The Pequod

Why the UCU strike against casualisation is also a fight for students: A story of personal experience

2019-12-01T14:55:00.000+00:00

Students at 60 universities have now lost five days of teaching due to strike action, with a further three days to come next week. Whether I've been standing on the physical picket line, listening at our teach outs, or digitally canvassing on twitter, the amount of support and solidarity students have given back has been empowering.

Yet it would also be understandable why students, perhaps even the silent majority of them, may question the impact the action is having on them. Students are being told that staff need secure pensions, a pay rise to reflect inflation, less extreme workloads, greater equality for female and BAME colleagues, and fewer casual contracts to improve the efficacy of the teaching that they deliver. Yet if a student has lost out on several hours of contact time, the immediate impact on any individual learner - a definitive event - feels harsh when weighed against the speculation that these enhancements for lecturers might support prospective students in the future. In the transactional economy that is university education these days, some students will feel that our claims are stretched to breaking point across two poles: the projected benefits to us, and the immediate deficits to them.

Will Dr Jones's lecture on mammalian evolution in the ice age really be ten percent better next year if Dr Jones knows that she will have a good pension in thirty years time? Will fixed-term teaching fellow Dr Williams give feedback on essays about Jane Austen's heroines that will be three times more useful if his contract lasts for three years rather than one?

Of course, the polarising us-and-them division is invalid given the structural market inequities within HE from which we all suffer. Yet at the level of the individual student, things can feel instinctively muddier. Alongside the higher-level analyses, it's important to represent the individual teacher's point of view and their actual work with students. My recent experiences at the Open University give a particular, tangible example of how improved conditions for staff will improve teaching, not just speculatively but in the here and now.

I find myself in a peculiar position in this dispute. Because while I've been fully supportive of the action in relation to my role at Durham University, at the Open University the zombie horror of endless casualisation is something that has recently been put to the stake. Weirdly, at the very moment when morale nationally is at an all-time low, mine personally is riding high as far as the OU is concerned. And it has immediately improved my support of students.

To see how and why, let's turn back the clock a couple of years.

By early 2018 I was in a bad place mentally, linked to the deconstruction of the institution as a whole. Then Vice-Chancellor, Peter Horrocks, was threatening to, in essence, turn the OU into a giant MOOC, doing away with the personal tutor-student relationship that we know is essential to student success; this came on the back of a disastrous implementation of a new tuition policy which made face-to-face support harder to access for many. And running longer term in the background to all this was the fact that, despite me knowing from student feedback, teaching observations, marking statistics, and peer monitoring that I'm good at what I do, I have had to apply to the OU 17 times in the decade I've been there, as contracts on individual modules came to an end or as I was made redundant on one and had to apply for another to compensate. After the background hum of casualisation, the noise of the Horrocks revolution meant I had never felt more precarious in ten years working in HE.

As a consequence, my motivation slumped, and students suffered. I stopped making extra (unpaid) phone calls to check up on particularly struggling students. Instead of posting weekly or even daily to my tutor group forums, far beyond what was workloaded, I only did the light touch moderation expected. Instead of busting a gut to return marking, I worked up to my 10-working-day contractual turnaround. Rather than responding to student emails more or less every day, I checked email two or three times a week, and uninstalled my OU account from my phone. I was working to contract, and although I hope I still gave a decent experience and support to students - and most won't have known it could have been different - I certainly didn't do the extra which I, like most of my colleagues, do.

This is what the threat of casualisation, and the erosion of working conditions more generally, does. Teachers are not robots. We are passionate about what we do - but because that passion is already exploited with us putting in many hours of unpaid labour, it's easy to become utterly demotivated once it goes entirely unrecognised by institutional strategies that treat you as a disposable problem. It was not inapt that Peter Horrocks was ultimately ousted for claiming that 'academics don't teach'.

Fast-forward to the present. Thanks to the endeavours of an active union, and a now-responsive management, change is coming. Associate Lecturers will be employed on a more conventional, permanent basis. The leadership of interim VC Professor Mary Kellet was exemplary, while her replacement Professor Tim Blackman looks set to be a similarly positive appointment. And along with the enhanced prospect, so tooI'm back to my old self. All those things listed above, which I stopped doing when demotivated, I've started doing once again.

But as well as having an immediate benefit to students, giving teachers long-term confidence also entails long-term payback in terms of teaching enhancement.

In any one hour in the classroom, my teaching is probably no better than many a brand-new PhD teaching assistant could do. What I do have on my side is pedagogic experience, which I can contribute if I'm employed for the long term. Here are some of the scholarship projects I'm currently involved in across both Durham and the OU:

Investigating how we might help students to feel more integrated into a subject learning community
Sitting on an Athena Swan panel and contributing to the actions that should significantly improve areas like the inclusivity of events, and the gender diversity of the undergraduate intake from A-Level
Pioneering digital storytelling to help students to reflect upon their learning
Experimenting with ways to employ playful learning in online forums, and delivering staff development workshops on the subject
Contributing data to explore how students with BAME and disability profiles engage with synchronous online teaching

Each of these projects will take more than one year to come to fruition. In the cycle of scholarship, you might well test a new technique in the classroom one year and gather some preliminary feedback to see whether it has potential; refine and redeliver the next year with a more robust survey methodology; disseminate within the institution; and eventually publish the findings externally. These are not quick or easy wins.

In each of these projects I am collaborating with one or more colleagues (who I won't name in this particular post - but you know who you are). These aren't people I just plucked out of a university email directory. They are trusted friends with whom I've built up relationships over a number of years, so that we have the mutual confidence to be frank with one another, to experiment, to fail, and then to fail better.

If you're employed on casual contracts, without knowing what will come after that twelve month period, you simply cannot iterate and enhance like this. As any Silicon Valley CEO will know, the most valuable asset an innovative organisation can utilise is not money, but time to think: throw that away, as universities do when they employ people short-term, and you lose potential.

Students might only notice what is not happening right now, amid the strike, namely hours in the classroom. My experience at the OU shows why there should be immediate returns to students and a better experience if we have teachers who aren't utterly demotivated and demoralised by working conditions, in spite of their ingrained desire to do their best for those they teach. But it's important to reflect on what also will not happen next year, or in five years, or ten years, if endemic casualisation, workloads, and other challenges to staff motivation continue to rot the foundations of what we do, and what we love.

Dwarves, Zombies, and Play Doh Caterpillars: Some Thoughts on Playful Learning

2019-07-19T10:31:00.002+00:00

It's a week since I returned from the fun-filled but pedagogically insightful Playful Learning Conference 2019. It's a conference like no other. I'm not sure where else you'd find delegates assembled in running gear at 8.00 in the morning ready to track down the well-dispersed postboxes of Leicester or trying to unlock an escape room while being assaulted by balloons.

Explorations with sparrows, face masks on the tables, and an almighty mound of Lego. Excited to be at #PlayLearn19. Watch this space as we level up learning. pic.twitter.com/kjRTNMQ4Ah
— Alistair Brown (@alibrown18) July 10, 2019

We grown-ups tend to treat the word 'play' as something for kids, and antithetical to such maturities as 'work' or 'learning'. And certainly I found myself suffering a mild existential breakdown: work should not be this fun! But I did learn a lot. For example, I discovered my true character:

Role-playing academic career profiles through dungeons and dragons. I am an angsty bardic dwarf sage with a charisma problem. Apparently. pic.twitter.com/4i52h1LHcX
— Alistair Brown (@alibrown18) July 11, 2019

I realised through Adam Boal that it's very hard to find ways to get double-glazing salesmen to share their expertise with computer scientists while visiting an aquarium. And if you're organising a biological zombie apocalypse in a major city, you might want to warn the relevant authorities first.

I learned that I cannot make Play Doh ducklings, but can make a good caterpillar (even if I can't spell the word).

Meet Terence, the completely unofficial #Playlearn19 conference playdoh catterpiller. pic.twitter.com/fBw3pL8yfQ
— Alistair Brown (@alibrown18) July 11, 2019

These three activities probably seem flippant to the outside observer, but all three speak to the enablements of play. In the first, I was helped to reflect on career pathways and professional attributes; in the second to take some extreme public engagement scenarios and use them to conceptualise how we connect experts with the public in the mainstream; in the third to think with the hands as well as the mind.

In all of them, gaming with other people, having a laugh, or fiddling creatively while sat round a table can stimulate conversation and breakdown the intimidating barriers of networking. Conferences matter not just for the content but for the serendipitous encounters they allow for; play is a way to create community.

I've come away with lots of great ideas for gaming and play in education, and won't go into other specifics. Other stuff happened too, but...fishing trip

via GIPHY

More generally, one wider theme I'm reflecting on is the importance of failure in play, but also the need to position 'failure' carefully. Several times I heard delegates celebrate that failure has to be embraced. Play removes us from real-world consequences, and allows us to fail with fun. My colleage Malcolm Murray came up with probably the gold-winning tweet of the conference:

When I 1st started thinking about play and learning it was about the stuff, the “toys”. #PlayLearn19 has taught me that’s wrong. It is about changing culture and creating places where failure is an everyday & necessary part of learning. Gestalt moment. pic.twitter.com/M6Nekm67JL
— Malcolm Murray (@malcolmmurray) July 11, 2019

He's right, but we need to nuance where that failure takes place. In the moment of playing a game, for example, having a student or staff participant fail or encounter a difficulty can certainly be productive: an opportunity for reflection on why something didn't work, discussion, and meaningful development.

However, if we simply announce that to design a playful learning activity you have to be prepared to fail as a teacher, this is not a message that will translate well to staff. In an era of NSS, promotion criteria predicated on student satisfaction, and the pervasive pressure of the student-consumer who wants an experience that simply works, academics will naturally be wary of testing new methodologies in teaching, especially those that admittedly may not work. We need to build in systems of reassurance - like play testing groups - that demonstrate that.

We must distinguish between allowing failure in a learning game, while protecting against failure of a learning game where possible.

Another key reflection was the way in which play is a truly interdisciplinary opportunity - but one that also extends beyond our conventional sense of what a 'discipline' is within a university context. Although there were some delegates (like myself) from a particular academic department and subject, there seemed to be many more learning technologists, librarians, those with training and staff development responsibilities, and people who work in outreach and public engagement. There was also a memorable keynote from James Charnock, events manager at Manchester Metropolitan University and rather fetching duck:

HELLO YELLOW TEAM! @playlearnconf #playlearn19 pic.twitter.com/Zns83Z2rz6
— James Charnock (@JameseCharnock) July 8, 2019

His work supporting the Playful Learning conference in its first iterations at MMU had led him and his team to introduce the playful ethos throughout what they do and offer to other conferences, with meaningful results. Why not get your catering team to dress as pirates, for example? Conference organisers are (or should be) increasingly alert to diversity and inclusivity issues. How often does this extend to bringing the professional services teams that usually support behind the scenes into the workings of a conference itself?

So on the back of Playful Learning, what will I do next in the classroom?

Design an escape room for the widening participation summer schools I'll be teaching to sixth-formers in a few weeks. These will be based around detective fiction, an ideal topic to integrate with puzzles and decoding. Previously, I have tried to use some playful activities - for example, I strung up a washing line of narrative events in 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' (the victim is a washerwoman) and got students to rearrange them in chronological sequence. This didn't work as well as I'd envisaged, I think in part because it was so unexpected. Ironically, for first-generation students with little prior experience of university, their perception of a university as somewhere remote and elevated may have led them to anticipate something more 'intellectual', and they were discomfited when given permission to have fun. They didn't really know what to do with that permission, what the 'rules' of the higher education game at large include. I'll need to frame the escape room carefully to make this work. I'll also be reflecting carefully on how to make the game inclusive and accessible, thanks to ideas I picked up at Playful Learning.
I played Cheryl Reynolds's clever and informative Bourdieu game, where we drew on our social and cultural credit cards and saw how they might have different value in various fields.

The Bordieu Game. Clever way to explain how social capital can be spent in different fields of life. I got the 'Went to Eton' card in my habitus wallet. Straight to parliament for me! #playlearn19 pic.twitter.com/pdR1oXrGNv
— Alistair Brown (@alibrown18) July 10, 2019

In teaching theory we're always coming back to issues of symbolic value and the cultural capital that we bring to our views of the canon and what it should or could be. I have in mind a deck of 'canonical text' cards which students can have at the start of the year, and then play with repeatedly and differently as they encounter new theoretical ideas.
I desperately want to figure a way to make online forums more playful. I'm moderating a few induction and bridging forums at the OU over the summer, each with several thousand potential participants. As with any forum, generating sustained engagement is difficult. Notably, there was nothing at the conference on inculcating play in VLEs, but it would be hugely beneficial if we could do this in distance learning. Again, no specific ideas as yet - and I'll be liaising further with my OU colleagues who were at Playful Learning.

If you have any game-winning ideas on any of the above, drop me a line!

Finally, a huge thanks to the organising team. Conference organising is a tough gig at the best of times, but battling to put a conference programme through the photocopier is nothing compared to the hard task of producing vegetable-based portraits of your keynote speaker. See you next year!

Lovely end to a great day. Cocktails on draft, sun, busker soundtrack, and good company. #playlearn19 pic.twitter.com/Y0yCTccpP8
— Nicola Whitton (@nicwhitton) July 12, 2019

Lighting a New Fuse

2017-11-01T11:39:00.000+00:00

I am delighted to announce that, from 1st November, I am doing a sideways shuffle in my career to take up a new post as Postdoctoral Research Associate on the project Creative Fuse North East, with some of my conventional Eng Lit work going into suspended animation for the next year.

Creative Fuse North East is a massive project across the region's five universities, looking at the state of the creative, tech and digital sector and thinking, among other things, about ways to enhance business by engaging imaginatively with arts and humanities, heritage and culture.

Creative Fuse North East Innovation Phase Launch from Creative Fuse North East on Vimeo.

In establishing and running READ: Research English At Durham (which continues), I've come to realise that the arts and humanities in particular have traditionally underestimated the wider value of what we do. Many people - not entirely unjustifiably - lament the impact agenda at universities, but it's become clear to me that when you simply share your research, however niche it might seem, there are people out there who want to listen and who will be inspired by it. Dissemination turns into conversation, and sparks fly. In a similar vein, Creative Fuse North East is in part about getting people from seemingly different sectors to talk to one another, and seeing what happens. The ongoing CAKE events run by the project are a case in point.

I'm looking forward to working with great people in universities, business, arts and culture, and enabling some Creative Fusion.

