Toulouse-Lautrec is one of my favourite artists, so when I found out that the Courtauld Gallery in London currently has an exhibition on featuring his work I was eager to go and see it.

The exhibition focuses on Lautrec’s friendship with Jane Avril, one of the stars from the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s. She features quite a lot in his work, and his depictions of her chronicle both her on-and-off stage personas. The thing I found most interesting was the information on Jane’s childhood and background and finding out about the afflictions that she suffered from, afflictions that now visually leap out at me when I look at Lautrec’s work.

The exhibition runs until the 18th September, and admission is free on Mondays between 10am – 4pm. You can also gain free entry if you are a full-time student or a staff member at any UK university.

The Courtauld Gallery also has a fantastic permanent collection of paintings, so I highly recommend a visit if you haven’t already been.

More info on the exhibition

King’s College London recently held a series of talks to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell who was a Professor at King’s from 1860-1865.


Although Maxwell is not very well known, he formulated the theory of electromagnetism, which laid the foundations for Einstein’s subsequent work on relativity and many class him as the greatest physicist of the 19th century.


However, it’s Maxwell’s work on colour photography that drew my attention, as I had no idea that he is responsible for the first ever colour photograph! In 1861 (with the help of Thomas Sutton, Lecturer in Photography at King’s), he demonstrated the world’s first colour photograph via the use of the ‘three colour method’, which separated the colour spectrum into red, green and blue.

Tartan Ribbon (1861)

As part of my PhD I’ve read a few books on the history of photography, and none of them have mentioned Maxwell and his contribution. Maybe that’s because even after the advent of colour photography, black and white still continued to dominate, partly due to cost and also because it was seen as the medium for serious photographers. Even now, with the relatively low costs of digital processing, many people still prefer to convert their images into black and white as they think it creates a more sophisticated and classic look.


But whatever your preference is (black & white or colour), Maxwell’s contribution to colour theory and photography deserves to be more widely acknowledged, so thanks King’s College for putting together a great series of talks to celebrate his legacy.

Just like when Charlie Bucket managed to get one of the golden tickets for a trip inside Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, I similarly managed to get my hands on an exclusive ipaper ticket that allowed me to attend the readers’ party on the 13th April at the Nancy Spero exhibition which is currently on show at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London.

ipaper readers' party at the Serpentine

The party was a chance for readers of the ipaper to meet some of the i team, and vice versa, as well as being able to view the work of the late artist and activist, Nancy Spero.


I didn’t know much about Nancy Spero before the exhibition, but my first impression on entering the gallery was that she was quite prolific. The walls of one of the main rooms in the Serpentine gallery are totally covered by a big wrap around frieze (Azur). The many individual pieces that make up the frieze are images of women and symbols from ancient art, folklore, and the modern day, all in a combination of pen, pencil, ink, gouache, stencil and collage on paper. Whilst the frieze is undeniably striking and intriguing, I felt that there was just too much to look at, yet none of the pieces when looked at individually stood out in their own right; so the piece only really worked when it wasn’t actually being looked at - which actually made it quite an appropriate backdrop to have on the walls of the room with the main party in.


A piece which I did really like was Maypole: Take No Prisoners II, which portrays the victims of violence via an explosion of gory faces suspended around a maypole.

Maypole: Take No Prisoners II (Nancy Spero)

However, by the far the highlight of the evening was getting the chance to chat to some of the editors of the ipaper. I particularly enjoyed chatting to David Lister (Arts Editor) about the newspaper, his view of the exhibition, and social media.


Thanks to the ipaper team for hosting such a great evening and for also producing such a great new newspaper!

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

The week before last I was fortunate enough to attend an exclusive UK screening of ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ at King’s College London, the latest film from renowned director Werner Herzog. The film is a documentary about the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave which was discovered in southern France in 1994, inside of which the oldest cave paintings in existence were found by a group of explorers. The cave is thought to have been occupied by humans some 32,000 years ago, during what can be variously referred to as an ice age. It is believed that the cave became sealed off due to a landslide and thus the contents of the cave (the paintings, and also lots of fossilized animal bones) were perfectly preserved inside until their discovery in 1994.


