‘The Stage’ digital archive (and ‘The Guardian’)

Here is an excellent resource for anyone working on the history of British theatre: the entire archive of that thespian stalwart The Stage is now available and searchable from the comfort of your own home for a very reasonable small fee.

Also, did you know that, while The Guardian‘s digital archive is currently a work-in-progress for the period prior to 1985, if you email them with a very specific pre-1985 query (as I did yesterday) you will get a very helpful response within a matter of hours, and they may even (as in my case) attach the requested article? This is an astonishingly good service – and is it ever possible to thank someone enough if they have saved you a trip to the hell which is Colindale? I shall be buying The Guardian again.

Festival of post-1945 footage

I’m very aware that things have been quiet round here recently, but I hope that normal service will be resumed in 2009.

Earlier in this year, however, I spent a lot of time putting together a variety of clips from YouTube (and/or the BFI and BBC) as additional teaching material for the QMUL Level 1 course ‘The Road From 1945: Britain Since the Second World War’.  My supervisor, Dan Todman of Trenchfever, hit upon the idea (excellent, I think) of a new blog consisting of primary film, televisual and musical sources to complement the other course documents and teaching materials. Although comments are not enabled on the Road from 1945 blog, we would be interested to hear any reactions through the comments which you can post here. 

As we explain on this page, the clips are categorized chronologicaly and cross-referenced thematically.  I was responsible for most of the material which might be of particular interest to Window Smashers: on The Sixties; the 1970s; the 1980s; Music; Cultural History; Political History and Devolution (or, more accurately, the non-English parts of the UK since the late 1960s). 

I’d appreciate any feedback on the the choices of clips, the passages I have written to contextualize them, and the questions I’ve posed to get the students thinking.

Privacy – and Greatest Hits

The mixed blessings of online life. Due to rather odd patterns of hits I have decided to password-protect the ‘PhD Thesis’ pages which are linked to this blog. If you would like to read them, simply leave a comment on any post and I’ll be happy to email you the password.

Everything else remains open to public searching and viewing. So here are a few links to my current ‘Greatest Hits’ posts. Smashing the Window is, apparently, a popular destination for people looking for variations on these search terms:

‘Hair, London, 1968, Nude Scene’: try here, here, and here, for starters.

‘Grunwick Dispute’ (which I’m very pleased about): click on the category in the right-hand side bar to see all my posts on Grunwick.

‘BBC, Medieval, Purple Haze’: voila. Groovy, forsooth.

And for some time, to my great amusement, I’ve been very popular with people in need of ‘Austin Powers Dialogue’. Click here, love!.

‘Testing…’

Yesterday I took part in a very interesting test of a potentially excellent resource which comes online for academic institutions soon and the public “sometime after that”. Although I was given no information in advance – in order to make it a bona fide blind test – no-one swore me to secrecy or made me sign a confidentiality clause afterwards. So I presume this is in the public domain… It is now.

I tested the new, digitized, online BL Newspapers 1800-1900 Archive (which they plan to extend into the C20th “at some stage”). I rated the concept 10/10 and told them that Colindale (in particular) investing large amounts of resources and time in this direction is an extremely positive development which I believe will be widely welcomed and applauded. I’m also impressed that the BL are seeking feedback on the site before it goes live. If they take even some of my comments (which they told me they found constructive) on board I’ll obviously be pleased. But I’d be interested to hear what others think about this and my suggestions to them.

I was quite picky about the site itself. I rated it 7/10 and suggested they make it more Joe Public-friendly by simply using more ‘Plain English’ browsing terms and links. At the moment it looks and works rather like a catalogue written by librarians – a sub-set of the BL integrated catalogue which, I admitted (with only a small degree of shame), I still find rather forbidding and tricky to navigate. I suggested they make it just a little more like the National Archive family history site, i.e., more like a public history archive/database. While there is probably a happy medium to be found between holding the hand of the uninitiated and allowing ‘serious academics’ to cut to the chase of the search, I did suggest that ‘we’ (the serious academics) wouldn’t mind clicking through some ‘How To Use This Site’ pages. Indeed, if we’re completely honest, we occasionally (frequently?) need to refer to them too.

The test itself was great fun: one pleasant hour in a studio with observers behind a two-way mirror and a webcam running on me. A chap sat with me, prompting me to vocalize reactions to what I saw on the site – like a cross between talking your way through an advanced driving test, a more pleasant TV casting, and doing a radio voiceover. It was organized by these people, who were also pleasant to deal with and are always looking for new testing guinea pigs. Nice money too – paid there and then. I recommend.

Hello and welcome (back)

Well in advance of the new academic year, voila: a whole new look within one, integrated site. All comments on the new format appreciated (particularly on any technical glitches encountered with different browsers or operating systems).

But rather than a long first post, why not have a look at the ‘About this blog’ page – my (re-)statement of intent – by clicking on the tab above, the link on the left, or in a new tab or window?

Blogging (but not blagging) a PhD

I am entering a period of severe writing purdah. Some people can gaily knock out a thousand or more words of quality writing of a morning while juggling other commitments during the rest of the day. I can’t. I’ve tried on numerous occasions and I just can’t do it. I’m like a Baptist in this respect: only “total immersion” works. I must have the peace of mind to get it all out on paper in substantial sections with some sense of argumentative through-line. It’s all there in bits, and it’s all there in my head, but – as I once said to a particularly deluded and self-indulgent theatre director – having it ‘in my head’ is of bugger all use to anyone else.