By David Wilson Clarke, via Wikimedia Commons

But there's a North East aspect to this too, which I feel quite personally and which was one of the reasons I was drawn to this project. I've lived in the North East for more or less 17 years. When I first came, I saw a region trying desperately to pull itself up by the bootstraps in the wake of industrial decline. And the one thing the North East continued to excel in was in downplaying itself.

Unrooted from the beauty and tourism potential of its natural landscape (not as good as Yorkshire!). Uncertain as to how to move from twentieth to twenty-first century industries (damn you, Manchester!). Unsure about the value of its galleries, museums and cultural venues (not up there with London!).

But our slumbering giant is now waking. Sunderland is in the bidding for City of Culture. The Great Exhibition of the North is coming next year. Newcastle has more heritage activity than any city outside of London. And all this despite, rather than because of, public funding and media attention which remains focused on the South East.

Compared to these developments, our digital and creative economy is not at the top yet. The creative economy accounts for 4.9% of all employment in the North East, against 8.3% for the UK as a whole. But it's growing, and with five brilliant universities and all the other cultural resources around, its future is bright. I'm proud that I'm going to be working with some amazing people, and playing a small part in making that happen.

(And if you're working in any of the areas mentioned above, reach out to me @alibrown18 or the Creative Fuse team @CreativeFuseNE on twitter, or find us online.)

Four Fallacies About Digital Learning

2017-10-11T20:21:00.003+00:00

By Paul Clark. Reproduced under CC BY licence via Jisc.

The Open University is currently undergoing a massive strategic shift to place its emphasis on digital first. But while this made the headlines, the OU is not the only institution to be debating and instituting these sorts of changes. Without wishing to pin this post to particular individuals, there's something in the weather of HE. As I throw my straws into the wind, and occasionally shout into the discussion forums, meetings, and social media sphere where digital pedagogy is being debated, I seem to keep coming across the same buzzy ideas and, to my mind, misconceptions. Here are four arguments I hear used by the more extreme digital-first evangelists, that represent careless fallacies that should be examined and challenged.

1. That the print v digital debate is dead

This is one of the most puzzling comments I've heard. It's the claim of someone who believes they have nailed jelly to the wall, and turns to you in triumph while the jelly slowly slides down behind them.

Let's leave to one side the not unimportant fact that research is still emerging on the value of print in ensuring retention of information, the claim ignores the ever-moving nature of the digital.

Digital is not in itself a format but simply the means of transmission. It's the interfaces that really matter, and for as long as these are subject to technological advancements, the print v digital discussion must actively continue.

People arguing for digital over print typically have in mind the idea of e-texts presented on tablets. But right now that interface is evolving and indeed may not be fit enough to survive. Tablet sales have begun to slide as large-screen phones increase in popularity. Google and Amazon are working flat out to make verbal and aural, rather than visual, interfaces the way we obtain our information. Microsoft's Hololens is bringing augmented reality into educational settings. With each new interface and rate of uptake of different technologies, we need to revisit the advantages and disadvantages of that new mode compared to print.

And even print itself represents a moving target. Digital culture has deeply affected print culture. Open a copy of any major newspaper or magazine now, for example, and you will find sidebars, box-outs, profile pictures of journalists etc. that borrow from the design practices of the web. The textbooks of the new literature courses I teach at the OU are far more visually appealing and structurally sophisticated than the 20-year-old textbooks for their predecessor modules.

The print v digital debate will never be dead. It returns, Lazarus-like, for every generation.

2. That students (want to) study in digital spaces

Until we enter the brave new world of William Gibson's Neuromancer or of cybernetic transcendentalists like Hans Moravec and Peter Thiel, we do not inhabit digital spaces. We inhabit physical spaces through which we may access the digital. Our screens are merely one information portal among many in the physical environment.

A colleague presented a version of this fallacy, based on their observation that in an academic library most students have their laptops open and are reading journal articles on screen. For them, this was telling evidence of the shift in study habits and proof that students want to study digitally. But wait a minute. The really interesting observation here is not that students are accessing research online - which is hardly revolutionary. It's where they are still choosing to do it - in a library!

With ubiquitous WiFi, there is no practical reason why students should be working in the library rather than the coffee shop or at home. But they are choosing to do so. There is remarkably little research looking directly at how digital has affected footfall in academic libraries, but judging from the building works I see on university campuses, while the role of the library is certainly changing its tangible and architectural presence at the heart of student life has not. The physical space of the library - which plays host to the digital portals of a thousand laptop screens - remains central to embodied student communities.

Further, compelling evidence against this fallacy (or fantasy) of the disembodied student can be seen in distance learning students, who don't have ready access to university libraries. Their social media posts quickly give the lie to the idea that students study in digital spaces. Look at the Instagram feed under #OUStudents for example. Most images include a combination of a digital device, mug of coffee, and mascot, along with a pinboard, sticky notes, highlighter pens and paper.

I had a little sort out last night, and created this little study space. The children were not impressed this morning as it's in the corner of their play room. My middle daughter remarked "Oh Mummy its lovely, but does it have to go there, it would be better, anywhere else!" 📚☕️ #studyspot #studycorner #mydesk #booklover #bibliophile #bookstagram #mumlife #readmore #crossstitch #fableandblack #oustudent #oustudents #arthistory #englishliterature #artandhumanities #nevertooold

A post shared by Kate Lymer (@books_hooks_and_tea_cups) on Sep 8, 2017 at 12:25am PDT

Even allowing for the fact that social media profiles are self-fashioning - so students may include the iconography that they associate with an idealised representation of study, not necessarily things they use actively to study - these images remind that students have complex and multimodal approaches, and that the physical environment in which they study is a vital asset.

If we were clever about learning we would exploit this multichannel approach (for example, the OU used to give students paper wallplanners), one made possible by the fact that 'digital natives' continue to inhabit the physical world and aren't, a la William Gibson, completely jacked-in to cyberspace.

3. That all students under 25 are digital natives

The 'digital native' is as mythical a creature as the yeti. Debates descend to X-Files levels of conspiracy when the spooky (and intangible) stereotype is used in forums and in discussions as a way to justify big shifts to digital learning. Indeed, the simplest evidence of the term's meaninglessness comes when it is used to identify a generation of student-consumers to which universities must answer. For as soon as a vast cohort falls under the umbrella of a definition, that definition ceases to have value as a research tool or pedagogic identifier.

We need instead to treat the 'digital native' with the same awareness of its intersectional positioning as we would other potentially sweeping categories, like 'male' and 'female' or 'white' and 'black'. The 18-year-old female 'digital native' living in London and studying on her commute on the tube may belong to a different digital community to the 25-year-old male software engineer who is looking for a career change out of the world of computers in which he is otherwise immersed. The 'digital native' who primarily accesses the internet through an Android 4.0 mobile phone has different needs and approaches to the 'digital native' early adopter who can afford an Oculus Rift.

4. That students need digital skills for the economy of the future

The year is 1800. George Stephenson sits patiently in class at his night school. His teacher marches around the stage, robes swishing with ever-increasing vigour: "the steam economy, boys. That's the thing of the future!"

It would have been absurd to imagine, in 1800, all of the forthcoming effects of steam, and while we can probably do a better job with the digital, we cannot possibly equip students now with the practical skills they will need to apply in years down the line. That the economy will be driven by digital is hardly controversial. But given the slew of recent books all desperately trying to predict and unpick the implications of the digital economy - from the rise of automation to the effects of free digital services - what is this 'future' we need to skill them for?

As the Oxford report on the future of employment suggested, it's creativity and underlying soft skills - those that use digital as the means to the end rather than the end in itself - that will be the most adaptable and resistant to artificial intelligence. So, when you burrow into it, we need to give students the underlying skills that are similar to those we've always offered, especially in disciplines like my own of English.

Incidentally, note the conflict between fallacies 3 and 4. If you are arguing that universities must digitalise in order to meet the demands of the 'digital natives', you can't then claim that your university will provide students with the digital literacy skills that they seemingly already possess. What you can focus on is critical digital skills - a different beast from the STEM-orientated vision inherent in government.

5. That these fallacies actually exist

In the digital humanities and pedagogic journals and conferences I'm engaged with the actual discourse is more nuanced and critically reflective than the pastiche I've presented here. But the trouble - and the motivation for writing this off-the-cuff post - is that the debate that matters is not happening in these places.

The debate that matters occurs in the frenzy of a packed Senate, or as a hurried remark in the packed agenda of an education committee. It's here that throwaway phrases like 'of course all our students are digital natives' lodge and take hold as infective ear worms in senior management.

"Digital economy," booms the VC as he gets into his limo, thinking that this will be music to JoJo's ears. "E-books," chirrups the registrar, dreaming that the east wing of the library would make a sparklingly nice hall of residence.*

We as critical digital humanists and pedagogues need continually to be on the defense against the casual conversation that slips these phrases and presumptions in.

* Any resemblance to real persons is entirely** coincidental.
* * Almost.

Reflections on English: Shared Futures 2017

2017-07-11T18:50:00.002+00:00

In the Civic Centre in Newcastle, where English Shared Futures was based, there's an enormous model of the city. It's a utopian panorama of planning: logical lines of highways, smooth boxes of buildings, aspirational glass structures rising at the centre. At the level of the streets there is no traffic, no litter, no congested crowds. It's an adaptable analogy for this enormous, 600-delegate, 100-panel strong conference surveying the field of English literature, language and creative writing.

On the ground of our universities, life feels tough. We are mired in a traffic jam of overwork, while the radio plays a shock jock conspiracy theory about REF and TEF, the employability of arts and humanities graduates, and the returns on their tuition fees. Underlying it all is a permanent anxiety about the value of being paid to read books (if you're lucky enough to be a permanent academic), and the literal value of your next pay cheque (if you're one of the precariat).

English Shared Futures was a chance to rise above this day-to-day existence, and to take a panoramic overview of the discipline as a whole. From this perspective, the virtues of what we do are clearer; while there were certainly panels diagnosing the challenges facing early career scholars or the difficulties of convincing government of the virtues of English, the overwhelming feeling of the conference was one of celebration and confidence.

English Shared Futures made me reflect that although we may grumble when we're required to justify the value of our research and to show how the established discipline of English engages with the brave new digital and economic world around us, we've actually adapted very well to this new landscape - at least if the panels I went to (which were only a fraction of what was on offer, and admittedly skewed towards digital humanities stuff) were anything to go by. Among other things I discovered:

how Romantic poetry and travel writing is being mapped and represented in innovative ways that allow the public to look afresh at the landscape around them, and scholars to look afresh at familiar canon
how to run innovative immersive salons and role play events that can enthuse students and the public alike and bring modernist literature to life
what wacky things happen when you ask readers to tweet as characters from Dickens
how we can explode our digital archives to unpack the hidden tidbits that fire the imagination
that when English literature, language and creative writing work together, they enable a regional audience to take pride both in their literary heritage, and in the creative force of their own accents and dialects

Our discipline goes under the label of English and has its origins in a nineteenth-century vision of the virtues of literature as a civilising force. But just as a city evolves beyond the planner's capacity to contain or model it, so in 2017 'English' has developed along all sorts of unexpected routes, absorbing other fields and disciplinary territories along the way. We do some remarkable and diverse things, and we continue to contribute to the society that houses and pays for us.

Huge thanks to all the organisers, helpers, speakers and coffee-break conversationalists for helping me - and judging by twitter many others as well - to recover this more utopian perspective.

Higher Education is a Market (Except When it Isn't)

2017-07-05T18:39:00.000+00:00

This morning the Institute for Fiscal Studies launched a report looking at the impact of higher university tuition fees. The headline was that students will graduate with more than £50 000 debt, but the Director of the IFS, Paul Johnson, also tweeted out the following 'highlight':

Greatly increased subsidies to cheap degree courses which have lower economic returns, but not to e.g. engineering which is more expensive pic.twitter.com/R2THsGpElj
— Paul Johnson (@PJTheEconomist) July 5, 2017

Note that when Johnson say 'increased subsidies' he doesn't necessarily mean subsidies from government in a direct sense, since costs for many degrees are covered solely by tuition fees, which may be paid by the government in the first instance but then in an ideal world are repaid with interest.

There's something perverse going on here. This is a market think-tank concerned about the fact that one group of disciplines in higher education - which remember we're continually told is a marketplace with student-consumers shopping for degrees - has found a way to deliver one product (arts and humanities) at low cost and high profit margins, to consumers who want to buy them. And government has contrived a system whereby the profits from these cheap-to-deliver subjects can be creamed off by institutions to subsidize the more expensive and allegedly beneficial STEM ones. Cheers, arts undergrads.

Some churlish folk might complain that this canny system depends on duping the student-consumer. Since arts graduates are likely to earn less than their counterparts in vocational subjects, they get a double whammy: they spend money that pays for their science counterparts, while they receive a less high return as they enter typically less well paid jobs (to be fair to the IFS they have a valid complaint that the taxpayer will therefore end up 'subsidising' them when they write off their loans later down the line).

But hey, from an institutional point of view this too is a positive thing, since (to use a ball park example without the figures to hand; feel free to supply) if arts and humanities students cost half as much to educate but are not half as badly paid once employed, there's an argument that the return on investment - again from the university perspective - from educating that particular student is reasonable. A cheap-to-educate student at least gets some employability bonus, even if not as much as the very-expensive-to-educate student.

And of course we as a society also need doctors and engineers. If universities can educate arts and humanities undergraduates, to support the expensive medical, engineering etc. degrees, all the better.

Of course, none of these arguments really seem quite to satisfy, do they? They are attempts to justify the structurally unjustifiable. Which is precisely my point. When a free market think tank complains that the system is broken because it's working too much like a market for the institutional supermarkets it is almost as if - call me crazy - Higher Education should not be treated as a market at all in the first place.

When Publishers Own the (Dead) Author on Facebook

2017-02-14T19:34:00.001+00:00

An interesting phenomenon I've just spotted on Facebook: major authors like Charlotte Bronte or Charles Dickens have their own verified pages - that is to say, pages confirmed by Facebook with the little blue tick as being "an authentic page for this public figure."

But who "owns" these pages? Follow the links from the About section, and you'll end up at Penguin-Random House's own website, where naturally you can buy the author's books. Evidently these pages are managed not by some altruistic-minded eager reader, but by the publishing conglomerate.

The content of these pages seems generally good: there is lots of community discussion and informative link sharing. It's not just a stream of posts inviting you to buy the latest Random House edition.

