2012) Constructing Participatory Journalism as a Scholarly Object. Digital Journalism, Vol 1, No 1, pp. 117-134.

Chen, N.-T. N., Dong, F., Ball-Rokeach, S. J., Parks, M. & Huang, J. (2012) Building a new media platform for local storytelling and civic engagement in ethnically diverse neighborhoods. New Media & Society, Vol 14, No 6, pp. 931-950.

Costera Meijer, I. (2012) When News Hurts. Journalism Studies, Vol 14, No 1, pp. 13-28.

Curran, J. (2010b) Technology Foretold. In: FENTON, N. (ed.) New media, old news : journalism and democracy in the digital age. London: SAGE. pp. 19-34.

Pink, S. (2012) Situating everyday life: practices and places. London: SAGE.

Postill, J. (2008) Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks. New Media & Society, Vol 10, No 3, pp. 413-431.

I managed to get myself a behind-the-scenes tour of Birmingham New Street station. It is currently undergoing a major transformation due to complete in 2015 that will see a new concourse built and a new shopping centre (called Grand Central) above it.

In April 2013 (actual date to be announced later in March 2013) the old concourse will shut and half of the new concourse will open allowing the other half of the new concourse to be built. The whole of the new concourse will then eventually open some time in 2015.

So, this new half-concourse is what I got a tour of. Pictures are below and I’ve put some notes with them to try to give you a sense of the layout.

My tour was by their comms person who is former BBC journalist Sue Beardsmore. Thanks to Nick Booth for suggesting I might be a useful person to take round.

Some points I noted as I went round (apologies for any inaccuracies):

• Until the whole of the new concourse opens in 2015 you won’t be able to access the station from the Bullring side. You will go down a new alleyway at the back of the Odeon cinema and emerge on Stephenson street where the new entrance is.
• There will be an exit during switchover on Hill street (and when John Lewis is finished in 2015, a much grander exit in that place).
• Every platform will have escalators and lifts (platform one will just have lift and stairs during the switchover period).
• The new car and taxi drop runs alongside the new concourse with a short stay car park above it. It’s actually in a section that was the old Pallasades carpark. You enter on Hill street, drive along a covered roadway and exit on Navigation street (where Taxi pick-up will be).
• The new concourse has a ticket side and a non-ticket side. Much the same way it’s set up now.
• Everything feels bigger. I think that’s because the ticket/non-ticket sides use the full width of the station whereas currently only the ticket side stretches all the way down.
• There were lots of people working there. So even though the pics seem to suggest there’s a long way to go it did seem that there were enough people on site to make the switchover date happen as planned in April.
• Once the new half concourse is open there seems to be a ton of concrete to take out of the old one. You can see why it’ll take another two years.
• Part of the old concourse will remain open as otherise there wouldn’t be a second exit from platforms. The old ladies toilet will still be in use for a while. The gents will get a refurb.
• The route from the ramp (you know, the one with MacDonalds on it) to the Bullring bridge will stay open, as will those shops. However, from switchover day the escalators down to the station will be closed and there will be a longish corridor route down to the new concourse.
• See also the info at: http://www.newstreetnewstart.co.uk/

Feel free to re-use the pics as you wish. You can download the hi-res versions and the licence is set to Creative Commons (link to set). I’ve added more detail in the notes below the pics.

Has the discussion about whether Birmingham is planning to bid for UK City of Culture 2017 started yet? We should bid; I think we’d win.

I was in Derry-Londonderry at the start of the year, the 2013 UK City of Culture. It was my first ever visit and I was immediately taken with the place. If you look at the words linked to Derry’s success then you’ll find nothing unexpected. They mention Creative Industries, ‘Digital’, they promised building/regeneration initiatives, they hinted at the potential for culture to “accelerate the pace of change and provide a new story for the city to tell to the world”.

That’s their way of saying “it’s complicated here but we’ll try.”

Naturally it’s the history I find particularly fascinating (I wrote my undergraduate dissertation about media representation of the peace process) and a visit to the Bogside and the Museum of Free Derry was therefore a highlight. The museum is very small and comprises a series of panels retelling Derry’s history from the perspective of its Catholic population, leading up to the events of Bloody Sunday. There’s a collection of items – posters, booklets, song books – relating to the civil rights movement as well as more macabre pieces such as clothing from Bloody Sunday victims complete with bullet holes marked for your attention. An audio soundtrack from the day of Bloody Sunday itself is playing on a loop.

The person on duty at the museum was a local man called John. It’s only after we’ve been round the place that we struck up a conversation. I played the ‘my folks are Irish’ card and he told me about Derry’s Birmingham connection. But he then reveled that his brother was one of the people shot dead (by ‘Lance Corporal F‘) on Bloody Sunday.

He’s probably told hundreds of people that fact but wow, that’s a big emotional punch right there. He expanded a little on what it was like to live in the Bogside then and now and hinted at his resistance to the idea that the City of Culture could somehow heal political and religious divides. For a start, he’d not been across the Peace Bridge because the regenerated barracks on the other side were where the Paratroopers that murdered his brother had been based.

