‘Instead of fetching flowers, the youths brought in flakes of snow’: exploring extreme weather history through English parish registers

Parish registers provide organized, dated and located population data and as such, are routinely among the most frequently consulted documents within the holdings of county record offices and archives. Throughout history, extreme weather has had significant impacts on the church, its congregation, and local landscape. It is for these reasons that extreme weather events have been deemed worthy of official note by authors of many registers. Although isolated entries have been used as supporting evidence for the occurrence of a number of historic extreme weather events, the information that parish registers contain relating to weather history has not been studied in its own right. Parish register narratives add new events to existing chronologies of extreme weather events and contribute to our understanding of their impacts at the local level. As public and well used documents they also function to keep the memory of particular events alive. The examples in this paper cover a wide range of weather types, places, and time periods, also enabling recording practice to be explored. Finally, as the number of digitized registers increases, we highlight the risks of weather narratives being obscured, and reflect on how the weather history contained within might be systematically captured

Defacing the map: cartographic vandalism in the digital commons

This article addresses the emergent phenomenon of carto-vandalism, the intentional defacement of collaborative cartographic digital artefacts in the context of volunteered geographic information. Through a qualitative analysis of reported incidents in WikiMapia and OpenStreetMap, a typology of this kind of vandalism is outlined, including play, ideological, fantasy, artistic, and industrial carto-vandalism, as well as carto-spam. Two families of counter-strategies deployed in amateur mapping communities are discussed. First, the contributors organise forms of policing, based on volunteered community involvement, patrolling the maps and reporting incidents. Second, the detection of carto-vandalism can be supported by automated tools, based either on explicit rules or on machine learning

From Grounded Foot to Leaping Foot

This research project developed from a realisation that there was a missing link between movement work for grounding and the next demand on the student to jump. Debbie Green and Ita O'Brien began their research, ‘From grounded foot to leaping foot’ in February 2009, proposing the statement ‘grounding is a pre-requisite’ as the premise from which to start the investigation into how the use of the feet can be developed to take the actor from this deeply grounded place to jump and leap safely. The work is explored within the context of fundamental movement for the acting student with the aim of maximising the actor's physical choices within her/his expressive work. From being grounded to leaping is quite literally a big ‘leap’ for acting students to make. Following nine months of research (March–December 2009), Green and O'Brien led a series of six practical sessions with nine volunteer actors between January and March 2010 to develop the progression from the ground, through the rigour and preparation required to take the body into a jump and leap, to the strength and articulation required to land safely. The work was then presented as a Practice and Pedagogy Forum, to an invited audience within the Research Events programme at Central School of Speech & Drama on 26 October 2010. The work has subsequently been taken back into the classroom. This article is the culmination of the research into the progression of work, ‘From grounded foot to leaping foot’

The drama of doing: occupation and the here-and-now

In this reflective discussion of Playback Theatre, parallels are drawn between occupation and drama, as a thing that is done, an embodied performance. Playback is considered from the perspectives of both performers, who respond to the teller's autobiographical narrative and the audience, who witness the performers’ and the teller's response. The moment of enactment of the story is presented as a kind of threshold, where the performers are in the moment and aware of the moment as they listen and begin to respond to the story. They tune into their somatic and emotional responses, call forth personal experiences that elicit ‘empathic imagination’, and listen for the imagery, emotions and cultural narratives embedded in the story. Knowledge of theatrical conventions, sequences remembered from previous performances, and collaboration with fellow performers compound the mix. The performance is discovered as it unfolds, with the phenomenological essence of the story creatively revealed in the doing. Understanding how ideas and artworks are created through and in the doing, it is proposed, is important if occupational science is to understand how the present is infused with the past, even as we inhabit the here and now