The TVAD Research Group, based in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire, researches relationships between text, narrative and image. We publish books, journal articles, host a double-blind peer-reviewed journal, Writing Visual Culture, and host events including international conferences.
Find out more here:
Last week, I was interviewed by Jane Housham (Publisher, University of Hertfordshire Press), and filmed by Chris Dunkley, for a short film about Open Access publishing. The interview was based on the fact that my book,Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalizationwas published as an open access book as well as in hardback in 2016 by Berghahn. The book is available as an entire pdf and the chapters are available as individual pdfson the publishers' website. I co-edited this book with Professor Kjetil Fallan of the University of Oslo. Both of the editor's institutions - the University of Oslo and the University of Hertfordshire - contributed funds to Berghahn to support the open access book. You can watch the film on Youtube and hear more about my experience of open access publishing. Although the initial impact has not been as great as I had hoped, I remain convinced that there will be longer term benefits in terms of increased readership and use of the book, and I remain committed to the ethos of open access.
Professor Grace Lees-Maffei TVAD Research Group Leader.
Regular readers of this blog will have seen various posts during this academic year linking to film recordings of the TVAD Talks research seminar series. Now, I have brought all of the films together in one place, the brand new YouTube channel! Now viewers can access all of the TVAD Talks currently published, as a series. (Existing links in blog posts will stay the same for the time being.) Click here to watch the TVAD Talks 2014-15 Enjoy!
On Wednesday March 11th in our TVAD Talks series, we heard Dr Ivan Phillips, talking about his forthcoming book Once Upon A Time Lord: The Myths and Stories of Doctor Who for I.B.Tauris, due for publication in 2016.
Towards the end of the 2010 series finale, ‘The Big Bang’, as he reboots the Universe and waits to fade forever from existence, the Doctor talks to the sleeping child Amelia Pond about the adventures they will now never share, the lives he will never have lived: ‘We’re all stories in the end,’ he says. ‘Just make it a good one.’ Although the contributions of the current show runner, Steven Moffat, have not met with universal approval among either fans or casual viewers, his scriptwriting here, as elsewhere, shows a sharp awareness of the centrality of storytelling to the enduring success of the Doctor Who phenomenon. It is no coincidence that fans of Doctor Who tend to talk in terms of ‘stories’: the first story they remember, their favourite story, the ‘lost’ story that they most wish could be found, the most under- or over-rated stories, and so on.
The merging of this storytelling element with features from traditional mythologies has been reflected in the analyses of many critics in the years since John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s pioneering study Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (1983), most notably Matt Hills in his Triumph of a Time Lord (2010). My own book, however, is proposed as the first full-length monograph to focus entirely on Doctor Who as an accumulated and richly interwoven, often contradictory, body of myths. The need for such an analysis was indicated over a decade ago by David Rafer:
The Doctor himself is a carrier and purveyor of his own myth but also encounters images and patterns drawn from ancient world mythology. The way that the Doctor confronts and feeds into myth reveals something of the enduring nature and appeal of mythic narratives and symbols and is a contributory factor in the mysticism of the character (In Butler, p. 123).
Acknowledging the status of Doctor Who as a substantial myth in its own right – Miles Booy has referred to it as ‘a significant national narrative’ (2012: 166) – this also promotes an exploration of the many ways in which it has become a locus of translation for existing mythologies, ancient and modern. Central to my study is a recognition that Doctor Who – ‘a voracious gobbler of ideas’ (Newman, 2005: 70) – has always taken its raw material from elsewhere, reimagining elements of classical mythology as well as drawing upon the established ‘mythic’ traditions of literature, cinema, television and other media. By examining the diverse stories which Doctor Who has generated across the last half-century, my aim is to demonstrate not only its singular ability to carry fantastical narratives into everyday life but also, perhaps, the continuing need for such narratives in the modern world.