The image below is one of the most well-known paintings which was found within the cave.

Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave

However this is only one of a series of paintings and hundreds of others exist within the vast cave. The paintings are predominantly of animals, many of which are now extinct.


The film consists of footage shot within the cave, as well as interviews with scientists, historians and even a master perfumer. The historical importance of the cave and it’s contents has meant that only a handful of people have ever been allowed access to it. Excessive moisture from human breath could damage the paintings, and so access is always limited to a few hours at a time. Special suits must be worn which have had no contact with outside and the cave also has a secured entry system with 24/7 surveillance. Therefore what makes this film so special is the fact that whilst you’re watching it, you feel as though you are one of those handful of people who have been granted access to go inside. The film was shot on a 3D camera in order to capture the shapes and contours of the cave walls – although unfortunately the screening I saw was only in 2D. Nonetheless this did not detract from the experience of really feeling as though I was inside the cave with the 4 man film crew as they slowly walked along the narrow gangways peering at the mesmerising cave paintings with the dim glow from their battery powered light. What were the people who made the cave paintings thinking and feeling as they created them? Why did they create them? Experts in pre-historic art and culture suggest that they were for ritualistic and shamanic reasons. But could there also have been an element of self-expression? Whatever their true reasons, the paintings act as a time portal, allowing us a glimpse of life 32,000 years ago.


The film is due for general release on 25th March 2011 (I think), and it’s definitely worth seeing. If you like caves, art, history, Werner Herzog, or just something a little different, then you’ll love this film.

Earlier in the year I carried out a pilot survey (the results of which are detailed in my last blog post). Based on the findings from this pilot survey, I slightly modified the design of my questionnaire, in preparation for a second survey which would be my main period of data collection.
In contrast to the pilot survey, which had utilised only facebook and twitter as a means of enlisting flickr users to respond, for my main survey, I wanted to try to reach a much larger and more random sample of Flickr users. As such, I utilised a 2 prong approach in recruiting my sample.


1. A bespoke Python program was created which interacted with the Flickr API in order to retrieve a list of totally random Flickr users. Using the internal Flickrmail facility I then sent messages to these random users asking them to complete my survey.
2. I again used Twitter as an additional method of recruiting Flickr users, however as well as just tweeting the survey URL, I also asked prominent organisations and people if they would help me to spread the word. I also searched for people on Twitter who had tweeted using the hashtag #flickr, and I tweeted the survey URL to these people.


As an extra incentive to encourage people to respond to my survey, my research group very kindly funded 6 prizes (5 Kindle ebook readers and an iPad) and all survey respondents were advised that their name would be entered into a prize draw to win 1 of the 6 prizes.


A total of 459 people completed my survey, and I would like to say a massive thank you to each and every one of them, as well as to all of the people who retweeted my survey URL and who helped to spread the word.


In order to ensure that the prize draw was carried out fair and impartially, I asked a visiting academic to my research group (María Dolores García Santiago from the University of Granada in Spain) to pick the winners. Using Microsoft Excel she created a random number generator which picked the 6 lucky winners – all 6 have been contacted and the prizes have all now been sent out, and they have all kindly given permission for me to list their names and link to their Flickr accounts:


1. Emiel Wendel (The Netherlands)
2. József Márton (Hungary)
3. Hannah Nourse (USA)
4. Matt Machell (UK)
5. Heitor Magno (Brazil)
6. Jesse Warren (China)


It was really nice to see that the winners came from such a varied mix of locations as it indicates I was successful in reaching a random sample of Flickr users.
It will be quite a while before I can post the overall results of this latest survey, as the data is forming the main crux of my PhD investigation, but I will post bits and bobs as I’m progressing with the analysis and write-up.


