Dear Mr Whitby – Raw Data Now
It’s been a bad day for Birmingham’s creative economy. The BBC is shunting a whole load of jobs (“over 100″) in networked factual programming from here to Bristol and Cardiff. So what now?
Since the early 2000s the regional strategy for the West Midlands creative economy (as developed by Advantage West Midlands and later Screen West Midlands) has largely emphasised ‘digital’ at the expense of a broader definition of media content creation. Earlier today I thought perhaps we’d backed the wrong horse for all those years, allowing Salford to come along with cheap land and shiny buildings and lure the BBC to their MediaCityUK.
But I’m not here to dwell on that. I actually think some conditions were created that allowed new web entrepreneurs to set up and flourish as well as ensuring more established firms stayed in their city and diversified their offer. I think we did back the right horse but we may have all been thinking of different horses as we tried to collectively articulate Birmingham and the West Midlands’ offer. That is, we never really knew what ‘digital’ meant.
But, as I say, I’m not here to dwell on that. What really got me irritated today is Councillor Mike Whitby, leader of Birmingham City Council, bleating on about Birmingham getting marginalised when he could actually do something to help Birmingham become a thriving centre of digital creativity.
It’s simple, and if he hadn’t side-lined the City’s digital agenda to the completely uninterested Deputy Leader Councillor Tilsley, I think we’d be a lot further down the road than we are. Here’s a message from Tim Berners-Lee to make it clear what I’m asking for:
Bright People do terrific things with Raw Open Data. Yesterday the council launched an Open Data project called Civic Dashboard. Mudlark, a company with bright people, made something useful by cajoling the council to give up their data to make it happen. Some good people within the council helped get that data out. I’m guessing it was a tortuous process to bring it to life; so tortuous that I bet none of them are in a hurry to do it again. But beyond this project there’s nothing. The City’s Open Data page is kind of embarrassing.
So that’s where we need Mr Whitby. While he’s still in office he needs to take the digital agenda under his wing and order his senior people to get with the digital stuff. He needs to re-work the deals he’s done with his private partners such as Capita (who handle Brum’s IT) and get them to stop hugging data.
Now that the aforementioned strategy writers (AWM and SWM) have shut up shop we’re in a bit of a vacuum. But rather than sideline the digital agenda and lament the loss of those BBC production jobs we need to embrace it more than ever.
So let’s write a new strategy. Wearing my ‘Chair of Birmingham Science City’s Digital Theme Group’ hat (I know, it doesn’t actually sound like it means anything but is a group of business-owners, public secotr types and researchers who meet once a quarter to try to get projects off the ground) I’m starting Birmingham’s brand new Digital Manifesto for Growth. Here’s the first line:
- Stop pissing about and get that data freed up Mr Whitby. Exciting things will happen. Honest.
You lot can write the rest.
Links for April 13th through April 18th
Some links for you:
- #mmwd – a set on Flickr – Pics from the Making and Saving Money with Open Data event – thanks to @policyworks
- Making (and saving) money with open data: ideas generation session | Podnosh – Gavin Wray summarises the 'Making and Saving Money with Open Data'.
- Talis Platform Consulting | Making and saving money with data – reflections by Rob at Talis on the 'Making and Saving Money with Open Data' event.
- Official labour market statistics for Greater Birmingham LEP – Stats for the Brum Local Economic Partnership area
Talking pretentiously about animation
For some reason (the details of which I seem to have totally forgotten) I ended up teaching ‘critical studies’ to first year BA (Hons) Animation and BA (Hons) Animation for Games Design students at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. ‘Critical Studies’ is the theory stuff. Y’know, analysing animation films ‘n’ stuff. This post is about how I set the following aim for the students and how they achieved it:
Unofficial Module Learning Outcome:
Talk like a pretentious snob about an aspect of animation practice of your choosing.
I chose this way to express it as it occurs to me that the sooner we make a link between ‘theory’ in film, media or animation studies, and notions of what constitutes professionalism, the better. In a short space of time I wanted to let the students into a Creative Industries networking secret – people like people who talk pretentiously. In fact they sometimes hire people who talk pretentiously as they want to bring a bit of that deep knowledge into their organisation.
I took as my starting point the following video of one of the Brothers Quay talking pretentiously about their influences. The Brothers Quay are astonishingly talented auteur animators. They are also directors for hire. They make ads (here’s one for Galaxy) and I reckon the combination of the creative talent with a sprinkling of pretentious talking does them just fine. The latter might even add a few quid to their daily rate:
So the students watched the video and bought into the idea. They took on the challenge of focusing on an animation practice of their choice and by the end of the module would stand up in front of their fellow students and talk (accurately and with reference to a range of secondary sources) like a pretentious snob.
The module sprinkled in some key concepts around narrative, genre, auteurship as well as a bit of history. For the history part the students made individual contributions to a posterous blog. This resource, animationtimeline.com, became a focus for their efforts in the early part of the course. I would sometimes choose random categories for them to go research and find examples of (one category was called “the kind of cartoons Dave watched on TV as a kid”) and they would email the Posterous with a youtube link and some text and collectively the central resource was created.
