'The music of the spheres': books at the centre of a cultural universe

This poster tells the story of how asking one question (how did these books come to be in our library?) led to an adventure in discovery of their cultural value. Using the example of music scores that belonged to Anna Charlier (fiancée of Nils Strindberg, a member of S. S. Andrée’s ill-fated balloon expedition to the North Pole), this poster illustrates how books can be objects of cultural value in and of themselves, rather than solely as containers for information or literature. It shows how these particular books provide cultural value through both their function as music scores and as generators of research. They are the link between present and past; between people separated by geography and tragedy; between Sweden, the North Pole, England and the United States. They are objects at the centre of a cultural universe of music, science, exploration, and literature – physical anchors to the past that, over a century later, can still be used to make music and/or inaugurate research, thereby generating and regenerating cultural life

"I have 100 reads therefore I am": 'academic' social media

This post explores academics’ relationships with ‘academic social media’; specifically with regards to the marketization of HE in the UK, audit culture, gamification, and open access. Academic social media can be defined as social media sites aimed at academic staff working in higher education, particularly in research. These sites encourage their users to share work (mainly in the form of research papers) and connect with other academics and researchers. There are currently two sites dominating the academic social media sector; ResearchGate and Academia.edu. These sites have been criticised for various reasons, but many academics still prefer to use them to disseminate research instead of using their own institution’s repositories. This paper will examine some of these criticisms and look at reasons why researchers choose to use academic social media platforms despite their serious ethical flaws and potentially detrimental effect on open access to research

Illness and disability in Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's Chalet School stories

As other scholars have noted, Brent-Dyer makes good use of the “illness/injury” plot device throughout her long series of Chalet School stories in order to symbolise a process of character change. Illness, disability or injury are used as catalysts to enable ‘difficult’ characters to reform. In addition, Brent-Dyer occasionally, particularly in the character of The Robin, employs the trope of the purity and innocence of sick children. In this paper, I discuss Brent-Dyer’s use of these ideas in the pre-war Chalet School stories, including thoughts on how her own life story may have influenced this aspect of her writing. I examine the positive and negative implications of the ways in which Brent-Dyer employs ideas of illness and disability, and how this may have affected my own reading of her Chalet School books as a child and young adult living with chronic ill health. In addition, I aim to explore the idea of books, and the Chalet School stories in particular, as sanctuary, and to briefly give some thought as to why Brent-Dyer’s attitudes to health and illness may have changed after the Second World War