Thanks again to everyone who took part, and to everyone who helped to promote the survey – I really really appreciate it – you have all given me loads of data to work with, now I’ve just got to get on with analysing it all ☺

In March this year I invited people who use Flickr to fill out a questionnaire I had developed with the aim of finding out people’s motivations for both uploading images to Flickr, and their reasons for tagging images. I wanted to use the questionnaire as a pilot study investigation for my PhD, and I also wanted to present the results from the pilot study at the Electronic Publishing conference 2010, which I attended in Helsinki in June. So now that the conference is over, I wanted to write a blog post to share my results with everyone. The full conference paper is available online here but I thought a blog post would be a much better way of sharing the results in a more user friendly way (and with a lot less words to have to read too!)


The investigation in a nutshell
I wanted to investigate people’s motivations for image publishing and tagging on Flickr and I also wanted to know whether people hope to make a commercial gain from their images.
Previous studies which have looked at Flickr and the use of web 2.0 systems suggest that motivations for adding and tagging content is due to a mixture of 4 main reasons:
- Self organisation: creating an archive/storage system/or backup for yourself
- Self communication: in order to remind yourself of particular things/events
- Social organisation: as a way of sharing content with other people (friends/family/the public)
- Social communication: as a way of conveying information to other people or ‘getting a message across’.


In order to investigate motivations further I developed an online survey using surveymonkey.com. Utilising the SurveyMonkey software, a custom designed questionnaire could be created fairly quickly and assigned its own unique URL. In order to try to increase the response rate of the questionnaire and also to make the questionnaire as user friendly as possible I made sure that the questionnaire:
- Was kept as short as possible and consisted of only 1 page of questions with minimal scrolling needed
- Had a clean, simple and uncluttered layout
The survey URL was then posted to the discussion forums of two public Flickr groups (Flickr Social and Surveys&Quizzes) and it was also advertised on my Facebook and Twitter profiles.


Results:
In total, 33 people completed the questionnaire. 51.5% of the respondents were female, and the mean average age of the respondent was 30 years. The majority of the respondents originated from the UK and Denmark.
1. Why people upload their images to Flickr
48% of respondents reported two main reasons behind their use of Flickr, with the two most predominant reasons being to share images with friends and family (social organisation), and to promote their work and connect with other people in the photography community (social communication).





2. What motivates people to tag their images?
Motivation to tag images slightly differed from people’s motivations in using Flickr to publish their images. Whereas people strongly state that social organisation is the main factor in using Flickr, social communication comes out slightly on top in terms of people’s motivations for tagging their images. Whilst people seem to be primarily drawn to Flickr because of the social function and community environment that it provides, tagging practices don’t necessarily follow this primary motivation, with self organisation and self communication reasons appearing as fairly high motivational factors overall. It would seem that people are much more dominantly motivated by the desire to either please themselves or others when it comes to describing and adding context to their images.





3. Do people hope to make a commercial gain from their images?
Despite the fact that 51% of the respondents in this investigation specifically mentioned using Flickr as a way of promoting their work and receiving feedback on their images, 75.8% of respondents said that they did not use Flickr with the hope that their images would be picked up by either a commercial stock photography organisation or by the media. So whilst the ‘sociality’ element is a big factor for many Flickr users, people are predominantly interested in having their images found so that they can gain feedback and encouragement from other Flickr users, rather than hoping their images will be picked up by a commercial agency or the media.





Conclusion
Whilst motivations for using Flickr and uploading images can be for a number of different reasons at the same time, motivations for tagging images tends to have a more predominant role. People may use Flickr as both a personal archive and as a place to share images with friends and family, but their reasons behind choice of tags will tend to be very distinctly either a ‘self’ or a ‘social’ action, with less hesitation in the mind of the tagger as to who will ultimately benefit from their choice of tag. People don’t appear to want to use a mixture of highly personal and social tags; they will adopt one strategy or the other, regardless of if they are tagging for archive and storage or communicative purposes.


However in support of much of the previous work carried out on Flickr, the respondents who took part in this investigation seem to use Flickr for the social aspects and the community environment which it provides with social organisation and social communication being the two most popular motivational factors overall. Despite people’s desire to have their images found and commented upon, as a general rule, people aren’t interested in making a commercial gain from the images they upload – the community spirit of Flickr and its ability to connect people both known and unknown to the image uploader is its most appealing feature.


p.s. thanks again to everyone who completed the questionnaire!

