Today is International Bagpipe Day (10March) – the fourth year of this celebration of bagpipe music. All around the world from Berlin to Budapest and from Iran to Canada, pipers will be holding concerts and events. SOAS Radio has been running a series of programmes on bagpipes – take a listen, it is a treat for the senses.
And watch this space – we are hoping to have a podcast on bagpipes here on Pod Academy soon……..
Photo by Klearchos Kapoutsis – bagpipes at Akrotiri, Santorini
Anna Randle, Head of Strategy at London Borough of Lambeth in south London talks to Jo Barratt about redefining local government in the fourth Civic Radio podcast
If citizenship is a reciprocal relationship between the individual citizen and everyone else in the communities of which we are part, what is the role of local government? This is something that Lambeth councll is grappling with, as they develop the notion of a ‘cooperative council’ seeking to establish a more equal relationship with their citizens.
But what does it mean in practice? What is involved in re-imagining local government? What does it mean to shift from being ‘a paternalistic provider of services’ to a ‘facilitative enabler’. Is it just about doing local government on the cheap?
In this thoughtful interview, Anna Randle talks persuasively about how a council can empower its citizens, without washing its hands of its responsibilities.
Open spaces, parks etc, in the borough provide a good example of the approach as Anna explains, “There was a point at which we realised we needed to say, ‘these are your spaces, they aren’t the council’s spaces, they are the community’s spaces, you own them. You don’t have to ask for permission to do stuff, we want you to do stuff, so if you want to go and plant some bulbs, just do it’.”
Civic Radio is part of Civic Workshop.
Picture of Barnsley Council offices by James Sheriff
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We’ve seen the hotly anticipated release of Hilary Mantel’s books, and the stunning success of their adaptations for the stage. Now the TV adaptation, starring Mark Rylance and Damien Lewis has just drawn to a close on BBC TV in the UK.
The TV series has been intelligent, subtle, artistic – but it is the meticulous costumes that have stolen the show, says Gabriele Neher, Assistant Professor of History of Art at Nottingham University in this blog that first appeared on The Conversation.
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The final instalment of the BBC’s six-part Wolf Hall sees the fall of one Queen and her retinue. In a brilliant shift of emphasis, the death of one queen marks the rise of another. Thomas Cromwell now stands, again, at the beginning of a tangled series of webs and relationships he is expected to manage, tease apart and carry, on increasingly sagging shoulders.
It is no secret that the mastermind behind the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn will be the next to fall victim to the complex power relationships of the Henrician Court. Kosminsky’s masterful and dazzling adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novels to date neatly sets the stage for, presumably, a television sequel as eagerly awaited as Mantel’s own conclusion to the tale.
Wolf Hall has stood apart as intelligent, subtle, artistic viewing. All kinds of aspects of the show have been analysed and admired, but what particularly stood out to me as outstanding was the costume.
The quality and authenticity of the settings has been commented on widely. Much praise has been heaped on the use of locations such as Montacute for “authenticity”. A closer look shows that the care and attention paid to the environment went beyond the superficial use of locations, permeating every aspect of the storytelling. Some commentators, notably Catherine Fletcher, have referred to the challenges of getting the material and visual culture of the Tudors right, and “whether screen history engages with what we know”. The answer is definitely an emphatic yes.
The costumes and fabrics in Wolf Hall reflect the very best of contemporary scholarship on the look and feel of Henry’s Court. Take, for example, the meticulous attention that has been paid to the dressing of the protagonists, notably Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell.
Anne wears the French hood contemporaries always commented on, dressed in very strong colours, while Henry VIII, on the other hand, wears garments of considerable intricacy, often cloth-of-gold, decorated with sumptuous embroidery, and supplemented by jewellery. Anne’s clothing is laced, Henry’s is fastened by buttons. Anne’s clothing is best shown off inside, Henry’s emphasises his athleticism and outdoor sportsmanship.