Nevertheless, these publications do feature heavily - though since many of these are by imprints such as Vintage, which are ultimately owned by Random House, it would be easy to miss that the page owner is solely promoting its own works. It's also questionable that pages such as the Jane Austen are badged as being "maintained by Jane Austen's U.S. & U.K. publisher Vintage Books" when of course, Austen has many US and UK publishers, and indeed her works are available free via the likes of Gutenberg.

The way in which Facebook presents such pages as being the authentic location - "authentic" carrying the whiff of objectivity - raises ethical questions. Is it right that a publisher can colonise the long-dead author, and piggy back on his or her identity as a sales route? If readers are landing on these pages as the top results on Facebook (which most would do, as these are the unique, verified accounts) are they missing word on interesting books released by competing publishers? How are the news feeds being steered so that what looks to be a fan site actually ties in with a wider publishing (and economic) agenda?

Of course, I've no objection to publishers using Facebook to promote their activities. Neither with publishers hosting fan sites for authors. But to hide behind the persona of the author, curating his or her historical identity in the twenty-first century, when the ultimate aim is presumably to sell more texts makes me uneasy. Is anyone with me on this?

Can we imagine a Statcheck for the arts and humanities?

2017-02-08T20:03:00.000+00:00

Here's a wondering for a Wednesday. Can we imagine having software tools in the arts and humanities that do some of the dirty work of fact and data checking ahead of peer review?

The inspiration for this comes from the stir that has been created recently in the sciences - especially experimental psychology - by a tool called Statcheck. Experimental psychology often depends upon applying p-value assessments to data, to determine whether findings are statistically significant or simply the result of experimental bias or background noise. Statcheck was a program devised at Tilberg University, which automatically scanned a massive set of 250 000 published papers, recalculated the p-values within them, and checked whether the researchers had made errors in their original calculations.

The finding was that around half of all published papers have at least one calculating error within them. That's not to say that half of all published papers were fundamentally wrong, such that their findings have to be thrown out of the window entirely. Nevertheless, it does highlight significant deficiencies in the peer review and editorial process, where such errors should be picked up. And while one miscalculation in a series may not be in itself significant, a number of miscalculations might spur suspicion as to the credibility of the findings more generally. Miscalculation also offers a glimpse into the mindset of the paper's author(s) and the processes that went into its production: have calculations been produced by one author alone, or by two authors independently to cross-check? were calculations done on statistical software or by hand? and, most seriously, do miscalculations point to attempts to manipulate data to support a preconceived outcome?

In a time-pressured academic world, peer reviewers often take shortcuts. Among one of the many reasons peer review is flawed as a gate-keeping mechanism for excellence, we know that even though reviews are technically blind, reviewers are often looking for an implicit feeling about the unknown author's overall trustworthiness rather than scrutinising every single feature of the individual article in detail. Beyond exposing problems with the articles themselves, this is a revelation about peer review that may emerge from Statcheck. In the arts and humanities, peer review should ideally be based on an assessment of the clarity and reliability with which an author advances his or her claims, rather than whether we agree with the claims themselves. To make an analogy with philosophical logic, we're looking for validity, not soundness. One of the basic functions of peer review is to get a feel for the author's argument as being based on legitimate reason even if the outcome of that argument is not one with which we concur. In assessing this, where there are deficiencies in basic details these may point to deeper structural or logical flaws in the author's thought processes.

The existence of Statcheck got me thinking about whether in the arts and humanities, and English in particular, our published papers depend upon similar basic mechanisms like the p-value test and, if they do, whether the author's accuracy in using those mechanisms could be checked automatically as a prelude to peer review. Of course, even in the age of the digital humanities, arts and humanities still don't tend to deal in statistical data but rather in 'soft' rhetoric and argumentation. Still, are there any rough equivalents? And if so, could we envisage software capable of running papers through pre-publication tests (just as Statcheck now does) to get a general sense of the care authors have paid to the 'data' on which their argument depends, which might then cue peer reviewers or editors to pay closer attention to some of the deeper assumptions and the article's overall credibility?

Here are some very hypothetical, testing-the-waters assumptions about the sorts of quantifiable signals it might be useful to pick up programmatically (all of which we would like to think peer reviewers would notice anyway - but the lesson of Statcheck in experimental psychology suggests otherwise):

Quotation forms the bedrock of argumentation in the arts and humanities. As I constantly tell my students, if you have not quoted a primary or secondary text with absolute precision, how I am supposed to trust your arguments that depend upon that quotation? If someone is trying to persuade me about their reading of the sprung meter of a Gerald Manley Hopkins poem, but they have mistyped a key word in such a way that the meter is 'broken' in the quotation, this hardly looks good. A software tool that automatically checks the accuracy of quotations within papers, and highlights errors would in many ways be an inversion of plagiarism-testing software, but here we would be actively looking for a match between the quotation and the source.
Similar to the above, spelling of titles of texts and author's names.
Referencing and citation are clearly important, and checking whether references - even or especially in a first draft - have been accurately compiled may highlight flaws in the author's record keeping.
Historical dates may provide another clue as to the author's own processes for writing and his or her strictness in self-verifying. In presenting a date in a paper, we may often be making a case for literary lineage, tradition, or the links between a text and its contexts. It matters that we get dates precise. In not double-checking every date (for example, because an author thinks they know off the top of their head) author's have missed a key step in the process. Erroneous dates may be a clue to problems in arguments that depend upon historical contingency.
If we're looking at novels in particular, there are key markers of place and character, and relationality within these, which need to be rendered precisely. To describe Isabella Linton as mother of Cathy Linton in Wuthering Heights or to write Thrushcross Grange when meaning the Heights might be easy mistakes. But these may also be symptomatic of an issue with the author's close (re)reading of the text. It should in principle be possible to apply computational stylistics to verify that an author really means who or what they refer to in the context of their writing.

I'm sure that there are more possibilities to add to this list - but I'm not sure that even if (and it's a big if for a host of technical reasons) we could devise programs to automatically parse papers for accuracy in areas like this it would be ultimately beneficial. Nevertheless, if peer review is a legacy mechanism for a pre-digital age, what harm in a little futuristic speculation now and again?

And, since I'm feeling cheeky, imagine if we could do a Statcheck on a whole mass of Arts and Humanities articles. Wouldn't it be deliciously gossipy to see just how many big name scholars make basic errors?

Why the OU is right not to enter the TEF

2017-02-02T18:17:00.003+00:00

Writing in the Times Higher, the vice-chancellor of the Open University, Peter Horrocks, has explained why the OU will not be entering the TEF in this initial cycle. His arguments are absolutely justified. Having seen some of the strategy documents floating around the institution prior to this decision, it's clear that the OU would have been attempting to bash the proverbial square peg into a rigid, round hole. Or perhaps the more accurate metaphor, given the OU's vast and amorphous student cohort, would that of trying to nail jelly to the wall.

For the standard college-leaving, three-year undergraduate, success has a particular shape as far as TEF construes it: completing the degree and employment at the end of it. But the TEF simply doesn't account for the types of students the OU takes in, the journey they go on with us, and the many ways in which 'success' may occur in a typical six-year part-time degree.

Unfortunately, retention and degree completion are scores on which, on the face of it, the OU does quite badly. Only around 13% who start with us complete a degree. But while there are numerous ways in which the OU needs to improve its approaches to personalised teaching and support (there have been several recent pedagogically-destructive fiascoes that I won't go into here), this headline number does not mean that we fail our students on the whole.

Many of our part-time students don't complete their degrees for reasons that we have very little or no control over: disability and illness, family circumstances, change in financial situation. Indeed, one common reason for not completing in my experience is a change in employment status. I've encountered many students who have begun studying part-time while working part-time in relatively low-paid jobs. Midway through, their OU modules have given them the confidence, transferable skills, and indicators of motivation and ability that lead employers to reward them with full time work or promotions. They no longer have time to study and so drop out mid-degree. Perversely, the very outcome that TEF wants to drive institutions to improve, students' employment prospects, is the thing that counts against the OU in a TEF measure of teaching excellence, retention.

Then there is the anecdotal evidence which shows that success can come in shapes and forms that don't line up nicely with the columns of an excel spreadsheet.

Consider the case of the student who came to one of my modules with a background of mental illness. This was a single parent, who had been in work but then stopped on health grounds. She studied the module. Failed. Studied it again. Passed. She left the institution at that point, because studying had served as a kind of therapy, and given her the confidence that she could dedicate herself to being the best possible parent to her kids by not going back to work, and that doing so was not a hallmark of her own inability.

Then there's the student who at school was told they were useless and would never succeed. She desperately wanted to go to university even so, but felt she was not good enough. She went into menial work, but then a few years later came to us. She studied for one module at level 1, realised she was actually very good indeed, and left us to go to the brick university that she had always craved.

Or what about the student of a colleague, who was terminally ill. That student finished his module, and then shortly afterwards, and very sadly, passed away. Later, a friend of the students told my colleague that he was convinced his friend had survived as long as he had because he wanted to complete his studies.

These are just three stories that immediately spring to my mind. If I dug through my back catalogue of students I've taught and farewell emails I've received, there would be many more. My colleagues could no doubt add many others still. They are touching, important cases - those that motivate us individually as educators, and that remind that the OU is one of the most powerful social engineering tools the country possesses.

None of these things would 'count' towards the TEF; all these non-completions would count against the OU. But only the most statistically-minded, hard-nosed, market-driven, minister could possibly think these are evidence of teaching failure. Unfortunately, in the absence of price indicators of quality in the rigged non-market of Higher Education, TEF is designed to bundle an institution into a single rankable number that can be plucked from the shelves. But students and institutions are not numbers, and education is not always about employment or even getting a degree certificate. We need a TEF which allows for the uniqueness of each institution and its intake, and that counts students as humans, not beans.

How the Faiz Siddiqui case reveals the limitations of the TEF

2016-12-06T20:57:00.002+00:00

The case of Faiz Siddiqui, who is suing Oxford University over his failure to achieve a First due to perceived poor teaching, is being met with a combination of incredulity and alarm in the popular and academic media. Many see this both as evidence that the rise of the student consumer is complete, and as a foretaste of things to come when the market model of education is further entrenched by the looming Teaching Excellence Framework. One other thing I think it offers, though, almost incidentally, is a sense of the limitations of the TEF as a way of improving teaching quality across the board.

What may seem remarkable to outside observers is that Siddiqui seems, objectively, like a success story. He attained a 2.1 from one of the world's top universities. He went on to train as a solicitor. On the key teaching metrics of TEF - retention, degree classification, employability - he ticks the boxes. And yet these generic measures of teaching quality are not representative of his experience. As he argues in his claim for £1 million lost earnings, that few marks between his 2.1 and a First mattered in defeating his dream of becoming a commercial barrister.

Whether Siddiqui has a valid case against his tutors and institution, and whether his teaching genuinely was poor, is a matter for the court to decide. However, it's also a provocation to reflect on teaching in general and the extent to which we support those who occupy a middle ground between absolute success (epitomised by the First-class Oxford candidate) and failure. I certainly do not buy into Jo Johnson's narrative that HE teaching is 'lamentable' (see Liz Morrish for an exellent critique of this, and other myths). However, if I am honest with myself, when I reflect on my practice with own students from various institutions with intakes at both the top and bottom of the student cohort, I tend to expend most energy on students at the extremes, which are picked up in TEF metrics: the obvious high fliers and those who are at risk of dropping out.

That brilliant student who emails me at two in the morning with some challenging question about Foucault's view of the literary author - he or she has got my ear.

That student who is scraping by or even failing - I will work hard with him or her and call on additional support to push, cajole, nudge or drag him or her over the line (this is something we do repeatedly, and on the whole very well, at the Open University).

It's students like Siddiqui who are most at risk of falling from my radar, given my humanly limited time and enthusiasm. The students who are all to easily missed are those who are, to borrow an economic metaphor, the just about managing.

While it may not always seem like in when labouring under the weight of groaning inboxes, a large proportion of the student body do get by without substantially 'bothering' their teachers with 'problems' or without overt appeals for motivational support. Sometimes students coast on their inherent intellect. Sometimes students fudge through with all nighters. Most often they work genuinely hard and independently and pull themselves along through sheer abundance of effort. These are the students I think less about, the ones who never (for various reasons) explicitly reach out for help. Maybe this is because at the time we think of them as successful relative to the rest. It's only with hindsight, the sort that Siddiqui is bringing to bear in his court case 16 years after his graduation, that we might reflect on their failure relative to their own potential.

The just-about-managings are those who we could do even more for if we had resources to do so (something the TEF certainly won't correct). They are the mid 2.1 student who might, with a bit of pushing and proactive engagement, push to a First. Or the student who is comfortably passing with ever quite excelling, even though there may be latent talent waiting to be unlocked. Despite the best of wills, these students are all too easily missed. Speaking to colleagues, I know I'm not alone in feeling this.

On its current basis, TEF will do nothing to incentivise universities to address this middle ground where really meaningful teaching can happen. VCs at the lower end will be very focused on boosting retention, progression and pass rates. At the OU for instance, with a very atypical student intake, our degree completion statistics look pretty poor - but they don't tell the whole story, as many students finish early because after a couple of years we've given them the confidence or skills to step back into mainstream education, or to boost their career. The OU and similar providers may need to offer more named exit points before degree level, to boost TEF metrics. However, this framework will also give more opportunities for the middling students to quit before their race is run, to let them go early with some success rather than pushing them as far as their talents will take them.

For Russell Group VCs, a different pressure applies. With so many students graduating with good (2.1 or higher) degrees, employability and their differentiation in the marketplace come from the additional extra-curricular opportunities. Sports, drama, volunteering are all vital parts of the student experience. But these are also opportunities for students who are not at risk of failure to divert into other things rather than pressing to excel academically. Despite their split attention spans, or indeed because of them, they are heralded as successful multitaskers ideally equipped for the work hard, play hard city of London.

The TEF is not a solution for the students who comprise the silent majority in the sector. Nor indeed is it meant to be. Its interest is in the bottom and top: forcing some institutions out of the market altogether, while bolstering the ability of elite universities to attract high paying international students. It's an economic not pedagogic tool. If we want to see genuine pedagogic gains, we need to look and think about what we do not at the marginal successes or failures, but those who, having attained the baseline standard, could be pushed to make incremental gains. The TEF will make it harder, not easier, to concentrate our attention on these.