Despite my usual reluctance to get out of bed in the mornings, I managed to bound out of bed at 3.30am this morning, and was washed, dressed and out of the door by 3.50am ready to start taking some pictures for the 4amproject [see my previous blog post for more details on what the 4amproject is all about]. I had heard there was an organised meet up getting together at Wolverhampton train station at 3.45am, but this would have meant leaving my flat at 3.15am…so I decided just to take some pictures closer to home instead, although my wander still took about 40 minutes in total.

Back in the day when I was a regular clubber, nightclubs used to close at 2am and I was usually safely tucked up in bed by 3am at the latest, but these days pubs and clubs are open all night long, and on my 4am wander I passed many people who were staggering home from town with half eaten pizzas and kebabs. I had a close call at one point when a young lad thought I was taking a picture of him…but when I explained I was just taking a picture of the litter strewn about the pavement, he must have thought I was either mad, or a reporter or something as he then apologised for questioning me and wandered off.

If you’re not regularly up and about at 4am, it’s easy to imagine how you think your local area will look, but it actually looks a lot different in reality. Where you live will obviously make a big difference to your experience, but for me, the eerie silence was the thing I noticed the most, it felt a bit like starring in a post-apocalyptic thriller, wandering the streets searching for other ‘survivors’. This silence was now and again disrupted as lone taxis whizzed by taking late night revellers home, and from the bird call which I never usually hear so clearly.

The best part about the 4am project is uploading the photos onto Flickr, and seeing the pictures that everyone else took. You come across pictures from other people in your local area, who you didn’t even know existed, yet who you now feel united with due to the fact you were both up at 4am wandering the streets because of your love of photography and the desire to take part in a global creative project. Such a project is a brilliant way of bringing people together, both directly (via organised 4am meetups) and also indirectly (via the world of social media and sites such as Flickr and Twitter).

All in all I really enjoyed my first experience of the 4am project. I will definitely take part in any future events, and next time I may even wander further afield, but my favourite picture from my first event was of the garage at the end of my road.

shell garage, tettenhall road, wolverhampton

If you’re: an insomniac; an early riser; a late night party-goer; a photographer; or none of the above and just plain curious, then why not take part in the 4amproject.


“The aim of the 4amproject is to gather a collection of photos from around the world at the magical time of 4am. Everyone can take part and join in! All you need is a camera. We want to see what you see at that moment in time on that one day. What’s your view at 4am?”


The project’s inventor is Karen Strunks, a freelance photographer based in Birmingham, UK. She first came up with the idea for the project in 2008, and since then it has become a global event with contributors from all over the world.
The next 4am date is scheduled for 4th April, 2010 (at 4am!) so why not take part in compiling a global 4am snapshot of the world.

Now that I have switched to working full-time on my PhD I hope to have more time this year to blog, and I thought what better to start off the 2010 blogging year than by sharing one of my top work tips. As you can probably see from the title of this post, my top tip is to get yourself a big whiteboard.





They come in extremely handy when you’re trying to work through ideas or visualise how different academic papers fit together within a broader context. You can just scribble things onto the whiteboard as you’re reading or thinking, erasing and altering as you see fit. It is so much nicer than ending up with scraps of paper which can easily be lost, or a word document which just looks bland and uninviting. Whereas thoughts on a whiteboard can look fun and interesting (especially if you use different colour pens).

If like me you work between home and university, then obviously the whiteboard can only really be located in one place and can’t easily be transferred backwards and forwards between the two locations….but, each time you fill your whiteboard up, you can take a picture of it on your mobile or digital camera and then email it to yourself or upload to Flickr so that you can access it when you’re somewhere else. And, you don’t even have to go to the hassle of fixing it to the wall, I find it handier just to lean mine up against a wall, and then it can easily be stored away under a bed or behind a bookcase when it’s getting in your way. Or, maybe you could just draw a nice picture on it and have it as a temporary work of art until it’s next needed.

Here’s a copy of the poster I presented at ISSI 2009 (the 12th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 14-18th July 2009)





Thanks to those people who took the time to look at my work and give me advice and feedback.