The joy of this project is that it enables me to merge a lifelong fan obsession with my academic research interests and the kind of subject matter that I have long discussed with my students. The story has only just begun, but I look forward to sharing it with some of you...
References:
Booy, M. (2012) Love and Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience, 1979 to the Present. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.
Butler, D., ed. (2007) Time And Relative Dissertations In Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Matt Hills, Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-First Century. London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2010.
Newman, K. (2005) Doctor Who (BFI TV Classics). London: BFI.
Tulloch, J., and Alvarado, M. (1983) Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
TVAD Talks take place on the second Wednesday of each month during term time. In 2015, we have heard three speakers from the School of Creative Arts, Professor Emeritus Michael Biggs spoke in January about the evaluation of research, Kevin Dowd gave a presentation ‘Exploring practice-based methods in graphic design research’ and Matthias Hillner's talk was entitled ‘From virtual typography to intellectual property rights (IPR), and from research through practice to research into practice’. Dowd and Hillner are both staff on the Graphic Design and Illustration BA Hons and they presented as a double bill in February. Here, we are able to share two of the three presentations we have enjoyed so far this year.
Watch Prog Biggs' talk on research evaluation here:
Next, we are able to share a talk by Kevin Dowd, ‘Exploring practice-based methods in graphic design research’
The discipline of graphic design is growing to accommodate novel ways of gathering data and generating findings, expanding beyond the established foundation of borrowed rhetoric that has informed current research methodologies. However, there are few examples of methodologies tailored specifically to the skills of the graphic designer as researcher, and fewer still with practice at their core. This talk explores examples of practice-based research in graphic design, highlighting a need to develop methods for design research practitioners. This is examined further through my own study, which proposes a novel system of practice-based methods in graphic design research.
Watch Kevin here:
Our TVAD Talks series continues in March with Dr Ivan Phillips, speaking about his forthcoming book Once Upon A Time Lord: The Myths and Stories of Doctor Who - watch this space!
The last in our series of reflections on the research seminars presented as part of the TVAD Talks series in the autumn term of 2014 is Dr Barbara Brownie's ‘Shoes
Without Feet: The presence of absence in empty-shoe memorials’, presented on Wednesday December 10th 2014. Here is the abstract for the talk, and a film of Barbara's presentation is below, with some images discussed in the presentation.
Personal artefacts left behind by the victims of conflict and tragedy
become part of the material culture of war. The piles of clothes and shoes
that were left behind at Auschwitz and Dachau, give us a sense of the thousands
of victims who once owned them. Holocaust museums in particular display
shoes among other primary artefacts as “tangible proof in the face of debate
about, and even denial of, what transpired [during the holocaust]” (Williams,
2007, p. 25). Shoe memorials exhibit what philosopher Patrick Fuery (cited
in Bille et al. 2010, p. 5) describes as “secondary absence”, that is, not
absence itself, but absence that is “defined by its connection to presence”.
Memorialists are directly concerned with expressing absence through presence.
Shoes are presented as witnesses to past events, and are sometimes the only
surviving evidence of the existence of the people who once wore them.
Though they are designed with the intention of
referencing the past, shoe memorials often say more about the contemporary
communities that construct them than they say about the memorialised victims.
Particularly in recent temporary shoe memorials, for which shoes are repurposed
(often donated by members of the bereaved community), victims are remembered as
through the eyes of the living. There is an artificiality to these memorials
that reflects a desire for familiarity rather than authenticity. Repurposed for
use in a memorial, shoes are transformed into sacred objects. Once archived,
the memorial artefacts are more effective as a record of public grief than of
the tragedy itself.
This TVAD discussion will present examples of
holocaust shoe memorials at Auschwitz and on the river Danube in Budapest, in
which shoes are presented to document the suffering of victims, in contrast to
vernacular and temporary memorials of the past two decades, for which shoes are
selected to represent the grief of those left behind. I will address how shoes
transform parks and streets into "traumascapes" or, in some cases,
into data visualisations which precisely quantify loss.