Videogames and Literature: Achieving Interdisciplinarity (Seminar on 15th November)

2016-11-02T14:00:00.001+00:00

If you happen to be in Durham on 15th November, I'm giving a seminar on video games and literary studies, as part of the new Digital Humanities Durham series. This is going to be quite a polemical discussion, outlining where (as I see it) literary scholars have got things wrong about video games - and how we can start to put things right. It may be of interest to anyone looking at histories of literary theory, video games, and theorising the difficulties of interdisciplinary or intermedial studies more generally. Abstract is below; more details here.

Abstract

On the face of it, the ways video games and literature tell stories may seem to be very different: video games are multimedia and interactive works, whereas literature is largely text based and plotted in a way that is predefined by an author. Nevertheless, in the 1990s literary scholars were among the first to incorporate game studies within the university context, colonising games on behalf of the discipline of English. Like all colonisations, though, the trading partnership was one-sided; early English scholars were keen to show what they could do for games, but less interested in what games could do for literary scholarship. While the digital humanities in general have seen digital practices radically reshape the methods employed by the humanities, an archaeological study of literature and game studies will uncover few attempts to consider how the study of video games might teach us to think differently about traditional literature itself. This talk will illustrate how literary scholars can modify their practices and methodologies, treating interdisciplinarity and intermediality as a two-way exchange of knowledge and ideas between video games and literature. In particular, it will show how game theory can be applied back to literature, and will demonstrate how the development of game adaptations of literary texts could provide a means of literary critique.

Evidence that Facebook can read the contents of your private emails

2016-09-01T08:40:00.001+00:00

Users of Facebook will be well aware that Facebook somehow 'knows' the contents of your web browsing history and serves up adverts accordingly. If you've ever had that peculiar experience of researching an exotic summer holiday to the Caribbean (I dream) and then discovered your Facebook timeline full of promotions about pristine beaches and exotic hotels you'll know what I'm talking about. To be fair this isn't necessarily Facebook snooping on your searches directly, but remarketing companies passing your data onto Facebook. Still, it's unsettling.

But what if Facebook could read the contents of your private emails and serve content that responds to those? That would be downright intrusive, right?

Yesterday I received an email - to my Gmail account, which I opened in Outlook 2016 - from a friend who has just returned from a cycling holiday in the Netherlands. He reported on various "amazing child carrying bicycle options in Netherlands" such as "a giant wooden box on the front of a bike where you just pile up the kids / shopping / dog." Imagine my surprise when later that evening I logged onto my Android Facebook app and saw the following in my timeline as a recommended video:

Uncanny, huh? I can assure you that the number of times I have searched for Dutch bicycle baskets and cycling behaviour is pretty minimal. Zero in fact. There's nothing related in my browsing history. And as I don't ever post to Facebook, just read it passively, I haven't added any photos or other content that might relate to this. Neither have I watched videos like this before. The only 'content' on my devices that could inspire Facebook to serve up this as a video I may like is that single, private email.

While Facebook requests extensive and invasive permissions when installing the Android app, none of these should allow it to read the contents of private emails. We know Google reads the contents of emails for its own advertising purposes. But Facebook and Google are two separate entities, and there's no way Facebook should be able to access emails stored on the latter's servers.

If it can have access, that is deeply concerning. In this case, the content is very innocuous, but it's easy to imagine other examples that would be less so. For instance, imagine an email from a daughter to her mother announcing her pregnancy, which she wants to keep private for now, only to find her Facebook feed populated with adverts for pink fluffy bunnies and Pampers.

So does Facebook 'know' about the contents of private email? If so how? Any thoughts welcome.

Can you crop an image under a Creative Commons Non Derivative licence?

2016-04-19T16:12:00.001+00:00

When I first started in web development a decade ago, with slow dial-up connections prevalent, the web was a text-heavy place. Today, browsing the web is less like reading a book, and more like to wandering through a gallery. Text floats and wraps elegantly around pictures to tell stories in a magazine format. Images fluidly adapt and scale to whatever device a viewer is reading on. Web editors will rarely plonk an image they have found straight into their site, but instead stretch, shape and tweak it to reflect their design framework.

(NB Yes I know this site looks dreadful at the moment, as I haven't had time to redesign for the last couple of years.)

But as publishers tweak the colour balance, adjust the file format and above all crop images to scale beautifully, how many publishers stop to consider the ND – or “No Derivatives” – element of a Creative Commons licence, under which many images used by responsible publishers are licenced?

In this post I want to lay out the issues in relation to a question that seems to pop up in several places (see here, here and here), without ever having been satisfactorily answered: can you crop an image under a non-derivative Creative Commons licence?

Before proceeding further, two caveats apply.

Firstly, I am not an expert in this area, and as is evident below I don't think there is actually a clear answer to be had. Nevertheless, I hope laying out some of the issues will help contribute to the debate. If anyone with more expertise wants to wade in below the line or via twitter, please do.

Secondly, this is a problem only in an abstract sense. On the ground, publishers almost invariably will be manipulating images in order to fit the aspect ratios required for their sites. Additionally, as I explore at the end of this post, site content syndicated to social media platforms is automatically modified beyond the control of the publisher. As so often in the field of copyright – witness the historical illegality of digitising one's CD collection – legislative or licencing issues are out of sync with the way things are being used in practice.

Nevertheless, when working over at READ towers, I am as fastidious as I can be about not breaching copyright or licences, so for what it’s worth here’s the problem as I see it.

Derivation and adaptation in the Creative Commons licences

Here’s the human-readable version of the ND component in a Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0 licence:

No Derivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.

This comes with the caveat that:

Merely changing the format never creates a derivative.

So it's fine to migrate an image to a different format (for instance, to save a large TIFF as a smaller JPEG). However, on face value of the above, even a minor crop is a transformation of sorts and presumably cannot be permitted. Nevertheless, this is a bit confusing, because the Attribution part of this same licence specifies that:

In 4.0, you must indicate if you modified the material and retain an indication of previous modifications. In 3.0 and earlier license versions, the indication of changes is only required if you create a derivative.

So we must indicate changes if we create a derivative, but apparently we're not allowed to create derivatives in the first place anyway. However, when we look at the ND element in its expanded, legal code, we seem to have a little more room to manoeuvre, to iron out this inconsistency:

Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image.

As ever the language is quite slippery. While the idea of adaptation seems qualitative, involving substantial and creative manipulation, as soon as the term “altered” is thrown into the mix our options seem to be narrowed, since an alteration is a more quantifiable measure. Hence the Creative Commons FAQ falls back on national laws:

What is an adaptation?

An adaptation is a work based on one or more pre-existing works. What constitutes an adaptation depends on applicable law, however translating a work from one language to another or creating a film version of a novel are generally considered adaptations.

In order for an adaptation to be protected by copyright, most national laws require the creator of the adaptation to add original expression to the pre-existing work. However, there is no international standard for originality, and the definition differs depending on the jurisdiction. Civil law jurisdictions (such as Germany and France) tend to require that the work contain an imprint of the adapter's personality. Common law jurisdictions (such as the U.S. or Canada), on the other hand, tend to have a lower threshold for originality, requiring only a minimal level of creativity and “independent conception.” Some countries approach originality completely differently. For example, Brazil's copyright code protects all works of the mind that do not fall within the list of works that are expressly defined in the statue as “unprotected works.” Consult your jurisdiction's copyright law for more information.

We don’t have the space to go into the different conceptions of adaptation in different jurisdictions, and where the benchmark for adding “original expression” is placed. However, since the U.S. has a low threshold for originality, let's use Title 17 Section 101 of the Copyright Act as one example. This defines a derivative work thus:

A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.

A crop certainly constitutes an “abridgment” or “condensation” in the literal sense. Nevertheless, these may not "as a whole" represent "an original work of authorship." So far, then, we seem to have got no definitive answer as to whether a crop constitutes an alteration, and whether an alteration of this kind breaks the no derivative clause.

The problem seems, though, to be mainly one of extent. If we take US copyright as our baseline, what degree of manipulation or modification may "as a whole, represent an original work of authorship"?

When does a crop constitute original authorship?

Let’s take a look at this image, Raphael's rather lovely An Allegory ("Vision of a Knight"). This is made available by the National Gallery under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. Interestingly, the National Gallery states that its terms prohibit "derivatives or edits of images"; the word "edits" would seem to be a somewhat stricter term than that of "adaptation" implied by Creative Commons:

An Allegory ('Vision of a Knight') about 1504, Raphael. (C) National Portrait Gallery. Reproduced under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.

Now let’s crop the image to get rid of that tree at the top and to "zoom in" on the figures:

It's still recognisable as the original; it's an "abridgement" under the Creative Commons definition, but hardly constitutes "original authorship" under the US one. But what if we crop to to form a banner at 16:9 ratio, the scale used by Facebook or many Wordpress headers, for instance:

Now our Vision of a Knight becomes Vision of Not Very Much at All. We can also turn this image into Castle Landscape:

This seems more like a new work in its own right. There’s a long tradition in art history of categorising (and canonising) works on the basis of its contents. As I write this some of my students are working on Felebien’s hierarchy of genres, and would know that a portrait stands (or stood) in higher regard than a landscape or nature painting. Our crop constitutes an adaptation that re-represents the original in a way different to that intended by the original creator.

This is an extreme case, admittedly, and with a canonical work like this many viewers would pick up on the fact that the original lies behind the scenes. However, it’s not hard to think of how less well-known works might be mistreated through cropping.

Consider the case of Flickr. Many amateur photographers who licence their work do so under a SA-NC-ND licence. This brief discussion on the Flickr community is adamant that cropping constitutes a derivative. It’s not hard to appreciate why they might be defensive.

The size of the Flickr archive is so vast that the chance of someone searching for Creative Commons images stumbling upon any individual photo is small. So if that photo then gets picked up by a major media organisation, is cropped for size, and then “shared alike,” it is the cropped version which would become circulated on social media and appear more prominently under Google Images. The derivative work would become the canonical one by virtue of the power of the republisher.

While we might like to think that a gentle crop would not be viewed as a problem by most authors licencing their work under Creative Commons, and indeed many would no doubt be proud to see their work republished elsewhere in any form, we cannot get around the fact that some in the Flickr community would and do see this as a breach of the licence. They may be unlikely to take us to court and test the extent of adaptation under local laws, which is the arbiter according to the Creative Commons FAQ, but for publishers like READ we ignore these concerns at our peril: we are hoping to engage with the public, not alienate them.

Syndication and Responsive Images

Let’s now throw another problem into the mix. When publishing on the web, most publishers will syndicate their work elsewhere via social media. Wordpress’s publicise feature, for instance, automatically republishes a snippet of a post to the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Linked In etc. In the process, the images attached to a post may be “transformed,” sometimes quite significantly.

On Facebook, for instance, the image will be cropped as per my first modification above, to 16:9. The original image can still be found by following the link back to the blog, but the original is not there on Facebook's servers.

Here it is on Twitter:

Again cropped, although unlike in Facebook it is still possible to view the original directly by clicking on the link, so the original itself has not been altered, only masked in some way (perhaps the analogy here is a viewer in a gallery walking around looking at images through an envelope sized slot).

Although not easily implemented at present, we can also imagine a future where blogs are syndicated to Instagram, run through automated filters, so the above scenarios could become even more radical. And we are on the cusp of virtual and augmented reality desktops, where the presentation of "our" content falls decreasingly under our control.

A further thing to consider is the use of responsive images in efficient web design. In simple terms, this means that your website serves up the type of image appropriate to the device it is being viewed on. So to a visitor using a widescreen retina display on a broadband-connected Mac, your site might serve up a beautiful high-resolution landscape image. To a visitor browsing on a mobile with a 3G connection, your site might serve up a portrait image cropped to the salient elements.

This might be done by providing two separate images, and coding so that the rendering agent decides which image is most appropriate to load. In this case, a human designer will presumably have looked at and edited the images, and been able to take into consideration derivative rights. However, an automated approach can be provided by adaptive image programming which could have different and unexpected implications for the representation of the original image.

Conclusion

I think it’s highly unlikely that an image author or rights owner would challenge these cases since they are within the spirit, if not necessarily the letter, of the licence. Nevertheless, it is important for the integrity of Creative Commons that these nuances continue to be debated. Coming back to Molly Kleinman’s much referenced page, it is notable that someone has asked exactly the question about cropping, yet nobody has responded.

Hopefully this offers some way of thinking through the issues, even if I have not the expertise to arrive at a firm conclusion. If you have any thoughts, please share below or via twitter.

Can Arts and Humanities Graduates Defeat the Rise of the Robots?

2015-12-14T14:31:00.000+00:00

If you glance at the statistics for graduate employment, the Arts and Humanities may appear to be in trouble. Arts and Humanities graduates are more likely to be unemployed or in part-time work than their STEM counterparts; an average salary for an English graduate is about £10 000 less than for a Chemical Engineering graduate.

However, statistics such as average earnings only tell part of the story. Whole life qualities such as job satisfaction, work-life balance, or (especially pertinent in the Arts and Humanities, in which two thirds of students are female) the ability to have flexible careers also matter - although you will rarely see these counted in the higher education marketplace where the only values of concern are those that can be tabulated in a spreadsheet.

Looming on the horizon, though, is another issue which even the most hard-nosed economist should take note of. This is the extent to which different degree qualifications may provide job security against the onrushing tide of automatisation.

In their recent book The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Mcaffee foresee how new technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics promise to improve our lives and social infrastructure, but also threaten to remove whole swathes of jobs from the economy. The most obvious example (as predicted by The Simpsons) is that of autonomous vehicles, which may make taxi drivers, truckers and delivery drivers redundant. As has been true since the Luddites smashed the Jacquard loom, the categories of work that are most threatened by automation will initially be those that entail manual labour. However, while historically those professions have subsequently been replaced by alternative work (think of the person who moves from assembling cars to repairing the robot that assembles the cars), in the twenty-first century there may be fewer substitute categories of work on the horizon. As Derek Thompson has pointed out in his brilliantly depressing Atlantic piece on A World Without Work:

Nine out of 10 workers today are in occupations that existed 100 years ago, and just 5 percent of the jobs generated between 1993 and 2013 came from “high tech” sectors like computing, software, and telecommunications. Our newest industries tend to be the most labor-efficient: they just don’t require many people.

It is these niche high-tech sectors that, for the first time, may be most threatened by the advent of algorithmic learning, computer problem solving, and the digital economy. Consider two revealing examples: the growth of AI website builders such as The Grid, and out-sourced programming pools.

This is where the recent NESTA report that the UK is home to a fifth of creative workers in Europe becomes especially interesting. As The Guardian mentioned in a comment piece on the report, the creative economy may be one sector that is protected against automation, given that creativity is something machines are not (yet) particularly good at. A machine may be able to build a car, but is not able to design it in a way that will marry aesthetics to engineering in a pleasing and efficient way. Robots can perform in plays, but can't write them. The digital age may have allowed us to visit museums virtually, but that has only boosted the demand for visits in person to thoughtfully curated exhibitions.

Of course, the knots linking graduates to careers are very tangled, and it's not possible to suggest that a more creative and less vocational degree necessarily offers better long term security against the trends of the future. Equally, it's evident that there are whole swathes of professions requiring science, engineering, medical backgrounds that will not only survive but thrive in the new economy.

Nevertheless, given that Arts and Humanities are under increasing pressure to prove their worth, and are continually undermined at a political level (witness, for instance, the recent extension of student loans to Equivalent Level Qualification students in STEM subjects alone), we in these disciplines ought surely to scope out the field and to consider the implications of the rise of automation.

Might the soft and transferable skills that we teach be precisely those that are safest from unplanned obsolescence?

As it stands, it's pretty hard to see how we might set about examining this question further. The key dataset - HESA's Destinations of Leavers in Higher Education - is not particularly instructive. Industry fields are lumped together in broad headings such as 'Manufacturing' or 'Construction', but these encapsulate a range of skills, from manual industry (which may be threatened) to creative skills such as design or architecture (which may be safe). Equally 'Education', a destination for a significant proportion of Arts and Humanities graduates, covers primary through to higher, but while Higher Education teaching may be eroded with the advent of MOOCs, it's hard to see that primary teachers could be eliminated by the digital community any time soon (robots make pretty poor Kindergarten Cops!). To untangle these treads, we need finer data that thinks more carefully about what individual jobs entail, and where the skills to do them might come from: are they degree level skills or derived from elsewhere?

Until we have such data in our hands, faced with the rise of the robots, I'd probably still take an Uzi 9mm above an intimate knowledge of sixteenth-century French prosody.

From A-Level to University English: Some Thoughts on Transition

2015-10-26T14:21:00.000+00:00

I recently had the opportunity to present a session at a Sutton Trust teachers' conference at Durham University, aimed at sharing strategies which might help students make the leap to university studies, especially those from from state schools that have lower than average rates of progression to Higher Education. My talk was particularly geared around encouraging independent study in students doing English Literature.

When planning the session I was very conscious that I could not simply talk through what HE teaching is like, and expect A-Level teachers to replicate this experience in the classroom. The A-Level curriculum, the targets and pressures that teachers are under, the diversity of the student cohorts they are dealing with, and the resources of an individual school or college make it impossible for teachers to follow what we academics might imagine to be ideal practices that would serve us with better students. Instead, I was keen simply to think through some of the pinch points and thresholds that students have to overcome as they enter university, and to reflect on these. Here is a very general summary.

Key Skills: Reading and Writing

I began the session by asking teachers what skill they thought their students required to be successful at HE English. As expected, they confirmed earlier research comparing A-Level and HE-Level teachers' assumptions: the most important requisite skills are critical perception and affinity with literature, essay writing, and reading. Both A-Level and HE-Level teachers are evidently on the same wavelength. The problem lies with the degree to which the A-Level curriculum (including the new format beginning in 2015) and teaching methods allow students to cultivate those skills which we widely recognise as essential.

Essay writing is a particular challenge because at A-Level the emphasis is on exams rather than coursework; students have little experience in writing longer essays expected at university level, although the new A-Level does include an independent critical study component. Whether essays are assessed or not, though, students are still expected to do their own research about a text as part of general teaching, and to come to class having read a text or investigated key issues for themselves using the internet. Depending on the examining body, some curricula also place emphasis on information skills such as tracking and referencing research. If students face difficulties in essay writing, it may be less to do with the research side of things, and more to do with expressing their ideas in accordance with academic conventions and rhetorical structures. It's notable, for instance, that weaker university essays often present introductory paragraphs that would be appropriately cursory for an exam response, but that lack the depth and engagement with the question necessary for a 2000 word term assignment.

Those students who do an additional Extended Project Qualification gain a great deal of valuable experience not only in research but also in writing-up research in essay form. In teaching widening participation summer schools, I certainly have noticed that those students doing an EPQ appear more confident and comfortable when we set them project or writing work, or do research tasks in the library.

In terms of reading, I was pleased to hear the teachers qualify their statements by suggesting students need to have a love of reading 'literature' rather than just reading generally. Without getting mired in arguments about literary versus genre fiction, and the appropriateness of the canon, this was a shorthand way of acknowledging that it's no good if students simply enjoy reading Harry Potter or The Hunger Games. At university they are going to be confronted with texts that are hard to get through, and that are intellectually stimulating but not necessarily entertaining. Students must have the perseverance to enjoy reading in general.

We might well question the extent to which the A-Level curriculum permits this type of engagement. In a marks-orientated culture, and with broad student cohorts in the non-selective sector, teachers quite naturally tend to choose texts that they think that the majority of students will enjoy and actually bother to read. Given the choice between The Mill on the Floss and The Great Gatsby, it's not surprising that the latter seems to be most prevalent among the A-Level students I meet.

Lectures

I have always assumed that small-group work must be the most potentially exclusionary environment for students, because here differences between their peers' educational, familial and cultural backgrounds might be most apparent. By contrast the lecture hall - a space filled with anonymous faces and silent voices - might be expected to be a non-discriminatory environment. However, while preparing for the conference, and following discussions with the teachers, I had to question this assumption.

Lectures may in fact be the most intimidating environment for students, and one where prior educational experiences and differences are starkly exposed. Teachers below HE are expected to work in an active way, encouraging group work rather than talking at students from the board (the 20:80 rule). While this may be a positive teaching practice in the classroom, this does mean that students lack experience in listening actively for an extended period. Furthermore, in the classroom, because those moments when the teacher does talk are perceived to be especially important, students are used to taking detailed notes at these points. Consequently, when students are exposed to hour long lectures they similarly and dutifully scribble as much as possible without adopting the more detached and critical approach required, synthesising the information and looking for points in the argument which they might want to challenge. Undoubtedly, a lecture requires some high level cognitive skills that some of us (or at least myself) perhaps take for granted.

Yet is the problem less with the student and more with the form of teaching? Currently there's a lively debate as to whether lectures are actually of much value in the first place, especially in an era when students could just as easily watch a recording of a lecture on YouTube. These issues have recently come to the fore in a couple of prominent articles in the New York Times.

For Molly Worthen the lecture is valuable precisely because it is a space which demands attentive and sustained critical listening, of the sort that technology and social media habituates us against.

For Annie Murphy Paul, lectures may be exclusionary, and active learning in small groups is the best way not only to achieve learning outcomes but to raise attainment across all social groups.

There is an interesting piece of new research (cited by Paul) that suggests students from under-represented backgrounds benefit proportionately more from active teaching and structured courses, such as those where a class is set a pre-lecture quiz, given a lecture, and then given a post-lecture assessment. The traditional lecture system, where students are simply expected to have prepared any necessary groundwork (such as reading the text), assimilate the key points, and go away to investigate these further requires the student to have deeply embedded norms of learning and independence that are not cultivated in schools, which handhold students throughout.

It would be wrong to expect A-Level teachers to devise ways to prepare students for lectures, when it may be HE itself that needs to do some fundamental rethinking. Nevertheless, at elite institutions lectures seem unlikely to go away any time soon. Students who have been exposed at school to extra-curricular activities, such as external speakers who do deliver a more passive experience, will no doubt gain a valuable insight into what to expect that moment they step into the lecture theatre. If teachers can help to inculcate listening skills in students, by delivering lessons passively rather than actively from time to time, students might learn to open their ears more, and their mouths less.

Small Group Teaching

In tutorial and seminar groups, formerly confident students may struggle to contribute when faced with a class of roughly equal ability to them. Students clam up when placed on the spot and when expected to engage in dialogue with others who seem 'so much cleverer' than themselves. We felt this might be a particular problem for students from non-selective state school backgrounds who, if they are aiming for a top university, will naturally find themselves towards the top of a broad ability class. When they come to university, they are no longer the voice the teacher automatically looks to, and when confronted with others at their same level for the first time and when taught by those who do not really know them individually this can be very daunting.

A report from the English Subject Centre captures a phenomenon any HE English lecturer will recognise, and advises:

If the first-year curriculum is considered to be preparatory, then it should carry an element of preparing students for this active approach, particularly if one wishes to avoid the often reported issue of ‘the same voices contributing in each class.

Mitigating this issue requires skill on the part of the small-group; the onus is on tutors to create a supportive environment for teaching and learning. Especially in a discipline like English, we know how valuable it is if students can use classes to challenge each others' and a teacher's interpretations about a text on the fly, and to advance their own ideas orally as a stimulus for further research in a written form of an essay.

At A-Level, though, it was heartening to hear just how much thought and energy teachers put into trying to encourage everyone to contribute, mitigating the 'same voices' effect. In our discipline, teachers can try to exploit the fact that there are not necessarily 'right' answers and to encourage even their best students to recognise that, although some people may be able to express things more articulately than others, the core ideas being presented by everyone may be valid and interesting. When the boot is suddenly on the other foot at university, and the good student suddenly feels weaker, they should be reminded that the difference is not one of 'cleverness'. This is merely their perception and not the reality of where others are at. In our subject, opinions count most, and everyone can assert theirs.

Working Capital

This was a theme that unexpectedly emerged from our reflections. Teachers pointed out how many of their students are forced to work and study at A-Level, thanks to the abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance. While from an academic point of view this may be problematic, it equips students with all sorts of skills in time management and motivation that students from better-off backgrounds, who do not need to work, may not possess. It also ensures students are exposed to a wider spectrum of society than those used to being just in the school and college environment.

If students from less well-off backgrounds feel put off when they meet students from more privileged backgrounds at university, perhaps we need to empower the former by reminding them of just what benefits they have gained by being forced to work to survive. This is something I see all the time at the Open University: the student who manages to study, work full time, and deal with family life possesses incredible powers of time-management and motivation that would be an asset to any employer. I'm always keen to stress that even if students get less good results because they have to fit study around work, their outcomes overall may well be stronger.

The Elephant in the Room

My session aimed to help A-Level English teachers think about how they might help their students to make the transition to HE. However, there is an enormous elephant in the room here, one which is lumbering inexorably towards us so that it cannot be ignored: we can expend lots of energy in helping students make the transition to university English - but this is wasted if none of these students want to study English in the first place.

Here is scary table number one, UCAS figures showing the number of applications to study English. Notice how this number has declined by about 5000 in 5 years since 2009, even as the total number of students entering HE has increased by 500 000.

This is bad news for English, though not as bad as the collapse facing some disciplines such as modern languages. Here is concerning figure number two, taken from a study in the US, showing that those who study English tend to be from higher and wealthier socio-economic groups:

Why should poorer students not want to study English, which is after all perceived as a 'traditional' discipline (not like newfangled media studies and the ilk) inculcating deep and transferable skills in language and critical thinking? Witness (but don't blab about it) chart number three, employment destinations of English graduates:

That's right, folks. Spend £27 000 to do an English degree, and you too could end up working in Pizza Express.

Leaving aside my facetiousness, and even allowing for the fact that my narrative above makes some broad sweeps over the underlying causes and effects, it's not good news if we are keen to widen participation in the subject. The previous chart is for those graduates in employment; what it does not show is that 20 percent of recent graduates are not in employment but taking further study, training or research. Doing an English degree is great preparation for numerous careers, with its broadly transferable skills - but it's not necessarily adequate preparation for one particular vocation. If students need to retrain, then it's not surprising that those who take up the discipline at HE may tend to be those who have the parental and financial resources to fall back on when they need to pursue further study.

Unless universities and academics can address the perceived irrelevance and skills gap of the non-STEM subjects, such as English, then attempts to widen participation in these fields, noble as they may be, are destined simply to chase an ever receding target.

Does the Martian have to be set on Mars? Setting as a resource for plotting

2015-10-15T13:23:00.002+00:00

This post builds on ideas that I developed in my recent article on communication technology and narrative. One of the underlying theories behind this piece was that the location where a story is set is not the mere backdrop to events, but quite fundamentally determines the events that can occur or the way they are plotted. Here, I apply these concepts to the recent film and book, The Martian.

Asking a question like 'Does The Martian have to be set on Mars?' seems very daft. There would be a lot of disgruntled cinemagoers were it to turn out that The Martian is, in fact, a film about a man stranded in a multi-storey car park in Walsall. Of course The Martian has to be located on Mars: the clue is in the title.

As it always has done throughout its mythological history, Mars holds an appeal as a place that seems at once very near and very distant. When H.G. Wells opens The War of the Worlds by imagining Martians peering at us through telescopes just as man peers at bacteria through a microscope, Mars seems uncomfortably close to home. Of course, in an astronomical sense it is anything but close, and the sense of tantalising distance is one reason why Mars provides such a focal point for the scientific and literary imagination. Like our closest neighbour, the moon, it is one place that anyone on earth can see, but that (most likely) nobody living on the planet will visit. The same sensibility pervades The Martian; in terms of an audience's cognitive experience, Mars matters.

Nevertheless, many reviews (here; here; here) have unwittingly downplayed the importance of the place itself to the plot. Notably, and entirely understandably, many have made comparison between The Martian and that ur-story of lone survival, Robinson Crusoe. It's not hard to see why The Martian might be cast as Crusoe-in-Space. While Crusoe is shipwrecked, Mark Watney's crewmates have to evacuate in a spaceship; both Crusoe and Watney are left isolated and can use only those tools that they can salvage or craft; both individuals survive on the basis of their wits and intellect in a powerful (capitalistic) vision of the self-made man; both men perceive themselves as first colonists of an uncharted and unclaimed territory; midway through Defoe's novel Crusoe takes on Man Friday for company and aid, while Watney eventually establishes contact and companionship with NASA.

Both the desert island and Mars - and one could add to this list equivalently isolated places as well, such as the Arctic wastes, the jungle, or a boat in the ocean - offer similar opportunities for storytelling and for tracking the basic attributes of the survivor story: the search for shelter, food and water, communication with the outside world, and ultimate rescue. Mars may be significant in terms of the place it holds in our imaginations, but similar events - and the audience's primary anxieties about isolation that result from them - could be evoked by equivalent places on earth. On this structural interpretation, place is mainly a backdrop where plot events occur; it is events, not places, that most motivate a narrative, and readers or viewers.

