Monthly Archives: June 2017

Identity in Newcastle: Flickr Photostream

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The identity in Newcastle Flickr Photostream

Here you’ll find a recording of 700 photos about identity in The North East of England that I took, uploaded, tagged, commented on, and categorised between 2010-2012.

The photostream shows how the categorisation of photos became an integral aspect of my project; selecting and ordering the photos so they made some kind of social scientific sense, placing them within a wider context. Creating a digital archive which aimed to capture some of the moments and signifiers of ‘identity’ in the North East during this time, now provides an interesting social history of that time. How many of these moments / sites are still there? If they’ve gone, what’s replaced them? (why do you think that is?)

Identity in Newcastle Flickr albums

The Culture Shock Project and Video

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Culture Shock was a digital storytelling project that started in 2005, and recorded over 550 different stories from people across The North East of England.

Read more about the origins and legacy of the project here: About The Culture Shock Project

The project was a joint partnership between many different museum and heritage organisation in the North East, but it is extensively housed and maintained by The Tyne and Wear Museum Trust.  What you’ll find if you look at this project is a fantastic, extensive digital archive of memories, voices, experiences, cultural moments, celebrations etc. from the region.

I took part in this project in 2010, and created this video about the arrival of my son, and as a way of thinking about my own arrival and place in Newcastle:

Cultural Shock: Geordie’s Arrival Day Video

You can create a similar digital story using this software:

Lightworks Free film editing Software

or even with PowerPoint on Word using the voice over facility.

 

‘Prezzi’ Presentation on Urban Art in The North East

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‘Prezzi’ Presentation on Urban Art in The North East

Between 2010 -2012 I conducted an ethnographic study of  ‘Identity in The North East’, photographing anything I deemed interesting as a comment on ‘identity’. Urban Art in the North East became an incidental but main feature of the project, as my interests grew, I started to see how urban art itself fell into different categories, and with that, held different cultural values and said different things. I’m interested in the link between urban art and place, so what art might say about an area and why.

Have a look at this Prezzi Presentation, as see what you think:

‘Prezzi’ Presentation on Urban Art

Do you agree with my classifications of urban art? What have I left out? Can you add to the collection?

Further Reading:

If you’re interested in conducting a project like this, here’s some further reading:

Metro-Roland, M, Tourists, Signs and the City: The Semiotics of culture in an urban landscape, Ashgate Publishing, London: 2012

Tourists, signs and the city : the semiotics of culture in an urban landscape

 

 

Biteable video: Identity in Newcastle

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Here I have created a short video using the free software ‘Biteable’ to get you thinking about conducting your own ethnographic photography project of Newcastle.

Take a look at the video here:

PARTNERS on Biteable.

In the video I mainly focus on ethnic and cultural identities such as ‘Geordie’, ‘Northern’, ‘Chinese Geordie’, but in your research you may want to think about identities in times of cross generation (such as ‘youth’), locality (such as ‘Northumberland Street’), religious identities (such as Buddhism) and /or subcultures (such as ‘goths’).

YouTube Film: The city in sound and image

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The way we perceive ‘place’, in this case the city of Newcastle Upon Tyne, is influenced by the images and accompanying sounds used to define, stylise and objectify.

I have put together this short video using YouTube Editor, which aims to show how presenting the city through iconic images (in the case of Newcastle- the river, bridges, characteristic ‘Tyneside’ housing stock), and using a soundtrack more reminiscent of the way other big cityscapes are presented (so in this case I’ve chosen a jazz soundtrack, synonymous with the Manhattan skyline), removes Newcastle from the traditional ‘working class, football, heavy industry’ association or stereotype that we’re often talking about in class.

‘Imagining place’ or ‘constructing the city’, as is discussed in the literature surrounding this topic, is a way of inverting or supporting cultural expectations. In this video I have included some travelling shots, such as the view from an escalator going down in to the metro, to get a ‘big city feel’.