A key criteria of winning the UK City of Culture competition is to ‘outline how you would use culture to bring about step-change.’ When asked what the City of Culture meant to him, John replied: “well Status Quo are playing a gig.” The gig is in the aforementioned Ebrington Barracks. He’ll have to make a step-change and cross that bridge if he wants to see them.

So what does this tell us about Birmingham’s potential to bid for City of Culture 2017. Well in a research report (PDF) which spoke to stakeholders in the Birmingham bid it becomes clear why we failed last time around:

“Birmingham felt that they “had to bid for it”, stating that it would have “said more about the city if we hadn’t” (p9)

And it seems that it’s not all that likely we’ll go for it again:

When asked if they would bid again for this or similar cultural titles, participants from Birmingham explained that the ‘appetite was lost’ [...] Bidding raises aspirations; unfulfilled aspiration was described as a “sore on the city”, and another bid as “pure masochism” (p17)

I’ll admit to being slightly confused at the moment about Birmingham’s cultural and creative leadership. It seems to have gotten subsumed into the LEP. Is that right? Someone has to lead the discussion, I guess they might start it.

But I think a different approach might be needed this time. One that values a bottom up approach to understanding culture. “Culture is Ordinary: this is where we must start” said Raymond Williams writing in 1958 (PDF – read it ALL). That’s where the Birmingham bid has to start. Don’t lead with the grandness of what the City delivers as part of its cultural offer. Instead, find some people as articulate, considered and humble as John and listen to how they talk about their culture. For John, politics, religion, division and coming to terms with division, is culture as much as Art, learning and buildings.

Culture is his lived experience of the City. Start from there and we’ll win.

See also: Phil Redmond’s blog post for the DCMS.

Actually, I struggled giving this post a title. I wanted to call it something like:

‘I wish local government communications people would stop self-aggrandising and give credit to their citizens instead’.

There was lots of snow in and around Birmingham on Friday (Jan 18). There was a time when the resultant unfolding narrative of school closures and rush hour traffic chaos used to be played out solely on local radio (oh how we used to gather round the radio praying for our school to be called out). Now we live in different times and not only are other media organisations able to publish updates but local councils can play a part by publishing updates on websites or via social media.

Unfortunately Birmingham City Council’s special website for disruption fell over on Friday morning so proved pretty useless. However, its twitter account (952 followers up to 2754 followers by Jan 22) did a pretty good job of tweeting school closure news as they came in.

Local government communications people seem to like the snow. The idea to come up with a hashtag for gritting (#wmgrit) got them a write up in a SOCITM report, coverage in mainstream media and in a report on Innovation in West Midlands councils (PDF). “By following that hashtag, residents can now see instantly when their council is out working on a cold night gritting the roads to make sure the county keeps moving,” the report says.

But a recent write-up asking ‘what’s next’ for snow-related local government comms seems to sum up a particular problem within local authorities. That is, the assumption that their adeptness in using social media places them at the centre of our communications universe. The role of citizens in this narrative is to ‘complain’ or ‘have a pop’.

The opposite couldn’t be more true on Friday. A hyperlocal website close to where I live, B31 Voices, showed how citizens are more than able to make communications contributions in times of crises that are a world away from ‘having a pop’.

B31 is run by Sas and Marty Taylor who decided at the first sign of snow on 11 January to organise their communications around a hashtag: #B31Snowwatch. It came into its own on Friday 18th with Sas and Marty juggling getting their own kids ready for school whilst tweeting (2464 followers) and facebooking (2324 likes) school closure updates.

Their information sources were both official and unofficial. By the latter I mean that other parents were tweeting updates as well as schools themselves or the council. They stayed online throughout the day and evening, updating on where the buses were terminating and on traffic problems.

But if you stand back from the key coordinating role that Sas and Marty played in this then perhaps more impressive is the contribution of the citizens of south Birmingham. #B31Snowwatch is an exemplar of networked communications innovation and its contributors should lauded for the ways in which they kept south Birmingham moving and communicating in an emergency (well, as much of an ‘emergency’ as a bit of snow is).

All I’m suggesting is that it would be nice if professional communicators gave examples like this more recognition.

The storify below covers tweets (not inc. retweets) from 11 Jan to 19 Jan 2013.

In looking for something else I discovered there’s a list on the City Council website of Birmingham’s top employers for Digital and Creative. The list (2011 data) is in a PDF or Word doc along with other sectors so I’ve extracted the relevant section and put it in a spreadsheet so I could embed it here.

Here’s a list of all of Birmingham’s cinema screens (as of December 2012 January 2013).

Update Jan 2013: The Showcase Cinema in Erdington shut in January 2013. That now means Birmingham has 78 screens and 17298 seats. That’s one cinema seat for every 59 people.

Here’s why this list exists:
I love watching films on BIG screens. Whenever I go to a multiplex I hate finding out that the film I’m watching is actually in its smallest screen. I kind of feel cheated. So I wanted a single place where I could find out the size of a screen.