This, however, is too simplistic. Far from being backdrops, places are what Mike Baynham has termed 'semiotic resources.' Different settings have within them different resources, geographical configurations, social features etc. and they make these available for the purposes of plotting. Depending on their placement, characters have different objects and technologies to hand, and these influence their decisions and actions that constitute a plot. Extending from this, the way in which that plot is conveyed to us - its discourse with the reader or audience - is also affected by its spatial context.

Because of the emphasis it places on literal resources, and because of the way the story about a distant astronaut is conveyed to those on earth (both the earth-based characters in the story, and the real audience of the story) The Martian encompasses the semiotic theory of place in a clear way. There are perhaps two main categories of resource that are unique to Mars as a place: geography, and communicative delay.

Geography

This places-as-resources model can be applied in a very literal sense to The Martian. The soil and atmosphere of the planet provide Watney with a combination of resources or threats to those resources that could not be found in equivalently isolated places elsewhere.

The wider narrative arc of The Martian involves the problem of food. Watney has immediate supplies, but not enough to last the four years it will take for a rescue mission to arrive. Watney's growing of food (potatoes) to survive is pretty similar to Crusoe's successes with wheat. And of course in a novel and film that pitches for scientific credibility, it is made possible by the fact that, unlike other planets, Mars really does have soil. However, while Crusoe is an experimental agriculturalist, Watney is a botantist only in name; his main capacity is as an electrical engineer: paramount to Watney's survival is his ability to use and reconfigure solar power. Harnessing the sun's energy allows Watney to preserve limited physical resources such as oxygen and water by recycling them through electricity, and it is these in turn which allow him to grow food, eat and above all to breathe.

It's hard to imagine a similar place on earth where this fundamental relationship could be represented, with electricity being abundant as the source of power and allowing a person to meet his needs of water, food and oxygen but not (as I shall come to shortly) communication with the wider world. Unlike Crusoe, who is also a gatherer of food and water already in the environment, Watney is a maker of these things from scratch, crafting life from electricity like a spacesuited Frankenstein. In no earthly surface environment would this be quite the case. Even the most dystopian setting (such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road) would offer some form of food and/or water, and electricity would play less or no role in making these things that can be already scavenged.

Perhaps the contemporary setting most like that inhabited by Watney might be a nuclear submarine, where such resources would also be produced from scratch through abundant electrical power, in a similar life-supporting bubble. Yet even then the fact that Watney uses solar rather than nuclear power - afforded amply by the Martian day-night cycle - is significant. While a nuclear submarine would offer a hermetic support vessel, solar power harnessed at the planet's surface allows Watney to move outside rather than always to be contained. The plot of The Martian entails Watney figuring a way to pack and transport his life support systems from the habitation module onto a rover so he can make his way to the escape craft. In a present-day setting no other power source would be so mobile across a surface. (Of course, one could change both the setting and period - period being an aspect of setting itself - and imagine a futuristic science fiction universe where a small transportable power source is available. However, for the purposes of argument I'm keeping the temporal variable the same, and just thinking through different spatial possibilities.)

The fact that this takes place in a non-earth environment also lends this a metaphorical quality. In a powerful scene in the movie, the planet offers Watney the gift of light, and correspondingly life, as he makes his journey. Light or the sun has a divine status.

Conversely, the permanent threat is air (or the lack of it), and Watney's need to generate his own to survive. A Martian wind is what causes the crew to evacuate and injures Watney. Air explodes from the habitation module when it is breached. Air escapes from Watney's spacesuit, is always on the brink of running out, and needs continually to be replenished by harnessing the power of the sun to recycle carbon dioxide.

The Martian could be seen as a battle between two elemental forces, the air and the sun. At which point, we're returned to where this post began: place is more than just about plot, and setting evokes holistic meanings. But whether looked at from the perspective of setting-and-plot or setting-as-metaphor, it is only on another planet than our own that air (or its lack) would become so paramount. And the quest to maintain air, and the problem solving as a character figures out how to maintain it on a journey, is unique to a narrative set in space and empowered by the sun.

At which point, one could suggest that any number of science fiction films, set on any number of other worlds (real or imaginary), or on a spacecraft, might pose a similar problem. Last year's Gravity treats air with a similar reverence, for instance. However, there is a second feature of choosing Mars as the locale that constitutes the plot in a way unlike that of other zones of the solar system, near or far.

Communicative Delay

There is a notable turn in the plot of The Martian once Watney establishes two-way contact with NASA, at first painfully slowly via the Pioneer rover and then via a rudimentary email system. Just as no man (Watney included) is an island, so no place is ever defined alone, but by its relations with other places removed from it. In most stories, characters move from one place to another, or communicate remotely with different places, and the speed and efficiency of the network influences the way plot unfolds.

To give one example, my article touched on the functional importance of post to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. In this novel, post goes missing or takes several days to arrive and be replied to from different houses, which allows Austen to create a considerable sense of drama or plot twists, without these appearing to be contrived. They occur as a natural consequence of the delay inherent to post as a communicative system between distributed places.

A similar type of delay occurs in contact between Mars and Earth. Especially when just using the Pioneer rover's camera to type out arduously in hexadecimal, there's a real sense of frustration that communication is slow - and a corresponding degree of tension as Watney is still forced to take decisions on his own. However, unlike the post, and unlike pretty much any communicative system one could imagine in an Earthbound marooned story, the delay on Mars is specific and relatively small: 12 minutes. Significantly, as when Apollo 8 orbited the dark side the moon, so when Watney finally blasts off from Mars the hundreds of scientists on earth are left in radio silence, unable to prevent or influence a course of events that will have, by the time they hear about it 12 minutes later, already have happened. Despite the emphasis placed on teamwork in the second half of the film, at this climax Watney is very much still alone.

Of course, the audience - unlike NASA - do track what Watney and the astronauts on the orbiting rescue craft are doing in the moment of its happening. Without having timed it, I'd guess that these events take place more or less in a realtime of 12 minutes. The audience thus receives a cathartic effect both from the actual rescue of Watney that we witness live as it were, and the way our emotions are correlatively projected on screen by the cheering crowds who learn of it at the very end.

This dramatic irony is a direct product of the distance between Earth and Mars - that is to say, the specific setting of the latter. On our next closest neighbour, the Moon, there would be virtually no delay. On Jupiter, the fifty minute gap would prevent the synchronicity of narrative time and film time that we have in The Martian. Venus is a similar distance from Earth as Mars, but on a semi-molten world the whole premise of the film would be impossible in the first place. In terms of plotting tension, Mars inhabits the Goldilocks zone.

Conclusion

As an astute reader will have observed from that last paragraph, and elsewhere in this discussion, an argument about setting and narrative depends quite heavily upon the construction of counterfactuals: it has to be here because if it were there it would be different. Reductio ad absurdum. At the opposite end it also implies a restrictive view of the powers of the author: it has to be here because storytellers can't possibly find workarounds when setting elsewhere. Reductio onerum auctor.

Both of these are valid points. It's always possible to find alternative examples where a different setting could produce very similar incidents in the plot, via some imaginative authorial workarounds. Nevertheless, thinking through the possibilities afforded by place is valuable. When authors choose a particular setting (Mars), and a particular genre (as close to scientific realism as possible), this dictates that certain events and emphases will happen in that narrative that would not happen otherwise. The value of solar power, the lack of oxygen, a distance from earth that results in communicative delay are all features of the Martian environment. While no one of these is unique to this particular place, they combine uniquely to produce a particular situation for Watney, and a set of puzzles to "science the shit" out of. The placement of The Martian reveals these resources - physically at the disposal of the astronaut, semiotically at the disposal of the narrative - in a particularly prominent way.

Yet on this note we must return to where we began. The fascination of the story, and one might argue of science fiction or fictions-about-science in general, comes from the way the narrative invites us to assess the unknown aspect of the fictional setting (another world, a technological novum) against our own reality, to ponder about the differences and similarities, and the degree to which the human qualities with which we are familiar could apply or work in a new world setting or a different, futuristic time period. Again, one could argue in this vein that Mars does not really matter - that another world in a galaxy far far away would do just as well to invoke this speculation. Except The Martian has been released precisely at a time when, with the commercialisation of space flight and the landing of rovers such as Curiosity, the place that is the Red Planet seems imaginatively and physically closer than ever before.

Reflections on New York (1): To Brooklyn Bridge

2015-10-10T07:03:00.002+00:00

I was lucky enough to spend a week in New York recently. Here is one of a series of passing reflections on what I felt and found.

I finally came to appreciate Hart Crane's poem, "To Brooklyn Bridge." We teach this on one of my OU courses, but I find it quite challenging, a dense poem that erratically and fleetingly shifts from one sense impression to the next. It begins:

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day...

The first stanza is innocuous enough, but by the second things start to become more confused. How can our eyes be as apparitional as sails? It's not until we read on that we might figure that it's not eyes themselves that are like sails, but the 'page of figures' that they look at, cooped up in some financier's office.

I'm not going to pretend that I 'get' this poem as a whole just yet - things get even more grammatically complex as each stanza evolves in this manner. However, one thing I do now 'get' are the descriptions of the bridge itself, the addressee of this ode. Here for instance is the eighth stanza:

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,

Standing on the middle of the bridge, I suddenly appreciate that 'harp and altar' reference. The wires are indeed harp like, curving to the top of each stanchion.

The road surface, perfectly horizontal, lies flat across the bay, just like an altar. I have of course seen plenty of photos of Brooklyn Bridge before, but it's only once standing there, the lines and surfaces and structural integrity of the whole enveloping me, that the image suddenly works.

Then there's this:

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

The curve is evident enough, there in the shape of the wires. Again, I have seen this in photographs before now. However, in still images the lines of perspective are narrowed and the sweep of the whole cannot be encompassed into a screen or 6 x 4 print. It's only when physically there that the panoramic scale of Crane's lines and the relationship they convey between the river and the bridge makes more sense, and the neologism of the curveship seems more justified. It is indeed like a ship, bearing down on Manhattan, its prow that pointed arch between which the skyscrapers loom larger as one walks across.

The growing user base of academia.edu: Issues in the dissemination of research

2015-09-30T10:43:00.002+00:00

Browsing academia.edu this morning, I was drawn to a remarkable statistic: according to this blog post, academia.edu is "adding roughly 70,000 researchers to [the] community every day" - or to put it another way, 25 million per year. At first I wondered if this was a typo, but elsewhere academia.edu claims to have 25 million users and to now be adding ten percent each month, or roughly 80 000 a day. Assuming this is correct, academia.edu will add as many new users this year (a further 25 million) as it gained in the first seven years of its operation since it began in 2008 (21 million).

That caveat out of the way, let's assume for a moment that this particular academic network is set to boom in the manner anticipated. What does this mean for the type of audience who uses academia.edu? And how might this affect the way in which researchers use the network and assess its value, especially in terms of research dissemination and impact?

The first thing to point out is that at these levels of growth it seems that academia.edu is not used only by researchers (i.e. those who work as PhD students, academics at universities, or those employed in research-driven industries). While I have not been able to find figures for how many people worldwide are categorised as working in Higher Education or research industries, with there being 23 000 universities globally, and a relatively fixed number of researchers, it seems fair to assume that a significant proportion of those new users of academia.edu are not going to be based in research institutions.

Since one of my roles is in research dissemination within the arts and humanities, I'm bound to say that this is not a bad thing. While academics have focused on putting research 'out there' into public spheres, through social and traditional media, there's no reason why we should not also allow our audiences to come 'in here' and to find research within networks and spaces that we have traditionally used for internal conversations among ourselves.

Yet when it comes to thinking about impact and dissemination, this does have a number of different effects that might bear reflection. There is, I think, a fundamental tension between academia.edu's mission to "bring the world's research online, available to all, for free" and the way researchers themselves might conceive of and use the network as a way of discussing and sharing research within what they perceive to be a primarily academic community. This tension might not really have manifested itself in the early years of academia.edu - but it becomes increasingly apparent when the network broadens its reach.

Since I'm writing this post as a way of thinking through the possible issues, I'd just like to pose a number of open questions:

If academia.edu is increasingly used by a public audience to find 'us', perhaps researchers might want to consider the way in which they present themselves to that audience. For example, the way biographies are presented on academia.edu seems to be typically academic-facing, emphasising a person's specialised fields of research, key publications and awards, teaching. Portrait images are often quite formal. Many biographies, I suspect, are a straight copy-and-paste from biographies on institutional websites which are, let's face it, often pretty dull. The self-presentation on academia.edu is not necessarily 'friendly', especially when compared to the flexible and jovial way many academics present on social media. Should academics adapt their profile even on what has been a traditionally 'academic' network?
As research assessment such as the REF seems increasingly likely to be metric-driven, we need sharper tools to diagnose just who is bookmarking, citing, and sharing research. For instance, if a research paper is bookmarked by 100 non-researchers, this hints that the impact of the research is outward facing. If it is bookmarked by 10 researchers, its main value may be within the sphere of academic knowledge. At present, the analytics on academia.edu only give overall counts of the number of times a document has been viewed or downloaded. Don't we need to be able to see exactly who is looking at our work within academia.edu in order to judge its effect and report on it appropriately?
The ecosphere of closed and open access publishing is changing rapidly (plug here for the recent launch of Open Library of Humanities - yay!), but as we transition from the former to the latter, closed publishers have begun to permit academics to upload pre-publication versions of papers to academia.edu, as well as institutional repositories. Academic users of the network are trained to appreciate what a pre-publication version means, in the sense that it may not be an entirely finished copy. Public users, however, may not perceive the difference. Indeed, since papers put on academia.edu are already available to anyone via search engines, this is already a concern, although in my experience academia.edu papers rank lower than papers on the publisher's own site. If users are accessing pre-publication versions of papers, when the finished version has significant corrections in it, could this cause research to be misrepresented or misinterpreted?
One might wonder whether non-academic users of academia.edu are able to frame as 'published' research what is actually personal speculation, unpublished and not peer-reviewed. A presence on academia.edu confers academic credentials by proxy: the clue's in the name. If people think that anyone one academia.edu is an academic, when actually this is increasingly not the case, this has risks. Homeopathy, anyone?

I'm conscious that in posing these questions I may seem to be resenting the fact that the lines between academic researchers and the public have become blurry, and that the unwashed masses of the 'public' are encroaching onto 'our' spaces and territory. That's not the case. I'm certainly not advocating pulling up the drawbridge to our ivory towers, and preserving the likes of academia.edu as networks for academics alone. However, as previously academic networks become increasingly like social networks, we do need to consider what this might mean for the way we present ourselves and our research on them.

