FILM DEVELOPMENT

On Monday I met Paul with Daniel to discuss the film schedule which will starts from the Folk Song Investigation. It was a very inspiring discussion which made us reflect on how each of us see our role in the investigation and, more widely, in the project. We realized that we have two different perceptions: Daniel sees himself as an historian of technology exploring new ways of doing research with historical data and heritage collections. I came from a museological perspective and I see my role as a bridge across different disciplines, vocabularies, and ways of thinking. I suggested the word ‘mediator’ which has been used in the museum sector to identify a field of practice and that, I think, can express very well the action of facilitating knowledge transfer between curators, historians and data scientists. We noticed how the word ‘mediator’ has a different meaning in science & technology studies (Daniel shared Bruno Latour’s piece about technical/technological mediation: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/54-TECHNIQUES-GB.pdf) and that our work could contribute to expand the field of ‘cultural mediation’ within the concept of the National Collection as a Social Machine. I realized that this could be, potentially, another word to add to our ‘Keywords for Congruence Engine’ (see the article in the Science Museum Journal). Another interesting point of our conversation was the reflection on the role of screen-based experience in the interaction with collection: I feel that the use of digital/machine learning techniques might lead us to a screen-based conceptualization of ‘linking collections’, and also because we are a geographically distributed project, also the majority of our interactions are mediated by screens. However, Daniel pointed out that he sees the digital connections as a ‘vessel’ that allows points of contacts with material experiences, fostering the physical access to libraries, archives and stimulate new research connections. I feel this could be a key dimension to explore in our investigation, and might help us to address the sonic, performative and participatory nature of the folk songs. As I explored in my PhD research, sound challenges museums to rethink their vocabulary and practices (the fact that Jennifer defines herself as ‘singing historian’ is another example of the need to coin new words to describe sonic research); at the same way, working with sound-based sources might challenge the way we think about ‘linking collections’ to include the sensoriality, physicality and sonicity of listening & performing. We realized that working together on the film narrative can help us to reflect on how we might communicate these elements to a wider audience: key questions for us could be Where and how do we usually encounter folk songs? How can we express the variety of experiences (searching song lyrics in a library, accessing songs in a museum gallery via headphones or QR code, participating in a folk song performance, listening to songs via YouTube while walking, sitting or driving) and the potential of connecting them through digital technologies?

FOLK SONGS INVESTIGATIONS UPDATE: FIRST MEETING WITH JENNIFER Daniel and I met Jennifer on Thursday to start discussing the proposed schedule of our work together in the next couple of months. We guided her through the preliminary annotation work on the transcripts and she already enriched our knowledge on some of the words that we identified in the first lyrics. We all agreed that Word can be an extremely versatile tool for us to use, and would allow Jennifer to add her comments on specific words that can help us to understand and develop potential categories. We also discussed the opportunity to expand our data collection, and she mentioned further material that we can add: not only song anthologies but also complementary sources such as Lancashire dialect dictionaries. We also talked about Kunika’s suggestion to keep a diary of our investigation, and we discussed the different styles each of us might have. Jennifer says that she prefers not to type as her reflection practice is mainly hand-writing notes that she can share with us, and we thought this could be an extremely stimulating way to expand the way we reflect. We decided to create a whatsapp group that would allow us to share images of song transcripts, book covers, links to video recordings and any other thoughts that we might want to share in this extemporaneous format.

DIGITAL TRAINING: ABBYYFINEREADER On Tuesday Felix guided me and Daniel through the OCR process in Abbyyfinereader. He showed us examples from the Lancashire ballads book and other documents he is working with. The interface is very user friendly and the software combines also image editing tools to increase the brightness and orientation. I recorded the session for anyone interested (here: this link expires on 1st April). We agreed that it would be very helpful for me and Daniel to have a subscription in order to speed up the transcription process in our work with Jennifer. We are are currently transcribing two folk songs anthologies, but Jennifer will help us to identify more sources which might also include complementary dialectal material. So we asked Tim and Alex if it would be possible to add two (or at least one) more subscriptions.

ORAL HISTORY INVESTIGATIONS UPDATE On Friday Alex, Daniel and I will meet Stef and Colin in Leicester to start discussing the first visualizations. There has been an issue with the file system in computing service of the University of Leicester so Stef wasn’t able to progress as expected, but we will still have the opportunity to discuss the pre-processing and planning the next steps.

I am also coordinating with Alex to arrange a visit in Bradford in April (potentially on the 17 or 24) to collect the Bradford Heritage Recording Unit audio recordings and meet with Tim Smith and the Bradford Industrial Museum Team.

RECONNECT RECOLLECT & YARN

This week I am doing some preparatory work for the two sessions on 30-31 March as part of the ReConnect ReCollect project, which aims to create Anglo-Indonesian collaboration between heritage/museum professionals. Together with Simon Popple and Fabiana Fazzi (Ca’ Foscari University), I am curating a Creative Lab which will involve 15 young Indonesian artists in the development of digital narratives inspired by museum collections. The first session will be focused on connecting collections through the example of Congruence Engine, while the second will introduce the role of place-based stories and sound walks. We will use Yarn to explore connections and izi.TRAVEL to create a collaborative geolocalized narrative of Indonesian museum collections.

Other notes

On the 21 March, I attended a very interesting Seminar within the ReConnect ReCollect project . Adrian Plau, Manuscript Collections Information Analyst at Wellcome Collection, mentioned the use of TEI for manuscript description: https://stacks.wellcomecollection.org/tei-for-manuscript-description-at-wellcome-collection-a2b8f52524e2 (Open access GitHub repo for all the TEI files here: https://github.com/wellcomecollection/wellcome-collection-tei).