JURN now has a basic alpha search tool, to search the world’s academic repositories — over 1,500 of them. Online repositories are the unlovely storage bunkers where academics deposit scholarly articles, ebooks, reports, data sets, journal back-issues, dissertations and theses, etc.
Archive for November, 2009
Big Canvas
Another “Big…” Birmingham wheeze. This time it’s the Big Blank Canvas… “tell us about an event or activity you would like to see, participate in or make happen” as part of the 2013 City of Culture bid. Witty comments about how to make performance art out of the organisers of the last City of Culture […]
Arena: Eno
Fab. A new ‘made for TV’ 80 minute documentary about Brian Eno. It apparently had a UK premiere in Sheffield, a few weeks ago.
Train spotting
So, where exactly is my train? Right now? … I think they might work on the naff pushpins, though. Little pixel-art trains might be better, perhaps even ones that get fatter or slimmer to indicate the level of over-crowding.
Clients from hell
Clients from hell (.tumblr)… “I know you said it would take three weeks but I’ve just looked at my budget and I can’t pay you after today — so you need to finish everything by 5pm”
Static waves (goodbye)
The end of static, vanishing along with raw rock music.
Arts attendance has not increased since 2005
28 Nov 2009 at 15:08
David Haden
Arts cuts, Creative industries, Regeneration
Comments Off on Arts attendance has not increased since 2005
The WMRO notices that West Midlands arts attendance has not increased since 2005, despite all the public money poured into audience boosting measures and audience research. In previous reports by other researchers it was revealed that none of the government targets for public participation in arts activity between 2005/6 and 2007/8 were met. It now […]
“Mirror, mirror…”
Issue No.5 of my overlay “house journal” for JURN, on the topic of mirrors.
The Arts Council : Managed to Death
22 Nov 2009 at 07:09
David Haden
Artist(s), Arts cuts, Creative industries, Reading
Comments Off on The Arts Council : Managed to Death
The Arts Council : Managed to Death (PDF link) now online from the Conservatives-aligned New Culture Forum, and written by the author of June 09’s not-wholly-convincing article on the Council in Standpoint.
O.S. for free
Nice. Ordnance Survey “geographical data” is apparently to be “free to all” from April 2010. Somehow I doubt we’ll be allowed to download a layered hi-res Illustrator file of each of the current retail O.S. map sheets, and thus have the ability to do some interesting subtractions and replacements (e.g.: a new “Medieval Birmingham and […]
Press Display
Press Display, allowing you to view the front pages of daily newspapers from across the UK, and to purchase screen-readable copies. The weekly edition of The Birmingham Post costs $0.99 to read online, ads and all. That’s a welcome example of an electronic publication that’s significantly cheaper than the paper version. There are some flaws. […]
Maggi Orth
Maggie Orth, electronic textiles artist…
Earworm
The Earworm search engine has a new front page. It’s now indexing nearly 150 sites containing academic podcasts, video lectures, and radio documentaries.
National Puppetry Archive
Beautiful splash page for the new National Puppetry Archive website…
Hatebook
Fed up with Facebook and the social media’s ersatz love-fest? Hatebook. Psychic firewalls – UP!
WordPress hanging on comment-reply.js
I’ve cured a strange problem, so I thought I’d share the solution here. Interior WordPress.com pages and individual posts were not loading. Trying to load them in Firefox or IE resulted in a white page. Front pages were fine. My self-hosted installations of WordPress blogs were also fine. “View Source” showed that the full page […]
Finding a Windows audio player that offers bookmarking
14 Nov 2009 at 10:01
David Haden
Entertainment, Reading, Techie
Comments Off on Finding a Windows audio player that offers bookmarking
Why are there no desktop media players which enable i) accurate sorting of audio book files, and ii) simple bookmarking of audio book files? If you have a mobile device (iPhone, etc) then you have commercial third-party audio bookmarking apps such as SayAgain. Windows Mobile O/S users have the free Windows Media Player Resume plugin. […]
Art Fund Survey released
14 Nov 2009 at 08:41
David Haden
Arts cuts, Creative industries
Comments Off on Art Fund Survey released
The Art Fund has published its 2009 survey of British museums and galleries (PDF link). Visitors were broadly up during the warm months of 2009, with 20% of venues experiencing more than a 10% rise in visitors. Redundancy payments, a decline in overseas holidays, and the weak pound, all seem to have contributed. But this […]
Graduate workshop in games careers
12 Nov 2009 at 06:27
David Haden
Birmingham, Creative industries, Gaming
Comments Off on Graduate workshop in games careers
The Serious Games Institute in Coventry has a graduate workshop on 9th December 2009 — Get ahead of the game : learn more about careers in the gaming industry. However… Bruce on Games has some good sobering advice about working in the industry.
Lost documentary surfaces
11 Nov 2009 at 08:53
David Haden
Birmingham, Cool sites, Entertainment, Stoke-on-Trent
Comments Off on Lost documentary surfaces
On The Cut, a major but long-lost 10-part radio documentary, now online thanks to BBC Radio Stoke… “An account of day-to-day life on commercial waterways by the men and women who worked on, and alongside, some of the main canals of England in the earlier years of the 20th century.”