Ready Player One

2015-03-31T15:30:00.000+00:00

As I have been doing the rounds of conferences and workshops, and nattering on about video games and literature, people have repeatedly told me that I should read Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. So, since I'm now enjoying the vacation (or what passes for it), I just have.

If you know your 1980's pop-culture and have fond memories of joystick bashing in coin-op arcades, you're probably going to find it an enjoyable romp, viewed through the dayglo spectacles of retrospect. The novel's plot is a rudimentary quest narrative, focusing on a hidden prize that lurks within the game world of the Oasis, which is a kind of mashup of various online role playing games. To discover the lucrative reward, players such as our hero, Parzival, need to have an intimate knowledge of the geekish 1980's obsessions of Oasis's programmer, Jim Halliday (a thinly disguised version of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates).

As a consequence of this structure, every page hums with intertextual knowingness: when you spot that a line of dialogue is lifted from Back to the Future, or recognise the in-joke about the Dungeons of Daggoroth, of if you already knew that you could pause Pac Man by nudging him into a corner, you'll get that little buzz of pleasure that comes from being on the same level as the author. It's not surprising that the book has become a hit, appealing to an age when every cult film and video game has its own Wiki, and trivia is the currency of Buzzfeed and Reddit.

Yet in terms of literary style, the novel's constant referentiality becomes a bit wearing. None of the characters have deep, carefully delineated personalities. Instead, they are like pixellated mosaics assembled from pop cultural icons, as in:

My surroundings made me feel like I was in a low-budget sword-and-sorcery flick, like Hawk the Slayer or The Beastmaster.

Roaming the halls unnoticed, I decided that I enjoyed having a secret identity. It made me feel like Clark Kent or Peter Parker.

It's tempting at this point to adopt the schoolmasterly voice of the New York Times reviewer: Mr Cline would do well to learn that simile, if used repeatedly, does little more than draw attention to the artificial contrivance of the connection. What do we learn about the feelings or mind of our hero here, other than that (like that of his author, presumably), it's full of "stuff"?

At least these are evidently just analogies, though. With some of the descriptions, it's hard to be sure whether Cline is being ironic, or hyperbolic, as here, when Parzival suddenly deciphers the first clue:

And that was when it hit me. Like an anvil falling out of the sky, directly onto my skull.

Thinking hurts, admittedly - but rarely this much. Is this a self-mocking homage to cartoons? Or just untempered exaggeration, the novelist's equivalent of typing with caps lock on? (It's that pedantic "directly" that really narks me, as if cognitive anvils might occasionally fall from the sky but slightly miss their target.) The problem, beyond the aesthetic, is that such descriptions flatten the difference between ordinary existence, and the exuberant variety of the game world. Cline's characters exist in a constant sensory overload, whether they are being assailed by anvils in the mind in real life (IRL) or by blasters shooting at their avatar bodies (in the game).

In the best cyberfiction, the fact that there is still a separation between real and virtual is all important. It's what the virtual can tell us about the real that gives cyberfiction its political edge, and elevates it from being "just" genre fiction. William Gibson's Neuromancer, for instance, treats cyberspace as both a zone of futuristic speculation, and a reflection on the structures of capitalism in his immediate present, the real.

This metaphorical distance collapses in Ready Player One. Beyond a sparse description of "the stacks" - a kind of vertical trailer park in which Parzival lives when the novel opens - and vague references to global warming and an energy crisis, we get very little sense of what the real world is actually like, such that the Oasis seems neither a departure from the real, nor an aslant criticism of it.

Which would still be fine, actually, if the whole point of the novel was precisely to suggest how indistinguishable and conflated the two realms, the real and the virtual, have become in our ludic twenty-first century. The Matrix, for example, asserts (following Baudrillard) that everything is simulacra. While this seems bizarre, its moral about the possibility of believing in a computerised virtual reality is ironically conveyed through something that is itself a simulation (a digital film) that is completely immersive. It proves its point through its own aesthetic. If Ready Player One were to do something similar - to so seduce us into its fictional realm so that we are forced to recognise our own genuine capacity to be deceived by the virtualisation of reality - then that would be interesting. However, Cline's writing style is always a step removed, somehow commentating on itself in the process of composition so that we can never inhabit its world as fully as its characters inhabit their games. Here, for instance, is Parzival, whose best friend in the game plays as a man, but who turns out to be a woman in real life:

Aech had selected an RX-78 Gundam mech from the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime series, one of his longtime favourites. (Even though I now knew Aech was actually a female in real life, her avatar was still male, so I decided to continue to refer to him as such.)

Being so obviously an address to the reader - in a science fiction which otherwise concentrates on building another, convincing world - it breaches any conviction we might have in the novel's alternate reality. It's like one of those dull but necessary footnotes in an academic textbook, that announces that henceforth future references will be abbreviated.

In fact, a textbook rather than cyberfiction is perhaps the genre to which Ready Player One is best fitted. One emerges from it feeling one knows a lot more about obscure 1980s video games than one did before - and realising that one has probably seen Back to the Future a few more times than is healthy. Take it as a test, enjoy playing the game - but go off and read some better cyberfiction afterwards.

Teaching Notes: On the Road

2015-02-18T10:13:00.003+00:00

I spent yesterday in classes with Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It's the first time I've taught this text on its own, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easily it provokes discussions.

I think it helps that it seems to be universally liked, but that students recognise that the reasons they enjoy it (its fast pace, relentless movement, the seductive yet destructive Dean Moriarty) are also precisely the reasons the novel demands closer reading. Whilst Kerouac famously wrote the novel in three weeks, at a furious 100 words per minute (to which Truman Capote complained, "That's not writing; that's typing"), it is actually very carefully styled and a highly politicised text. We engaged with a number of passages and noted just how we need to pay attention to the language and structure in order to appreciate the subtlety of Sal's (the narrator's) criticisms of Dean Moriarty, and in turn of American culture.

In one exemplary sentence, slipped innocuously in mid-paragraph in Part 3 - blink and you'll miss it! - Sal notes that "Of course, the Hudson was gone; Dean hadn't been able to make further payments on it." That two word "of course" is significant; Sal never fully expresses his disapproval of Dean, but in momentary judgements like this we see how our narrator is developing from his first, naive and admiring view of Dean at the start of the book, to a more worldly and disillusioned awareness of his character now.

This led onto all sorts of interesting discussions about what that judgement might tell us about the American dream, and the post-war response to it. Some groups noted that despite seemingly pitching himself as a loose cannon outside of social convention, Dean in fact expresses his desire for freedom through that archetypal object of American capitalism: the car. There is an irony about escaping from society through the vehicle (literal and metaphorical) that best connotes it. As several students noted, in some ways, Dean is a victim of American capitalism not unlike Willy Loman in Death of a Salesmen, or Jay Gatsby: he is torn between a romantic, abstract, ideal, and the attempt to attain that ideal through material goods.

This led some to speculate that the best way to frame this novel might be as a satire. Others suggested that it should be read more as a work of historical realism, albeit that it seems styled in an impressionistic rather than "objective" way. When groups have different views on the same text, you know that it's working well.

At the end of our study, we looked at the central passage where Dean's philosophy of life - his quest for "IT" - is most sustainedly described. Dean and Sal reminisce ecstatically about their earliest memories, and their childish dreams of freedom when they imagined being able to run at ninety miles an hour. Their conversation builds to a climax:

We were telling these things and both sweating. We had completely forgotten the people up front who had begun to wonder what was going on in the back seat. At one point the driver said, 'For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there.' Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.

What is "it"? A passage like this is so open that people can't help but have views. Some speculated that the beat of the extract is akin to jazz music, and that we should read the paragraph, with its excessive final sentence, as being aware of the limitations of language: trying to describe "it" in words is about as impossible (and reductionist) as trying to pin down exactly how music feels. Others rightly remembered that for Kerouac the concept of "beat" was linked to his spiritual commitment to the "beatific," which comes through strongly in that final line.

For myself, whilst acknowledging these possibilities, I initially chose the passage because I thought it embodied a kind of sexual energy. This is, surely, something of a parody of a back seat teenage fumbling: rocking the boat to that final, breathless climax. This suggestion seemed, however, to fall a bit flat - one of those moments where you worry you might have over-read something that's not there. You win some and you lose some, and the joy of On the Road is its ambiguity - but am I alone in sensing the sexual here?

The Many Questions of Gustave Courbet

2015-01-05T14:45:00.000+00:00

Gustave Courbet is not an artist who was especially familiar to me, until I visited a major new exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. After this comprehensive show, that samples pioneering works from across his career, I feel I know Courbet from many angles. What most impresses, across eight carefully choreographed rooms, is the range of his performance in paint: we start with early, sometimes quite conventional, portraits; move through brooding studies of the rock walls and caverns of the Loue river, near Courbet's home town of Ornans; end with studies of sea and weather that remind of Turner. Just as Picasso had his many periods, so too Courbet seems restlessly to have worked in multiple styles, focusing on different subjects.

Towards the end of the exhibition is Courbet's most famous work, L'Origine du monde. The close-up image of a woman's breasts and sex - the portrait has no arms, legs, or head - has the capacity to provoke, even now. One can only imagine the reaction 150 years ago, when the Egyptian diplomat Kahlil Bey, who commissioned the work, drew back the green curtains that concealed it. Whilst still striking, though, in some ways L'Origine du monde is one of the less engaging pictures in the exhibition. The interest of the painting is less about the work itself, than the way its title invites the viewer to interrogate it. Are we to see this as a woman placed at the disposal of the implied male viewer, all sex organs with no face to complicate the fantasy? Or are we being told that it is woman who has real power, inviting man's lust in order to fulfil her necessary and more important purpose of originating human life itself? Woman as lover; woman as mother. With this binary, it's not surprising that L'Origine du monde was once owned by Jacques Lacan. Whilst interesting in the sexual theories it prefigures, and the nineteenth century taboo that it defiantly broke, though, I don't think the painting is a particularly exciting one aesthetically, especially not when compared to some of the other works here.

What I find more interesting, both in its possible narrative and in its more complex and dynamic vision of female sexuality, is Courbet's beautiful Les Trois Baigneuses. In the centre of this image, a young girl seems set to slide, naked, into the dark pool below, but she is hesitant, balancing precariously on a tiptoe on a mossy rock. A dark-skinned, gypsy-like girl to her right appears to be at once providing a supportive arm, and also attempting to push her down. Somehow a bit mystical, her red skirt mirrors the fiery red hair of the woman to the girl's left - both colours seems to suggest sexual experience or energy. The second woman in the foreground of the picture, one leg already half-immersed in the murky green water, places her hand on the girl's arm. Like the posture of the gypsy-like woman, the gesture is ambiguous, possibly reassuring but perhaps also forceful. She faces away from the viewer, so we have to imagine her expression. Is she, too, urging her to step in, or is she expressing sympathy for her nervousness? Her fuller (pregnant?) womanly figure makes me read this as a painting about the loss of virginity, and the simultaneous anxiety and celebration of the move from childhood to adult womanhood. I do not fully buy into the possible Freudian readings of Courbet's numerous paintings of dark pools, black caves, dense woods through which figures, sometimes deer, sometimes a lone nude bather, try to penetrate. Les Trois Baigneuses succeeds for me by making this narrative more explicit, whilst also being a beautifully balanced work - notice the mirrored red and ginger of skirt and hair, the way the arch of the trees frames the woman, the eyelines of the three women, with the gypsy looking down into the mysterious pool, the girl anxiously out of the picture, and the ginger woman gazing up at the girl but away from the viewer. The subject of three bathers is, of course, a staple of Western painting, epitomised by Cezanne's later studies. This seemed to me to be a particularly evocative take on the theme.

Whilst Les Trois Baigneuses intrigues me, however, my favourite picture is the monumental Le Coup de vent, foret de Fontainebleau. I would say that this is unusual for Courbet's landscapes, because of its bright and wide colour palette. Ordinarily, he seems to confine his landscapes to a narrow range of dusky greys and browns. Then again, given this Courbet exhibition shows everything from a woman's genitalia to Turner-esque seascapes, I'm not at all sure what constitutes the "usual" for this artist. In this context, all we can say is that Le Coup de vent uses colour in a magnificently atmospheric way. There is that great whorl of a tree on the right, almost windmilling with the ferocious wind sweeping in from the left. Everything in the foreground is blurred, the paint laid on thick with the knife. It is like looking at a photograph taken with a very shallow depth of field, with the sharper focus only in the middle and far distance. Here, right in the centre of the picture, and seemingly missed (as yet) by the storm but instead captured in a pool of sunlight, is a villa. The painting was commissioned as part of the decoration for this villa, and it could be read as a celebrating an oasis amid a wild French landscape. On the other hand, the villa itself seems lost amid the trees, and lonely given there are no other signs of life visible between it and the range of mountains distantly but clearly in the background. This could, therefore, also be a reminder, in Romantic mode, of the power of the environment and the insignificance of human life within it.

As with most of Courbet's paintings, it is the ambiguity that I admire, the request that the viewer project and imagine what we are supposed to learn. What comes across in this exhibition is the sheer range of ways in which, in his choice of form and subjects, Courbet was able to ask such questions.

Is Student Retention Always a Good Thing?

2014-11-14T09:25:00.001+00:00

One of the current buzzwords at the Open University – as at many other institutions – is that of “retention,” or its twin, “completion.” As the OU shifts from serving leisure learners, who dip into the odd module here and there, and starts to deliver courses increasingly to more conventional students moving on degree programmes from Level 1 through to (we hope) graduation, there is quite rightly an increasing focus on how many of those students progress through each year, and how many manage to attain a degree at the end of the process.

I don’t think it is giving insider information to suggest that the OU will always struggle to match the 97 percent retention rates enjoyed at some institutions. The fact that we take any students from any prior educational background, and the fact that even for the most competent students pushing through six years of part-time study is bloody hard work, means that the OU is always going to be lower on this particular, blunt measure. Nevertheless, it is of course self-evidently right – from pastoral, pedagogic and, yes, financial points of view – for an institution to attempt to retain as many students as possible.

Or is it?

I’ve been pondering this, and think it’s important that we also ask the seemingly counterfactual question: Is it always a good thing to retain students? Can and should we imagine scenarios where students dropping out might actually be better, both for them and for the institution?

