Observing the 80s

Greenham Infographic

Jessica Scantlebury — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 08:20:02 +0000

The Observing the 1980s OER has been used extensively in a course taught here at Sussex called; ‘1984: Thatcher’s Britain’. Brandon Perree, one of the students on the course, was inspired by the inforgraphics created as part of the Observing the 1980s project. So much so, that he has created his own inforgraphic about the Greenham Common peace camp and responded to our questions about his work:

How did you do the infographic?

The graphic itself was a simple photoshop job but the content was a distilled version of what I had learned throughout my time studying Greenham. While I left myself a bit limited for space I felt it was perhaps most important to give so sort feeling of what Greenham ‘was’. By that I mean that while the government and the CND debate was based on statistics and cold facts Greenham was created on feeling; I didn’t want the infographic to spew statistics, it had to tell a story; the story of the women of the camp.

How did the infographic help your use evidence?

The infographic I made can be easily split into four distinct areas of evidence which I hoped would tell the story, not the statistics of Greenham. The first is obviously the timeline; the timeline helped to get some perspective of what the women of the camp were doing and also the unique ways they were doing it. It could definitely be argued that Greenham was the start of a new era of nonviolence and the actions they used were the main part of that. The second distinct area was the story, and what better way to tell a story than in a newspaper. While I had hoped to make it longer space limitations kept the story of Greenham v Reagan to only a paragraph but it is hoped that doesn’t detract too much from its impact. Third is opinion, or primary evidence; what were the people there saying. The heart of Greenham was in how well it showed a contrast, men v women, nonviolence v war, change v stability. By showing why the women of the camp used nonviolence some insight was offered into the mind-set that the women of the camp had. Finally we come to statistics, and no matter how much you want to avoid the numbers sometimes the best way to show someone just what happened is to use cold hard facts. From that we have the four different types of evidence; the overview or timeline, the story as told by history, the primary evidence or insight, and the facts. So how did the inforgraphic help my use of evidence? I think it allowed me to truly sever the idea that the only evidence that matter is the facts, because in reality without all the component parts you haven’t really told the story.

Fancy being a modern day Mass Observer?

Jessica Scantlebury — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:55:53 +0000

The Mass Observation Archive has put out a call for electronic diaries written on the 12^th May 2013. Anyone can take part! For more details visit: www.massobs.org.uk/12may

Who knows? You diary might end up part of an Observing the 2013 OER!

Picturing the 80s

David Guest — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 09:01:01 +0000

As part of the Observing the 80s project, we wanted to produce some visual materials to counterpoint the other resources. We had some great audio recordings from the British Library Oral History collections and plenty of fascinating textual documents. But we thought that a few images or posters might help to open up some of the issues and episodes of the 80s and look good on the website, too! So we came up with the idea of producing a series of infographics to display selected data on relevant topics.

The term ‘infographics’ has gained currency lately with examples appearing all over the place. There are entire websites and online galleries devoted to them. But they aren’t a new idea at all. Florence Nightingale famously used innovative graphics to explain the high death rates among British soldiers and John Snow’s visual representation of the cholera epidemic in 1850s London is a particularly good early example – a kind of cross between a chart and a map. Produced at a time when the prevailing scientific opinion held that cholera spread as an airborne “miasma”, Snow’s image told a very different story. It provided compelling evidence that a particular water pump was the source of the illness and was vital to developing understanding of both the outbreak and the disease.

I think infographics have a lot of potential uses, especially in education where they can provide an alternative way of approaching a topic. For example, our graphic on sexuality in the 80s shows a timeline of cultural reactions, illustrating changing attitudes evidenced in music, television and film and giving a thought-provoking and quite succinct perspective on a complex issue.

Graphics like these can help to highlight the resources made available by a project like Observing the 80s. So in one of the examples, there’s a fairly straightforward graph of unemployment figures rising and falling. But overlaid on this are excerpts from oral histories and Mass Observation archives. This exhibits the excellent source materials but it’s also a simple illustration of the human stories contained in the statistics and something that might be missing from a more conventional economic history.

The graphics have also been great fun to make. At the outset, we talked about colour palettes and how the eighties “looked”. We also compared graphics on album covers such as Duran Duran’s Rio. I tried to reflect some of this in the style of the images.

Stuart had already chosen a great typeface for the website and defined a bold, saturated colour palette. I expanded it slightly with some of the brighter colours prominent in 80s design – green, pink, orange – and developed an icon style to signify different sources of information. I’ve also tried to keep a consistent visual grammar so that the images work together as a set.

See all of the infographics

How digitised ‘special’ collections are boosting experiences of teaching and learning : JISC

Jill Kirby — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 18:04:53 +0000

Find out more about other OERs created in the same JISC-funded programme as Observing the 1980s. How digitised ‘special’ collections are boosting experiences of teaching and learning : JISC.

Feedback video

Jill Kirby — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 12:46:08 +0000

Find out what students and other users have said about the Observing the 1980s collection in our video.

Media coverage

Jill Kirby — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 09:44:53 +0000

See latest media coverage in The Guardian!

Giving Voices To Our Archives – Augmenting The 1980s with Scarlet+.

Rose Lock — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:42:16 +0000

Since August 2013 I have been working with Dr. Lucy Robinson and the SCARLET team at Mimas to develop an Augmented Reality application (AR app) using material from the Mass Observation Project (MOP), to be used as part of Dr. Robinson’s course on Thatcher’s Britain.

It is now very nearly finished, and has been entitled ‘Voices In Your Pocket’.

The first step toward creating our app was an extensive workshop where Laura Skilton and Matt Ramirez of Mimas and Dr. Guyda Armstrong of University of Manchester introduced potential applications of Augmented Reality (AR) in teaching and learning. This pivotal workshop inspired and supported us in our discussions of what to actually build.We were lucky to be joined by Sussex staff members including Stuart Lamour, an E-Learning Developer with experience in AR; Dr. John Davies, an Educational Developer; Dr. Lucy Robinson, Sussex history lecturer and Scarlet+’s academic lead; Jill Kirby, Project Manager for Observing the 1980s, plus a variety of Special Collections and Library staff. Their varied skills and wealth of experienced was invaluable as it really widened our ideas of what might be possible with this technology.

As Observing the 1980s itself is an Open Educational Resource (OER), we realised quite quickly that there would be little point in reproducing vast swathes of MOP material as part of the AR app that were actually available through a link in the app itself. The team was also eager to make sure that AR added something unique to Lucy’s teaching.

The idea emerged of using the application to introduce additional people who would not usually be represented in the room, and to allow them to voice their attitudes towards MOP through text and video. This seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

The three voices that are presented in the AR app are:

A member of Mass Observation staff.
Three of the Mass Observers themselves.
A student historian who has used the Mass Observation Project in their research.

The Observers are represented by their digitised writings, the others have been kind enough to be filmed talking about their experiences of and feelings about MO. These short videos are currently being edited and we are all very excited about seeing them soon.

We would like in the future to allow students to add comments to the app, but this is not currently feasible.

I had great concerns about the technical side of this project, caused in part by having been so impressed by what the original SCARLET apps could do. My worries were alleviated by a trip up to Manchester along with my opposite number in the Scarlet+ project (Marie-Therese Gramstadt from the University for the Creative Arts) for a technical workshop with Matt Ramirez, the augmented reality technical expert from Mimas who developed the original Scarlet apps.

By providing step-by-step instructions Matt gave me the both the framework and confidence to create my own AR applications. The importance of this face-to-face contact in the development of Voices In Your Pocket cannot be overstated. My understanding of the way AR works increased exponentially and I am also now far more able to explain to others how AR works and to show them how to create their own apps. As embedding the skills into our department has always been the main purpose of this project, not just building this one application.

The AR app is now just waiting for the finished videos to be edited and slotted in to place; the next step is testing and dissemination and I have already booked my first session to teach AR creation to other members Special Collections.

For further information on Augmented Reality and the Scarlet and Scarlet+ projects, please visit our blog or contact Rose Lock at University of Sussex Special Collections.

Snagging Santa

Lucy Robinson — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 18:12:14 +0000

A last word before Christmas, from Dr Lucy Robinson!

We felt that the Christmas break was a natural deadline to get the OER finished and zipped up cosily. This did mean that the last few days have been a bit of a rush. Tidying up the OER meant fixing up a few grinchy glitches picked up by copying the OER from the taught version of the course. A few images had disappeared. All of the pdfs of the set reading, within University copyright for registered Sussex students, had to be removed from the OER. Lucy accidently got a bit click happy and some bits will need to be put back in the taught version of the site before it is launched to students. The elves who volunteered to click their way through the OER found a few dead links, – a reminder of digital projects past in some cases, and a couple of misnamed excel files. Lucy renamed the OER herself to ensure no sneaky apostophes appeared in the title. At this moment the last step is to zip up the whole thing into a shiny package. We are taking bets on how big the file will be…….

We’ve all had a lovely time and its been emotional…. Happy 80s Christmas, one and all!

Poofters, Pop and Pandemics

Jill Kirby — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 10:06:17 +0000

On the 28^th November Dr Lucy Robinson was invited to speak at the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive (LAGNA) event Poofters, Pop and Pandemics at Bishopsgate Institute. The evening began with an introduction to the LAGNA archive by Robert Thompson who demonstrated how useful the newsmedia archives could be in understanding gay experience and representation in the 1980s.

The event was themed around the emergence of out and outish gay men in the pop music scene. It seemed the tabloid press was very worried that too many gay pop stars were forcing young women fans to buy records by girl bands. But The Sun did also offer the occasion ‘page 7 feller’, usually topless and in denim and looking remarkably like well-known pop stars. Lucy presented some of her work on AIDS charities in the 1980s, particularly focussing on how the growth of charitable donation and engagement fitted into Thatcher’s Britain’s ‘victorian values’.

When MOP respondents were asked about charity in Spring 1985 many of them raised anxieties about the growing levels of overheads they saw in the professionalization of charities, and how they maintained a respect for those who donated their own time to charities rather than just money. For example B1215 wrote the following:

“I don’t donate regularly to charity or appeals after so much publicity as to the percentage of donations which are spent on advertisements and administration.”

The aesthetic and format of the charity single videos released in the 1980s played this out. The videos were designed to look cheap, thrown together as an emergency response, bring together eclectic collections of musicians and celebities , and to lay bare all the workings of the music industry usually left hidden. The Dionne Warwick and Friends ‘That’s what friends are for’ showed the slicker end of the format.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbnua2kSa8

Putting the charity back into charity singles: charity singles in Britain 1984-1995. Contemporary British History, 26 (3). pp. 405-425. ISSN 1361-9462

New Frontiers – it’s longitudinal research, but not as we know it…

Jill Kirby — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 16:51:21 +0000

Dr Lucy Robinson picked up some great mentions for the project at the New Frontiers in Qualitative Longitudinal Research event at the University of Southampton last week (look out for ‘teabags’ – all about perforations in time!)

She gave a paper based on the Observing the 1980s material and some of the learning that has come out of the methodological and ethical debates we’ve had during the project and how they have reframed our understanding of the amount of variables in change over time.

Check out Twitter to see more #NFQLR.