Open educational resources: shared solutions for higher education

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are a response to a need for more flexible licensing of educational materials. The OER Movement aims to create materials which can be exchanged and recombined for educational purposes. In the Higher Education sector, some universities (notably MIT) have led the way in putting their course material and lectures online. One of the effects of this has been a greater diversity in student access and recruitment[1]. However, there are many different approaches across the Higher Education sector, and most UK universities control access to some or all of their course content, licensing or selling the Intellectual Property to partner institutions

Film adaptation for knowing audiences: analysing fan on-line responses to the end of Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012)

Critics of film adaptations of literary works have historically evaluated the success or failure of the movie on the grounds of its fidelity to the original book. In contrast popular arguments for medium specificity have questioned whether fidelity is possible when adapting one medium to another. This article follows recent academic work which has focused awareness on the processes of adaptation by examining evidence of reading and viewing experience in online and social media forums.      The broader research project explored the online Twilight fan community as an example of a ‘knowing audience’ acquainted with both novel and film. Here we focus on the strong response within fan forums to the surprise ending of the final film adaptation Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012). The research uses the forum, blog and facebook page as sites for evidence of reading experience as defined by the Reading Experience Database (RED). The analysis sheds new light on the tensions that exist between fidelity and deviation and the article positions fan audiences as intensive readers who gained unexpected pleasure from a deviation from a canon. It argues that fans are also collaborators within the adaptation process who respect authorial authority and discuss the author’s, scriptwriter’s and director’s interpretation of the novel for the screen. The research identifies the creative and commercial advantages to be gained from a collaborative and open dialogue between adaptors and fans.  Keywords: Adaptation, fandom, online fan communities, Twilight, reading experience, film, audiences, fidelity, canon, collaboration, screenwriting, franchise, Stephenie Meyer, Melissa Rosenberg, Bill Condo

Restructuring the knowledge production value chain in publishing

The current system of publishing (i.e. knowledge sharing) values individualism and commodification, restricting our use of existing knowledge. The Western model of knowledge production is not currently inclusive of other forms of knowledge, which inhibits the reuse, adaptation, reinterpretation and development of existing knowledge. The author proposes that knowledge systems be purposefully re-created to prioritize the end users’ needs and value them as co-creators

The special relationship and the allure of transatlantic travel in the work of Elinor Glyn

Winston Churchill famously said that the United Kingdom and the United States of America had a ‘special relationship’. This article takes a look at Elinor Glyn's Atlantic travel in her life and in her novels, and her visits to the United States, drawing on her archives, her memoir, magazine articles and contemporary newspaper reports of her trips. Her novel Six Days (1924) was adapted into a popular silent film which was exhibited in Europe and the United States. It is a combination of love and romance, transatlantic travel on a Cunard liner, a secret military mission and political cooperation, and is taken as an example of how the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom has been depicted in romance novels. It draws parallels between the movies 6 Days (1923) and Titanic (1997). This article was the keynote address at the Love Across the Atlantic Conference at the University of Roehampton in June 2017

The origins of the broadbrow: Hugh Walpole and Russian modernism in 1917

In 1914 the English writer Hugh Walpole travelled to Russia. His diaries, fragments of autobiography and two novels written at the time The Dark Forest and The Secret City vividly record a world of artistic as well as political tension in the theatre, the ballet, circus and wrestling matches he attended in Petrograd and Moscow and of the Eastern front in Galicia while serving in the Russian Red Cross. He went on to establish the Anglo-Russian bureau there to counter German propaganda. Guided by his friends Mikhail Lykiardopoulos and Konstantin Somov, Walpole socialised with some of the leading representatives of Russia’s new culture, such as Sologub, Glazunov, Scriabin and stars such as Tamara Karsavina and attended the famous Moscow Arts Theatre. Walpole’s exposure to the breadth of Russian culture was formative in his definition of the broadbrow and his attitude to cultural production. Firstly, the paper argues that the ‘battle of the brows’ between the lowbrow, highbrow, and middlebrow in periodical press in the 1920s belies the richer qualities of the term whose meaning had deeper resonances in the 19th century and early years of the 20th century. Secondly, it argues that in Walpole’s and H.G. Wells’ definition embraced an aspiration to be open to all experiences and to all knowledge which engendered a noble and broad view of life. Finally, it argues that the term became an important one for the emerging mediums of radio and film as way of engaging and enlightening audiences of every kind. Dedicated to the memory of Dr Giannandrea Poesio, this work is testament to his scholarship in Russian ballet and the arts. The article was completed for publication by Alexis Weedon following the authors’ collaboration on the research, writing and co-presentation of the paper at the Laughing and Coping: Entertainment in WW1 conference March 2016 and the Postgraduate symposium May 2016 University of Bedfordshire. Acknowledgements: Weedon’s archival research in The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations in 2016 was funded by Research Institute for Media, Art and Performance, University of Bedfordshire, with grateful thanks to Dr Giannandrea Poesio Director of the Institute. Hugh Walpole was one of ten authors identified for the AHRC funded project ‘Cross-media co-operation in Britain in 1920s and 1930s’ (AR 112216) and Weedon’s work here is a follow-on from this project