Cromwell perpetually dresses in black, but a closer look reveals the change in the status of the man, as wool and linen give way to increasingly voluminous fur-lined cloaks and of the most sumptuous black dye. Black was the colour of the professional man, so Cromwell denotes his status in his dress throughout Wolf Hall as the professional who faithfully serves his master. In doing so, he gains in significance and draws ever closer to the centre of power.
As the series progresses, Henry’s and Cromwell’s relationship becomes increasingly tactile, as Cromwell stands closer to the monarch and spends less time observing in the shadows. Of course, this new visibility means he makes himself vulnerable – and we all know how this will end.
But I don’t only admire the costume for its accuracy. Like the use of dress in contemporary Tudor portraits, it has also been used here to add additional layers to the unfolding of the narrative itself.
Watch for example the way clothing is used to tell emotional stories. In the case of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, their early scenes show a couple often dressed in vivid, brilliant, and often contrasting colours, the other figures of the courts appearing colourless and pale in comparison to the drama that attaches itself to the protagonists.
Then there follow scenes where Anne and Henry wear complementary colours, fashioned from similar material, their common purpose reflected in their garb. Towards the end, Anne dresses increasingly in red, often holding flame-haired Elizabeth in her lap, with Henry choosing muted colours, which makes the closing sequence of the series all the more shocking. Note how the sombre colours worn by Anne and her ladies-in-waiting on Tower Green give way to the exuberant gold and red of a jubilant Henry, who again dons his courting robes from earlier in the series, this time in honour of Jane Seymour. Colour and clothing makes power relationships visible.
Many of the scenes are framed enclosed by walls, by hedges, by courtyards. Events unfold that are only ever visible to a small group of spectators. Rare indeed are the occasions when the actions in Wolf Hall are played out in bright sunshine and to a crowd, and for those crowds of onlookers, of eyewitnesses, the clothes of the protagonists tell the story they remember.
The intricacies ad subtleties of the dangerous power games at the heart of court remain largely invisible, and of course, they centre around the ever still and always dark-clad figure of Thomas Cromwell. The colours of the courtiers swirl and change around Cromwell, yet he alone never changes his colours (so to speak) and remains the emotional anchor and centre of Mantel’s complex story.
After all, as Stephen Greenblatt once wrote, the Tudor Court is about self-fashioning an identity. Performance is at the heart of these relationships and they become nowhere more visible than in the small details of the fabrics of Wolf Hall.
This is the third of our podcasts from Civic Radio, exploring the role of the ‘civic’ in today’s world – a world in which commerce often squeezes out our collective experience as citizens, and in which the term ‘citizenship’ is usually used to mean the individual’s relationship with government, rather than citizens’ interdependence with each other.
This is the theme explored by tech activist Laurenellen McCann, in conversation with Jo Barratt, In particular they consider the emergence of the ‘Civic Tech’ movement, in which Laurenellen played a major role, but of which she is now increasingly critical.
The roots of civic tech are in gov2.0, E.gov, and OpenGov in the early 2000s and are for the tech initiated. Civic technology is vital, but, says LaurenEllen, what does a white tech dude have in common with a single mother on welfare? How can he really understand what she needs? Open Gov techies continue to work within a definition of citizenship which focuses on the citizen’s relationship to governrnent, how their preoccupations and their ‘solutions’ work for people with different and specific needs?
Civic tech should be about people, rather than technology, so, Instead, she suggests, a new definition for civic tech, “Any tool, approach, process or solution which is created with public good in mind” and she argues that we should move from a civic tech which is based on ‘hardware, software and APIs’ to put technology at the service of deliberative processes, in which everyone can become involved.
Our podcast is an extract from the Civic Radio podcast – for the full version click here.
You can also subscribe to Civic Radio on Itunes.
Laurenellen McCann @elle_mccann.
Laurenellen is a key player in the world of technology and democracy in the US, here she is on a panel at the Code for America Summit 2014 with Catherine Bracy, Diana Nucera and Denise Taylor)…….
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What is The School of Sound?