As the executives of Tesco have realised, it is undoubtedly a good thing to retain one’s customers; the bottom line, profit, is hit when customers defect elsewhere. Not only do customers flock elsewhere, but this very behaviour sets up a vicious cycle: if people see others are no longer loyal to Tesco, they too think that they should start to look elsewhere. Similarly in Higher Education, student-consumers are (at least when seen through Willetts’ spectacles) equipped with an arsenal of data, so that they can make informed choices and drive up standards across the sector through the pressure of competition. One valuable piece of data is that of retention or course completion. From a student-consumer point of view, the more students who complete a course, the better in terms of teaching and pastoral support that institution must be.

The risk, though, with focusing on retention or completion rates is that it ignores the individual and the fact that his or her education may not always be defined by the successful attainment of a degree at the end of it. Not all students are the same, and neither are the institutions that serve them. Russell Group institutions will always take a student demographic that is more likely to succeed through university, because A* students have already succeeded at school, for reasons ranging from parental support to personal ability. If an elite university does not retain a student, in spite of the prior advantages they enjoy, then perhaps this does indicate something systemically wrong (note Morwenna Jones’s article on how Cambridge almost killed her). On the other hand, if the OU were to get 97 percent of its learners to degree qualifications, this would be an outstanding outcome on paper, but I think we would need to ask what has been compromised in terms of education in the process.

To get one hundred percent completion would not quite be the ideal it may appear to be. I can think of plenty of cases from personal experience where although the OU has not retained a student, neither has it failed them. Distance learners, and especially part-time distance learners, have unique issues which mean that their educational experience is not necessarily best defined and summarised by having a degree at the end of it (joyous though that award can be). I have, for example, had students whose recognition that they have not been able to complete a course has led them to realise more significant problems in their life, such as undiagnosed mental illness or the need to better balance family and work. Their OU studies proved the straw that broke their back – but at the same time, learning through failure put them on course to put things right in other aspects of their life, such as by seeking medical advice they had previously been too afraid to seek out. Sometimes, I as a teacher along with the other support networks at the institution have to be brave enough to admit that, yes, stopping study really is best for you as a person.

The risk of the retention emphasis is surely that, just as the supermarkets come up with elaborate price wheezes to keep your custom, so HE institutions may start to use financial incentives to keep students on the books, when frankly the best action for them would be to discontinue their studies. One can envisage a student who drops out at year one being enticed back by a discount on a year two of study, for example. When the tuition fee cap is lifted (as it almost certainly will be) and loan book privatised so that universities have full reign over their charging mechanisms, it’s possible to imagine something like reward point schemes, where for each year of study successive years get cheaper.

It’s also possible to imagine situations where students are continually placed on a study “pause” by well-meaning advisors or tutors, so that they always have the option to pick up study where they left off. This may not be best for them pedagogically – a student who has studied at Level 1 but then does not take up study at Level 2 for another couple of years will have lost lots of momentum and core skills which might make restarting from scratch a better option in the long run.

One can imagine how under financial pressures the curriculum might change to deliver modules that are easier to pass. If Intermediate French has a 90 percent completion rate with an average 50 percent grade, and Greek for Beginners only 25 percent completing but with 75 percent marks (not actual figures, I hasten to add!), then one can see which module might be ripe for a cut. The fact that those who do complete Greek may be astonishingly good students is neither here nor there in the rush to a measure of success that places just passing, rather than excellence, as the standard: retainment rather than attainment as the benchmark to aim for.

Just to be clear, I am not accusing the OU of doing any of the above, and have no problem in general with the desire to improve retention and help more of our students to that day when they can proudly don their robes and clutch those degree certificates. I do, however, think that it would be problematic if both the OU and HE institutions in general see retention as invariably a good thing, and conversely see a student dropping out as an institutional failure. Just as market pressures create risks such as grade inflation, or the dumbing down of degree courses, so too they may lead us inadvertently to strive to retain students whose best prospects, as people and prospective learners, may lie elsewhere.

Topology and Modern Communication Technology in the Novel

2014-09-02T15:31:00.001+00:00

I am busy writing up an article on how communication technologies, from letters to intranet messaging to mobile phones, have affected the plot possibilities of literary fiction. In particular I've been comparing how technologies influence the plots of three works of a similar genre, namely Pride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones's Diary, and The Edge of Reason (yes, it's a hard job reading two of these three, but somebody has to do it).

By way of thinking through one of my general findings, which might be of wider interest, I thought I'd share with you an outline of how communication technologies serve to problematise the ways in which we have conventionally thought about space in the novel. This is very much a case of thinking-in-the-process-of-writing, but I hope makes sense as a way of questioning some of our basic narratological theories by throwing technology into the mix.

Conventionally, narratology sees space as being intimately linked to plot, in that plots can be mapped as characters' movements through a world, and thus through time (Dannenberg). Within this model, spaces occupy a hierarchy of containers, nested one within the other (Ronen 1986). For example:

City

House

Room in house

According to this view, plot is not simply a manifestation of events progressing through time, but of events moving through space. This can be illustrated with a simplistic example. Suppose we have a character in a room in her house in one part of a city. Her room exists at the same topological level as that of the room of another character in his house in another part of the city. Both are private spaces, intimate to that character but not shared by both. For the characters to connect, they must enter the communal, higher-level space of the city that contains both rooms. They must trace a path out of one space and into another. This in turn can be cognitively mapped by the reader as a plot progressing through time, since we imagine it takes time for such movements to occur; spatial movement also thus signifies character development, since a change in their psychological state triggers their motion to new spaces which in turn incite different cognitive reactions. This temporal progress might be rapid, as in the sweeping motions of my hypothetical story, or at a fine-grain of resolution, such as the intimate movements of Mrs Dalloway around her boudoir as she prepares for a party. Either way, movement through and between spaces takes time to accomplish.

These different spaces also condition different possibilities of behaviour and action. For example, it is not possible for a character to buy herself a new dress whilst sitting alone in her bedroom wondering who she is going to go to the ball with that evening; she must instead enter the higher level space of the city, where perhaps she might meet the handsome man from the other part of town, who has gone to buy some new shoes. Whilst chatting to said handsome man in the city street she might not be fully open about her feelings, but when they head together to the ballroom after dark, different behaviours might manifest themselves.

This is of course a very simplified way of describing things, but one can see how different spaces condition and make certain actions more or less plausible. Each person's room presents a limited palette of opportunities; the shared arena of the city somewhat more. When we see characters in certain spaces, which we recognise either from our own world (in a more realist novel) or from the internal conventions of the storyworld (in a more fantasy fiction), we expect them to behave in certain ways. Thus the topological hierarchy above seems a reasonable way of thinking about how plots and characterisation function, as different levels in the hierarchy frame different types of action.

However, here's where communication technology makes things interesting. Communication technologies allow spaces to intersect, without characters having physically to move between them. In an age of post, this may not have especially radical consequences, since the time it takes for a letter to move between two points may be commensurate with the time it would take for a character to make the transition. But as technologies of communication become increasingly prevalent and ubiquitous, spatial distinctions start to break down. This in turn can be seen to influence the generic conventions available to fiction.

The rules governing my hypothetical example above might hold true up until the 1990s. Characters could not live solely in their own rooms, in different parts of a city, and yet somehow still meet coincidentally without leaving their four walls; were a novel to want to present them as somehow managing to do this, the novel would locate itself within the spectrum of science fiction or fantasy rather than realism. Ordinarily, for our woman to buy her dress, and our man to buy his shoes, they would have to enter the higher level container of the city. However, in the age of the internet one can easily see how space is transcended by technology. The spaces inhabited by either character are irrelevant, as social media might enable them to develop a relationship without ever moving from one space. By invoking this medium, a novel can achieve a similar plot structure but via a different, and this time still realistic, means. The shared space of the digital cloud takes the place of our communal container of the city - but also in turn problematises our traditional topological way of mapping plot.

To see this, here's another example, again hypothetical (though not too far removed from the scenario of a Tom Clancy novel).

Our secret agent has been dispatched from London to the South American jungle, to gather intel on some local drug lord. Ensconced in a hut deep in the rainforest, he is equipped with the latest satellite broadband package and a laptop, connected via virtual private networking to his office in MI6 headquarters in London. How does the hierarchy of spaces work here?

On the conventional model, we might represent this as:

South America	United Kingdom
jungle	London
hut	MI6 HQ

However, given his technological connectedness, what is the most significant container for our spy's hut? Is it the South American jungle? Or is it London in the United Kingdom?

That character may possess informational resources, and be able to discourse with others back home, from which everyone else in the container of the jungle is excluded. These same resources may, however, be readily accessible by another character in the United Kingdom. In this case, the hut is best seen as contained not by the jungle but the United Kingdom, since the resources available in that country (e.g. judicial, informational, personal, dialogic) are as readily available to our man in South America as they would be were he physically present in London. The spatial dimensions and location of the hut has no effect on his degree of containment - that is, the range of relevant actions he can perform.

This also has implications for the way in which space serves to map or denote time. Whilst movement through space is translated by the reader into some form of temporality in the plot, in the milieu of communication systems there need be no physical movement to equate to a significant progression or change in the action. When Mrs Dalloway finally leaves her boudoir and heads back out into the streets of London, time has passed in a momentous way. By contrast, our spy in the jungle may only need to press a key for a similar sense of plot shift to manifest. This is not, of course, to say that as soon as someone has a broadband connection a writer can no longer develop interesting plots. Any reader of popular thrillers knows quite the opposite. Rather, it is simply to point out the limitations of a traditional model that sees physical space and time in correlation, without reflecting how technologies of communication might collapse both categories.

So why does this obscure problem of literary theory actually matter? Well, for a start it shows how literary theory, and perhaps literature too, are affected by the radical shift in space-time relations, energised by technology, that David Harvey has seen as characteristic of our postmodern condition. Looking at novels, such as those I am studying in more depth in my paper, there is a peculiar effect. The world of Pride and Prejudice, though "contained" by England, seems very large; it takes time and energy to propel characters or letters through the space that separates Longbourn from Pemberley. By contrast, the world of something like Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, seems very small, even though its nexuses of action are worldwide. Bridget can readily communicate with any of her friends anywhere in London, simply by using her mobile phone; she can call home from Thailand, or receive calls from her errant mother in Africa.

The way that communications allow a novel's plot to transcend spatial limitations also resonates with real-world politics. For example, in an era of "extraordinary rendition" the laws of one country in which a target is located can be transcended in a supranational imposition of the laws of another. For the Al-Qaeda operative in Kuwait, the law which most applies to him - that is to say, the container within the rubric of which judicial principles are set - may not be Kuwait but the United States. Or, to give a more commonplace example, although I am writing this blog sat in my office in the United Kingdom, it will be published on an American server and potentially read by anyone wordwide. The laws of authorship and copyright that apply in this scenario are unclear, because they do not depend upon the container in which my writing body physically resided when producing its content.

Topology and the boundedness of the body to space is ruptured when we exist as disembodied selves in (through? among?) the no-space of cyberspace. In the same kind of way, communication technologies decompartmentalise the spaces of literary fiction; characters become digital nomads, never fully contained by one specific part of the novel's world.

Using Web Automation Tools to Collate Impact Evidence from Social Media

2014-08-13T20:22:00.002+00:00

Drawing on my experiences as editor of READ, I've published a little piece over at the LSE Impact Blog, on gathering impact evidence from social media. Here is the blurb:

With such diffuse streams of web activity and academic engagement, there is a great need for simple ways to capture and record this valuable data, whether for personal use or reporting purposes. Alistair Brown provides an overview on useful automation tools that streamline the process. Over time, depending on the scope of your search and social media activity, setting up these feedback loops can be a relatively straightforward way to collating all online discussions as a method of proving impact and relevance.

Head on over to the blog to read the full article.

Games Like Television Like Games

2014-08-08T06:18:00.001+00:00

Keith Stuart has written a perceptive article on how EA Sports' Fifa series of video games has developed increasingly like-like degrees of realism. The new 2015 iteration promises faithfully to model every Premiership ground, right down to capturing the unique noise and chants of crowds over the audio commentary, with camera angles and replays that reflect the positions of television cameras in the actual stadia. As Stuart points out:

Just as Sky exploded into football coverage in the early nineties bringing video game-like stats, sound effects and visuals, video games have met the television industry half-way. A match in Fifa 15 will begin with a stadium fly-over cam, the Premiership theme tune, the players lining up to shake hands, the commentators gabbing on about the meaning and important of it all. You can click through it all, but gamers are encouraged to feel a part of the “theatre”.

In this way, what is being emulated in the Fifa series is not simply the sport, but the narrative of the sport as disseminated via television. It is a good point, and one that we can extrapolate to other games as well, which do not render the original experience but the experience as already rendered through other media. Think, for example, of the cinematic quality of Call of Duty, which takes its cue not from war itself but from movies like Saving Private Ryan. What is aimed for here is not a pure realism, but a realism of the simulacra. Like Baudrillard's Disneyland, the mimicry of the event supersedes the original in its presentation and quality.

However, perhaps the more interesting observation to take forwards, which Stuart only glances at in the quote above, is that the traffic is two-way. Games do not just take their inspiration from television and cinema, but the latter media also draw on the theatricality of games. Thus both Sky and BT Sport's football shows increasingly invite viewer interactivity, through social media, live betting, and smartphone apps. Digital television allows the viewer to choose his or her camera angle, including following one particular player closely through a match, not unlike the experience of the simulation. Even the conservative Match of the Day has a three-dimensional replay mode, whereby commentators can spin around a virtual image of the live action, much like replays in Fifa. Whilst we still tend to conceptualise games as a sub-culture, the influence of games on our most popular sport and a mainstream media reminds that the ludic cannot be boxed off from other narrative methods.

As Matt Hayler observed in a brilliant conference paper recently, technologies change the types of aesthetic that it is possible for us to conceptualise. He cited the case of "robot" break dance (witness footballer Peter Crouch, or better still this example), a performance whose semiotics would make no sense in a culture without robots and mechanical devices; similarly, this light dance evokes early video games, the film Tron, and our ability to discriminate a continuous performance despite lights flickering on and off, to which video technologies such as fast-forward have attuned us (indeed, after his paper I mentioned the example of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, whose backward narration would not be conceptualisable before the era of the video recorder rewind). Tracing this thread, then, I think one can make the case that it is not simply that video games have sought to emulate television-style commentaries, but that the presentation of sports on television is designed increasingly to resemble a video game.

Of course, unlike the video game, we do not actually have control of a televised game. The game-style of contemporary sports commentary is designed to enhance the illusion that will sustain all football fans over the coming season: the belief that by shouting loudly at the television they can actually influence the action.