Story, storyteller, and storytelling

Nothing has had so much impact on our daily lives in the past two decades as the revolution in technologies of communication. Across the resulting debate in industry and academia the notion of ‘storytelling’ has come into prominence. It is a term in need of conceptual placement and theoretical framing.  Publishers may feel that they have first call on storytelling as primary producers of the written text. When oral traditions documented by scribes gave way to authorship of the written text, the dissemination of knowledge became by way of print. But since the invention and adoption of other media—film, radio, internet, web, book apps, interactive mobile media—storytelling has been the exclusive domain of none.  This paper provides a definition of ‘story’, ‘storytelling’, and ‘storyteller’ based on contemporary examples and historical usage, and traces how the affordances of new technologies have opened up pathways in storytelling by looking at examples from the origins of media convergence in the early 20th century to today.

An introduction to Elinor Glyn : her life and legacy

This special issue of Women: A Cultural Review re-evaluates an author who was once a household name, beloved by readers of romance, and whose films were distributed widely in Europe and the Americas. Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) was a British author of romantic fiction who went to Hollywood and became famous for her movies. She was a celebrity figure of the 1920s, and wrote constantly in Hearst's press. She wrote racy stories which were turned into films—most famously, Three Weeks (1924) and It (1927). These were viewed by the judiciary as scandalous, but by others—Hollywood and the Spanish Catholic Church—as acceptably conservative. Glyn has become a peripheral figure in histories of this period, marginalized in accounts of the youth-centred ‘flapper era’. Decades on, the idea of the ‘It Girl’ continues to have great pertinence in the post-feminist discourses of the twenty-first century. The 1910s and 1920s saw the development of intermodal networks between print, sound and screen cultures. This introduction to Glyn's life and legacy reviews the cross-disciplinary debate sparked by renewed interest in Glyn by film scholars and literary and feminist historians, and offers a range of views of Glyn's cultural and historical significance and areas for future research

Elinor Glyn's British Talkies: Voice, Nationality and the Author On-Screen

Existing accounts of Elinor Glyn's career have emphasized her substantial impact on early Hollywood. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to her less successful efforts to break into the UK film industry in the early sound period. This article addresses this underexplored period, focusing on Glyn's use of sound in her two 1930 British films, Knowing Men and The Price of Things. The article argues that Glyn's British production practices reveal a unique strategy for reformulating her authorial stardom through the medium of the ‘talkie’. It explores how Glyn sought to exploit the specifically national qualities of the recorded English voice amidst a turbulent period in UK film production. The article contextualizes this strategy in relation to Glyn's business and personal archives, which evidence her attempts to refine her own speaking voice, alongside those of the screen stars whose careers she sought to develop for recorded sound. It suggests that the sound film was marked out as an important, exploitable new tool for Glyn within a broader context of debates about voice, recorded sound and nationality in UK culture at this time. This enabled her to portray a distinctively national brand identity through her new film work and surrounding publicity, in contrast to her appearances in American silent films. The article will show that recorded sound further allowed Glyn performatively to foreground her role as author-director through speaking cameos. This is analysed in relation to wider evidence of her practice, where she reflected on the performative qualities of the spoken voice in her writing and interviews, and made use of radio, newsreel and live performance to perfect and refine her own skills in recitation and oration

The history of the book in the west: 1914-2000. Volume 5.

This collection brings together published papers on key themes which book historians have identified as of particular significance in the history of twentieth-century publishing. It reprints some of the best comparative perspectives and most insightful and innovatively presented scholarship on publishing and book history from such figures as Philip Altbach, Lewis Coser, James Curran, Elizabeth Long, Laura Miller, Angus Phillips, Janice Radway, Jonathan Rose, Shafquat Towheed, Catherine Turner, Jay Satterfield, Clare Squires, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén. It is arranged into six sections which examine the internationalisation of publishing businesses, changing notions of authorship, innovation in the design and marketing of books, the specific effects of globalisation on creative property and the book in a multimedia marketplace