Obviously size does not necessarily equal a quality cinema going experience but for me it’s 90% of it. Also, the number of seats in the auditorium doesn’t mean that the screen size is the biggest (not now that Cineworld’s LieMAX and Odeon’s ISense screens fill the whole of the back wall of their screens). Including screen size in auditorium information would be useful but most cinemas omit it.

Screen 1 in Sutton Coldfield’s cinema has the most number of seats – 592.

Omissions:
Annoyingly I cant find info online about seat numbers for the Giant Screen at Millenium Point (now added) or the Showcase in Erdington (now closed as of 31/1/2013). Contrary to what I first thought, the Reel Cinema in Quinton sits across the border in Dudley.

(Link to Google doc version of this with additional info)

Just before Christmas the Harte family took their first ever trip to New York. Here’s  a post on what we managed to squeeze in. Bear in mind we went as a family on a reasonable budget so you won’t find tales of cool bars or expensive restaurants here. We had fun though.

Travel:
We flew with Aer Lingus from Birmingham to JFK via Dublin rather than go direct from a UK airport to JFK or choose the Birmingham to Newark route. We got the price down to circa £470 each (other options all seemed to be £600 min) – best I could for the dates involved (18 – 23 December). A bag went astray on the way back but was back with us within a couple of days.

Accommodation:
We stayed on the 16th floor, room-only, at the Affinia Manhattan, corner of 8th Avenue and 31st Street, next to Penn station. It was handy for Times Square, the Empire State Building and close to the top end of the Highline. We had a studio suite, compact but big enough for two double beds and a small kitchen. It was a nice hotel, quiet, friendly staff. Pricey at circa £200 a night but worth it we felt.

What we did (paid for stuff):
Empire State Building (Adults $25, Kids $19) – We went to the 86th floor of the Empire State. You can pay more and carry on to the 102nd but it was high enough for us. Great views and no queuing at 10am.

MoMA ($25, Kids free) – Our kids will only stomach one major 2+ hours museum vist per holiday. We made a good choice in the Museum of Modern Art given UK primary school educators seem very keen on 20th Century Art so my 10 year-old daughter was already familiar with some works. Three cinema-related things impressed me. Firstly, the MoMA cinema had a Pasolini season on. Imagine living in a city that would show Pasolini on a big screen and have people show up for it. Awesome. Secondly, there was a Quay Brothers exhibition. I love those crazy Quays. Thirdly, there was a screening of Christian Marclay’s The Clock on a large screen in a room with sofas. Myself and the boy (aged 6) parked ourselves at the front for 10 minutes or so. We were both hooked as the film (24 hours of film excerpts of people looking at their watches and suchlike) is put together as if it is itself a richly plotted movie. Also, when familiar moments appear on screen, in this case an excerpt from When Harry Met Sally, the crowd laugh and applaud. I would love this to come to Birmingham. I would happily watch the whole darn thing in one sitting.

Theatre – we saw Spiderman – Turn off the Dark. Camp and knowing in places, I enjoyed this, as did the kids. I suspect had we been kid-free we might have tried for tickets to Pacino in Glengarry Glen Ross (though it has  had poor reviews).

What we did (free stuff):
Staten Island Ferry – the best free boat ride ever. Views of Manhattan, Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty.

Brooklyn Bridge – We caught the metro to Brooklyn, walked back through Brooklyn Heights and then back over the Bridge into the Financial District.

Ground Zero – you need a visitor’s pass which you have to get in advance. We didn’t realise this, however, we lucked out and picked one up at the entrance. The sites of the two towers are now black, marble fountains surrounded by newly planted oak trees. It’s impressively done.

Central Park – we walked the bottom half of it. Past the ice-rink and up to Belvedere Castle. All lovely. Lovelier in autumn or summer I guess.

The Highline – Thanks to a late prompt I remembered about The Highline. A former elevated freight rail line now converted to an urban trail/park. It’s a joyful hour stroll – a real highlight of the trip. We have Highline potential in Birmingham y’know.

Shopping – well it’s free if you don’t buy anything. Certainly Tiffany’s is worth a look (nice building, high ceilings).

Times Square – madly busy, too busy really though enjoyably glitzy.

Eating
We had a nice ‘so-big-we-took-some-home’ meal in a place called Carmine’s on the Upper West Side and a lovely breakfast in Andrew’s Coffee Shop on 7th Avenue near to our hotel. As I say, we didn’t go big on eating out. However, we did enjoy the abundance of Delis in New York. The one closest to our Hotel served everything from Pizza to Sushi. In the UK a ‘Deli’ is an excuse to sell fancy cheese and meats at high prices. In New York it was simply a place where you could get any kind of food, at reasonable prices, at any time of day or night.

Getting Around
We mostly walked or caught the Metro ($2.25 per trip to go anywhere. if your child can squeeze under the barriers they go free). The cab to and from the airport (fixed fare of $52 + $6 tolls) was fast and scary with much beeping of horn.

Overall, it was a fantastic trip. I think next time would see more exploring of the other Boroughs but for a starter, we did okay I think.

Some pics what I took: