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My musical Friday

I had such an interesting day last Friday but I haven’t had a chance to write it up until now. I kicked off by meeting Ben Mawson at The Cowheards, a pub on the common close to Southampton University. Ben introduced me to his ongoing work Portrait of a City. He gave a me a cheap Android phone, with no sim card, and a pair of headphones (on the longest cable ever – pbviously made for sharing). The phone was running NoTOURS softwhere. Continue reading →

Pulling spaces out of narrative

While I’m looking at (broadly) how narratives can be told across space, I gatecrashed an interesting seminar today looking at how spaces (thats places, not the space between the words) can be pulled out of narratives and mapped. Its all part of the Spatial Humanities project at Lancaster University. Patricia Murrieta-Flores visited Southampton (her old alma mater) today to share some of the work she has been doing as a proof of concept for the idea. Continue reading →

Music, narrative and space

I’m thinking about music. Which is slightly scary for me, as I’m not very good with music. I have no sense of rhythm, I’m not tone deaf, but I do struggle to tell the difference between notes, and though I enjoy singing, people around me don’t enjoy my singing. This might have something to do with two of my favourite musicians being Bob Dylan and Shane McGowan whose own singing voices are a matter of some division among critics. Continue reading →

Home from the range

My wife told me “You can stop studying for your PhD now, you’ve done what you wanted.” Last night I hit the end credits of Red Dead Redemption. My wife isn’t entirely right, but yes, reading about Red Dead Redemption was one of the “triggers” (forgive me) for thinking about what Cultural Heritage might lean about telling stories in three-dimensional spaces. In February I decided I had to actually play the thing, and went out to buy a cheap XBox and the game. Continue reading →

The trouble with HypeDyn

Gah! Sculpting Hypertext is harder than it looks! I’m still struggling with what I thought would be a simple enough exercise to practice using the free hypertext creation tool for non-techy creatives: HypeDyn. You may recall I set myself the task of adapting the draft text for a guide to the River Wey and Godalming Navigations, into a hypertext document. The original text, by Sue Kirkland, reads very well, but its written as though the reader is walking the length of Navigations, upstream. Continue reading →

My day-job brings archaeological story to the headlines and inspires comedy!

Forgive me a little aside here, but I’m feeling a little proud about this. I first started working with the Vyne, a National Trust property in Hampshire, about 18 months ago. On my first visit, one of the objects that most interested me (apart from the truncheons stored in the ante-chapel to impose the will of the aristocracy on the peasants) was a fourth century gold ring, said to have been one of Tolkien’s inspirations for the ring that features in his famous books. Continue reading →

Ambient Games, Ambient Interpretation

Last night I saw a presentation by Dr Mark Eyles. It was part of a meeting of the Hampshire Unity3D/3D Interactive Group (H3DG), a groups which started up just as I was beginning my studies, so I’ve sort of fallen into it. Its a great little get together, about once a month at The Point in Eastleigh. Part of the evening consists of a tutorial demonstrating how easy the Unity3D engine is to use. Continue reading →

Ripping text into Hypertext

I’ve spent the day engaged in a first-pass edit of a proposed guidebook text into HypeDyn. The text is the 10,000 word draft by Sue Kirkland of a guide to the River Wey and Godalming Navigations. Though this is National Trust site, its not an official project, I’m doing it as a “real-world” exercise in using HypeDyn. So far I’ve cut the text up into about seventy “nodes”, most of which are associated with actual places along the river. Continue reading →