But as they got deeper into an area of their choosing they realised that in order to talk the talk they would have to do things like, watch more films, read more books. The teaching/learning fell into a pattern of short intro to key concept from me, they produce a nicely illustrated poster to show understanding of the concept, they stand up and talk about it to the group. Our most fun lesson was using Tom and Jerry cartoons to help illustrate ‘Genre’ (here’s sci-fi T & J).
So after a period of seven months, at the end of module, by golly they each did a pretty damn good job of talking knowledgeably about subjects as diverse as the political conditions of communism and its influence on the work of Jiri Trnka, to the Disney animators strike and how it re-shaped the US animation industry during WW2.
Great topics, dealt with in depth and with enthusiasm. They easily achieved the actual learning outcome of ‘critically evaluate historical, contemporary and personal practice(s) within the broad context of the field‘. Overall an enjoyable time with talented students who can now take their knowledge to those kind of networking events where dropping a reference to Jan Svankmajer always go down well.
In addition the students used their own blogs to talk demonstrate their understanding of key ideas. Here’s one as an example – pretty good for a first year I reckon.
Links for January 21st through March 21st
Some links for you:
- How hyperlocal sustainability is only possible with the network; how were doing that in Lichfield and with Journal Local | Philip John – “Networks of niches underpinned by local partnerships are, in my opinion, the way forward.”
- 5 TV news conventions video journalists should scrap « Adam Westbrook :: online video & entrepreneurial journalism – I like seeing this topic covered though I disagree with some points: “Why do online video journalists still follow their television brethren so closely? Here are five conventions which TV news designed and VJs could leave behind”
- Hack de Overheid « Mudlark – “Waag Society, the City of Amsterdam and Hack de Overheid (Hack the Government) are challenging developers, hackers, entrepreneurs, corporations and students to turn massive amounts of raw data provided by the City into new Web and mobile applications that benefit the public.”
- Elements of local digital ecosystems | DavePress – “there are many different elements of the digital scene within a specific locality, so thought it only fair if I have a crack at listing them.”
- Hyper local update dec10 and jan11 – Presentation by Damian Radcliffe from Ofcom – full of great info about existing Hyperlocal media landscape.
- Twitter, community, and the problem of the reverse panopticon | Citrus Fortress – “All of this is not to say that Twitter is not an incredibly interesting and potentially useful tool (like the telephone or the pencil.) Just that it is architected in such a way as to make true community very difficult to achieve, and to promote the existence of Twitter micro-celebrities with thousands of followers that they don’t themselves follow. These celebrity nodes are where shared sensibilities might converge, but the followers aren’t themselves sharing a context; they are all observing and perhaps responding to the center (where an @aplusk or a @hodgman or a @scobleizer might sit,) but are invisible to one another.”
Links for January 17th through January 18th
Some links for you:
- When to Create Project Instructions | Project Management Tips – (via @riprap007) – worth it just for the illustration accompanying the article.
- Learning through Digital Media – "The simple yet far-reaching ambition of this collection of essays is to discover how to use digital media for learning on campus and off."
- The lightning talks at Culture Hack Day – Great round up by Chris at Meshed Media of talks at the Culture Hack Day in London – lots of links
Links for December 31st through January 10th
Some links for you:
- Obama London: Inexplicable Edits on Sarah Palin's Facebook Page – "In the wake of the terrible events in Arizona, with many commentators pointing out the obvious fact that Gabrielle Giffords had been targetted by Palin in the November election on a map that used a chilling gun site graphic, I thought it would be worth watching her page for a little while to see if her team were indeed deleting negative comments routinely."
- More than 140 Coworking spaces in Europe : Here is a list | Coworking Europe 2010 – As it says on the tin – list of coworking spaces across Europe
- Net Gen Skeptic: Digital Learners in Higher Education: Generation is Not the Issue – "The idea that generation explains how young people use digital technologies and that these "digital natives" are fundamentally different from the older "digital natives" in how they use and understand technology has been successfully debunked."
Links for December 13th through December 30th
Some links for you:
- Cascade – A diversity in TV training programme – Now defunct, but useful, blog about participants on a TV training scheme. Useful reading for media students doing placements.
- Digital Storytelling | We jam econo – Online course built around a blog: "This is the aggregated home for the online, open course Digital Storytelling that will be starting January 10th, 2011."
- Who Tweets? – Pew Research Center – "Eight percent of the American adults who use the internet are Twitter users. It is an online activity that is particularly popular with young adults, minorities, and those who live in cities." (via one of my MA Social Media students)
Links for November 29th through December 1st
Some links for you:
- Facebook for Business: The Basics « Dream it, Do it, Love it! – "Whilst the area is relatively new, and Facebook is particularly prone to change, there are some basics that you should really get your head around now to prevent time-consuming re-work and potential damage to your brand. Get it right first time and it will be much easier to maintain." (via Dubber I think)
- digitalresearchtools / FrontPage – "This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively." (via Jon Hickman)
- NESTA – Creative clusters and innovation report – "This gap in our understanding is what NESTA set out to address in Creative Clusters and Innovation, the outcome of a two-year collaboration with Birmingham and Cardiff Universities. The study adopts the concept of creative clusters as a starting point to examine the role that creative industries play in local and regional innovation systems. Its publication accompanies an online platform we have developed for users to examine creative industry concentrations at a fine level of detail in their localities."