Scrapbooks

We had an interesting discussion today about the different layers of materialising of our research.

One point someone made was the relationship between the actual texts/material artefacts and the interpretative texts surrounding them.

They suggested I put the fieldnotes around the texts I am collecting into the exhibition.

I thought this was exciting, and challenging.

Here is an image of one of the scrap books that I would like to include in the exhibition, maybe in a separate glass cabinet.

writing in the street

I found it difficult to choose one image too, but - since windows are the theme - here's a photo that I took in the Pentonville Road, London, in summer 2009. (You can see my reflection in the window.) I have no idea what '101% harmless' refers to but the materiality of the text struck me very forcefully. It's drawn into the dust on a plate glass window.

A few hours later: Since posting this, it's struck me that, of course, Walter Benjamin focuses on dust in the Arcades Project. This from Teresa Stoppani, 2007, 'Dust projects', Journal of Architecture, 12/5, 543-557:

In Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk dust is associated with ideas of greyness, obsolescence and boredom. Dust blankets Paris like a heavy grey coat. It nests in the arcades and in the bourgeois interiors, materialising oblivion, stillness and decay. And yet, slow or fast, in both interiors and exteriors, dust measures the uncontrollable, penetrating that which is apparently ordered, organised, systematised. [my italics]

And dust texts? Dust language even?

It's hard to choose one photo, but given that we were talking about windows today, here is one with a view through from mountain to mountain. You get a hint of textile and can infer a table. From Norafjell August 2010.

Inhabiting space - Jessop Wing project

After today's very good meeting, can I suggest that we all put up an image which could simply be an image that represents a vision or idea rather than THE image, to illustrate the way you have thought about your part of the exhibition from today's meeting?

I want to put up an image of threads, embroidery, knitting and crochet, but

as I said, the embroidery video is lost.

You will have to imagine it.

Press article

Newspaper article on the Cabinet of Curiosities (Sheffield Telegraph 09.04.10).

Cabinet of Curiosities

A funded pilot exhibition took place as part of the 'Curious' festival organised by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Six researchers presented images and objects from our research in a glass kiosk on The Moor in central Sheffield. Using a cabinet as a way to learn about the world goes back to the 16th and 17th centuries when men began displaying their collections of often odd and unusual objects in custom-made cabinets. Their collections showed the curiosity of the owners and, like material libraries, they also allowed others to learn about new and unfamiliar things. These 'cabinets of curiosities' brought together diverse knowledge into a single compact space: a university in miniature. The cabinet on the Moor and its contents invited passers by to stop for a moment, look, and think about our own collections and displays.

What is our work about?

Can we describe our work in a blurb? here is one version I sent Susie but I am not sure how we could create a joint blurb for all of us

These images come from two studies of literacy practices in homes in Sheffield and Rotherham.
We are grateful to Booktrust and Yorkshire Forward for funding these projects. In these images, literacy is found to be embedded in material things. If you look at these images, where is the literacy? Is it in the craft activities, in the toys, in the digital objects?
The study sees literacy as an everyday social practice. Rather than think of literacy as something that happens at school, it sees literacy as being strongly embedded in the home and in home objects. Many of these images have been taken by children as young as five to show the researcher what they like to play with at home. Some of the families are multilingual and they use different languages in the home. Some of the literacy materials are in scripts such as Arabic, Urdu or Malaysian. The exhibition reminds us of Richard Hoggart’s classic study in Yorkshire on The Uses of Literacy (1957). As you look at the images, you could think about the differences and similarities between literacy in the home 50 years ago, and then the uses of literacy today.
The images have been drawn from two ethnographic studies of home literacy practices, (2009-2010) conducted by Kate Pahl, Margaret Lewis and Louise Ritchie, funded by Booktrust and Yorkshire Forward.