The fact that I’ve had conferences, training sessions, teaching or archive appointments in far-flung parts of London on every single day since 4th January has been the latest major writing obstacle. Rewarding and useful though these events have been, the timing could not have been worse. I look at the diary each weekend, thinking ‘surely, surely I don’t have any more coming up?’…and I still have another week looming where I’m booked for every day. It really is enough to make a grown man weep. (It has this one.)

Although I’ve used this blog in a deliberately rather stream-of-consciousness (although hopefully not incoherent) way, I have always intended to go back through it to see which posts, citations, comments and links would be of direct use in my thesis. This seemed like as good a time as any to do so.

Pro- and anti-blogging PhD writers might therefore be interested to know that I have 5,500 words of material here in an immediately cut+paste-able format. This will, of course, be heavily cut, simmered down and re-written. But if it yields even a few K of material which survives almost verbatim in my final thesis, it will be a few K achieved painlessly – almost subconsciously. Anything related to the business of producing a PhD which can be achieved painlessly can only be a good thing for anyone, I think. So this alone (although there are other benefits) makes blogging worthwhile.

Still here!

Don’t panic. This blog is most definitely not defunct. Nor am I. I’ve simply been 1) bogged-down in some dometic turmoil recently 2) juggling several embryonic things which are not quite in a ‘bloggable’ state yet 3) absolutely sweltering in the current ridiculous London heatwave. (I’m Scottish. In Scotland there is no such thing as ‘humidity’ – only ‘rain’. Or as Billy Connolly once put it, in Scotland there are only two seasons – June and Winter.) Normal service will be resumed soon.

Superstar? Jesus Christ.

Dubunking of pseudo-science and pseudo-history always appeals to me, and Respectful Influence is a blog which does both with wit.

Responding to press reports, it has provoked quite a debate by asking who would be inspired to choose such an inappropriate ‘venue’ in which to stage Jesus Christ Superstar.

Anoraknophobia II : The Browsers

Recent technological determinism from Trench Fever and Airminded has pushed me (reluctantly, I admit) towards using Mozilla Firefox instead of/as well as Internet Expl*r*r. I had been hearing for ages that Firefox prevents many security issues, keeps your whole system cleaner, and avoids creeping over-dependence on Gates and his (little) Big Brothers. But Firefox does take some time to get used to (particularly when distinguishing between working with new Tabs as opposed to new Windows) and not every website is over-happy to be viewed through it yet.

So, being one to do my research, I’ve also tried Opera, Avant and the stand-alone Mozilla (not Firefox). It’s good fun. They are all fast. They are all good. Some of them can be re-skinned to look quite amazing (and/or tacky). But my (admittedly not very extensive) research suggests that Firefox is, in fact, the best all round as it demands the smallest shift in mind-set by the hitherto IE dependent. You can also faff about with how it looks, if so inclined.

Download Firefox for free here.

None of this applies to Macs, of course. But I’m sure Airminded Brett might have some ideas for fellow devotees of (dirty?) Macs.

Anoraknophobia

Teaching grannies to suck eggs, perhaps, but here’s a cautionary tale for computer simpletons/phobics/the blissfully ignorant.

Just when I could least afford to (in every sense), I’ve been forced to learn rather a lot of computer techie stuff – and not just about esoteric screen-top niceties. Don’t wait until your hitherto completely reliable computer/laptop decides to start misbehaving as suddenly and seriously as mine did two weeks ago to realize that we are all now, whether we like it or not, utterly dependent on bl**dy computers. This is particularly true as we make greater demands on them, often without realizing how demanding these new tasks are. It’s not enough to stay virus and spy-ware free; you have to undertake a little self-tutoring in order to know at least enough to cope when the crisis comes. And it will. If it can happen to me – religious system-cleaning scanner and backer-upper that I am – then it will, it some point, happen to you.

Symptom? – complete system instability. Cause? – reaching the ‘tipping point’ where my beloved laptop (less than 2 years old!) simply hadn’t the ‘legs’ to cope with the demands of PhD-land. Solution? – I had to buy a brand new laptop. Result? – poverty tempered by bliss (for now, at least) courtesy of Toshiba.

But at least I learned a lot en route. If you are attached to an educational institution there will be numerous financial benefits offered by your internal Computer Services/IT department. And if you are registered for a PhD, remember that they should now treat you as ‘staff’. To my pleasant surprise, mine did. So do check out your own IT home page, particularly before you buy software – and particularly anything from Micros**t. Full Office will cost you c.£250 on the open market. There is a 3/4 size ‘Student and Teacher’ version available for around £100. Don’t buy either if you are an Institutionalized Person. I went through the QMUL IT Dept and got full Office Pro for just £72 from a great firm in Wales called Pugh who are licensed to sell Office to the ‘educationally attached’ in the UK. Thanks to them, and cclonline, a great e-tailer in Bradford, I’m skint, but £250 or so less skint than I would otherwise have been.

And I now have two functioning computers. The happy ending is that the old one didn’t quite die, and by stripping it back closer to its basics it is still perfectly serviceable as a back-up. So the moral of the story is: don’t wait until your computer literally explodes/implodes. Along with your work. And your sanity.