Be Inspired! – the first event held by the Great Writers Inspire project – took place on December 14th at the English Faculty in Oxford.
The event had two main aims – to bring friends of the project together to share thoughts and ideas, and to capture a series of short talks about great writers that will be used in the project.
The event started with a panel session discussing issues related to the practice of using digital resources in teaching and public engagement.
Eric Meyer, Oxford Internet Institute, kicked off the session by talking about impact. What is impact and why should you think about it? It should not be looked at in a purely quantitative way, e.g. how many downloads? But also challenge you to ask new research questions and reach new users. He pointed to work done by the Oxford Internet Institute, and recommended the Toolkit for Impact of Digital Scholarly Resources (TIDSR) they have developed.
Giles Bergel, a book historian from the Faculty of English, followed on placing his brief talk in the context of using rare and valuable books in teaching. What happens of you don’t have the original? A modern, low-cost re-print of an old book makes the text more easily available, but will obviously not be capturing all features of the original, for example the thickness of the original paper. An electronic version has further limitations, but also offers additional benefits. Giles showed examples of this, such as collaborative projects where literary texts are combined with additional material to offer richer resources.
Abigail Willams from the Faculty of English showed how you can take academic activity, such as a digitisation project, and use it and its outputs in other contexts. Performing ballads in a home-like environment offers the audiences chance to hear material they may not otherwise have heard. Placing the material in this context also allows the researcher a chance to experience it in the way it would have been originally used and that can offer valuable insights.
Katharine Lindsay, Oxford University Computing Services, talked about the work of the Great War Archive and WW1 Poetry Digital Archive and how the projects captured and created material with the help of the public. She also explained how the projects worked closely with teachers to develop online tutorials.
Emma Smith, Faculty of English, chaired the session and invited everyone to take part in the discussion. Questions included the role of the audience/users and the need to capture their views. How we can enable access, and perhaps demonstrating examples of how the resources can be used is the best way to encourage further use. A member of the Libraries ask a question about sustainability – how are resources from digital projects going to be made available in the future? What happens when the funding runs out? Perhaps a benefit of an OER project is that the licence allows resources to have a life of their own – they may go on to ‘live’ elsewhere and this makes it sustainable.
The rest of the afternoon was devoted to a series of short talks by 10 University of Oxford academics talking about a great writer of their choice, including the Beowulf poet, Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Stephen Duck, William Blake, Ezra Pound, Katherine Mansfield, Olive Schreiner and J.M. Coetzee. These inspirational recordings will all be made available under a Creative Commons licence for reuse in education worldwide. News of their release will be posted on this blog.
All participants left the event enthused and full of ideas; see the quotes below from two of our academic champions:
“… most thought-provoking were different people’s interpretation and response to the prompt ‘Great Writers Inspire’. To be honest, there’s been some discomfort with the ‘Great Writers’ bit, and even the ‘Inspire’ bit is perhaps a bit touchyfeely for academics. What today made clear is that it’s actually a really useful umbrella term, which people can shelter under.” Dr Emma Smith
“I’ve come away from the Be Inspired event today with a long reading list: it’s been fascinating to hear my colleagues’ interpretations of well known writers, who they managed to make entirely new. The panel session with Eric Meyer, Giles Bergel, Abigail Williams and Kate Lindsay raised really productive questions about the various ways the project could be developed, and how the content it produces could be used.” Dr Rebecca Beasley