If you’re interested in this try these reading about place, branding, image construction, events, and the city:

Ed Aitken, S and Zonn, L (1994) Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, Rowmann and Littelfield

Alberto Vanolo, The image of the creative city: Some reflections on urban branding in Turin, Cities, Volume 25, Issue 6, 2008, Pages 370-382, ISSN 0264-2751, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2008.08.001
Abstract: Continue reading →

Geordie Playlist

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We’re currently compiling a Spotify Playlist of ‘geordie’ tunes.

This is a list of song about Newcastle/ by bands or artists from Newcastle/ reference aspects of geordie history or identity

If you have any suggestions for inclusion onto this ever-expanding list, please write them to the comments below, and we’ll add them in.

N.B. There is a veto on Sting — so please, no Sting!

Trinity Square — composition

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aphid-trinity

Here is a short piece of music I wrote for a series of photos that a friend of mine took of the Trinity Square car park as it was being torn down.

The car park was a landmark in Gateshead — famous for featuring in the 1971 film ‘Get Carter’. My friend lived in Gateshead, and would walk past the dissolving landmark every day. Watching it disappear was a shock — the kind Alvin Tofler talks about in his book ‘Future Shock’ in the way the landscape of the city can change. In the music, I wanted to try and reflect some of that distant change, some of that sadness and loss of something that you took for granted as always being there. But maybe, in the middle section, there’s also a little bit of hope about what might replace it (which was unwarrented — the new houses are horrible!)

This bring together photography and music, obviously, but it shows how creative research works as a network. Responding to the outputs that someone else has created in a different form can be a way of really expanding your groups research. There’s a famous quote — attributed variously to Laurie Anderson and Elvis Costello (among others) — “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. Well, if that’s true, then we’d love to see your groups dancing about architecture by combining different media together!

 

Welcome to The Combined Honours Research Blog

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Welcome to The Combined Honours research blog!

What the blog aims to do:

Place to stimulate your interests

The Combined Honours Research site does not aim to be a comprehensive ‘interactive bibliography’ on all things ‘Newcastle’. Instead it provides a foundation, a collection of interesting, multi media, multi format, multi and cross disciplinary resources for you to dip in and out of and stimulate your interests and ideas.

Offers scope and breadth: models interdisciplinarity of ideas

Throughout this blog we have linked and tagged sources, aiming to show you how the information spans across disciplines and relates to different subjects simultaneously. In this manner, it is easy to see how the sources have originated in different contexts, for different purposes. Great research projects tend to include a breadth of research (so using sources that originate from different contexts and have different purposes) and a depth of research (so this is where you then investigate your chosen topic further, thinking about and considering the topic at a deeper level).

Open, productive and collaborative research dialogue and engagement

What we would love to achieve with this blog is an archive of student and staff work, wherein we can capture some ‘depth’ to add to the early breadth of the blog as it stands. We encourage you to see Combined ‘research’ as a sharing and collaborative community, and so adding, commenting on, posting, contributing to the blog as you go would be much valued. The Combined Honours research blog aims to simulate a real life research environment; we aim to show that ‘research’ doesn’t and shouldn’t exist in isolation, and by the process of sharing and interacting with each others ideas and projects, we create a healthy and productive research dialogue.

Modelling platforms to present, ways to engage and audience

In short, this is a collaborative interactive bibliography that we aim to grow over time. It provides a good place to initiate and spark your own research ideas. Each clip, sound-bite, link, description, article, chapter, diary entry etc. included, aims to be short, offering a taster, a snippet of an idea, from which you can grow your own project and / or, weave some of the blog site ideas together. We have provided numerous examples of presentation styles and formats too, such as Prezzi, biteable, YouTube (using film editor) etc. as we hope that you will experiment with presentation style and format too, in order to think about how to best engage an audience with your research.

A research archive: longevity and purpose

We look forward to your final research project contributions being part of our collective bank of research forever more. The longevity, use, purpose and dissemination of research are important issues for all researchers, and so with this blog we hope to offer you a place to publish and showcase your work in a live, useable and working research environment. We hope the blog (which we aim to make ‘public’ ) will help you get your work recognised and your names credited with your findings.