The School of Sound is a symposium created to encourage a cross-disciplinary approach to using sound in the arts and media. It explores what sound does, how audiences listen.
It is a place where you can raise your awareness of how audio production works, how it conveys information and emotion, how you can work with it.
Sound always seems to be occupying areas of ambiguity – the emotional, the subtext, the intuitive, the borders between reality and fantasy, the conscious and the subconscious. But how do you think about something so ephemeral? And how do you teach it?
For four days, you’ll be immersed in a world of imagination,
invention and innovation. Listening to presentations from a diversity of incredible talents, you will be able to reflect on sound as something that is profoundly complex, entertaining and important.
The School of Sound provides a rare opportunity to hear and meet a stellar line-up of very talented creatives working at the highest levels of the arts and media speaking in detail about how they think and work, including: sound designer Walter Murch, composer Jocelyn Pook, choreographer Siobhan davies, filmmaker John Akomfrah, sound designer Rana Eid, and Foley specialist Nicolas Becker.
Skillset is offerering bursaries to cover the fee through their Diversity fund. Women working in radio, film or TV are eligible. But hurry, it can take some time to process requests. See: http://www.schoolofsound.co.uk/sos/registration-and-fees for details.
Photo is of Nicolas Becker, the renowned Foley artist (Gravity, Wuthering Heights) who has now turned to more abstract, space-based sound work. He will be describing his techniques and methods at the School of Sound).
In this second podcast from Civic Radio, Jo Barratt talks to Simon Willis, Chief Executive of the Young Foundation about social inequality ad civic participation.
Willis says that many people in the UK feel forgotten and disenfranchised, he is concerned to find ways to hand voice and power to people who feel excluded, to enable them to establish their own ways of doing things, on their terms, when political parties fail to address their needs.
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Has the world of commerce encroached irrevocably on our civic spaces, and how much do we care?
Civic Workshop is asking that question and looking at ways to reframe our everyday local experiences with an awareness of our collective social and political future.
A key part of Civic Workshop is the new Civic Radio. We are hoping to cover a lot of their output here on Pod Academy – take a listen to this first podcast in which Jo Barratt talks to writer and urbanist Adam Greenfield @agpublic about a new vision for the civic. How much is civic exclusion growing because of what participation demands or expects of us?
Civic Radio will be on the road, seeking out the people and organisations that are exploring these topics in different ways.
http://www.civicworkshop.city/blog/2015/2/10/civic-radio-episode-01
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Would you like to translate one of Pod Academy’s podcasts? We are looking for volunteer translators.
We have just published our first translation. Héctor Pittman Villarreal from Peru has translated the transcript of the ethnomusicology podcast into Spanish – see it here.
Pod Academy is a truly global platform. We have listeners from all around the world, in every country, on every continent. Several of them have said it is great to listen in English, but they would like to be able to check if their understanding is correct. Others would just like to read about the research we cover in their own language. For that we need to be able to offer translations in many different languages.
So…..if you would like to translate one of our podcasts into your own language, we’d really like to hear from you. We cannot pay you – we are all volunteers (and Pod Academy is a registered charity) – but if you’d like to get involved in this way, you would be making a very valuable contribution. And we would, of course, publish your name as translator.
Please choose the podcast you’d like to translate, and write to us (in English) saying which language you could offer: info@podacademy.org
As the picture says – Thank you, Gracias, Merci, Bolzin, Biyan………
Picture Woodley Wonder Works
Here at Pod Academy we are convinced that podcasting is a great way to get research out to a wide audience, to make an impact.
If you’d like to try your hand at making a podcast, here are some tips to help you, they came out of a course we ran for our volunteer producers. And take a listen to the podcast above – it demonstrates a number of different approaches you might take.
Preparation
Preparation 1: Preparing around the CONTENT
What are you trying to achieve?
First of all decide, what are your objectives for the podcast. Of course two of your principal objectives will be:
But you may have other objectives, such as: –
It may be that your objectives span all or none of these, but whatever you are aiming to achieve, be clear about it from the outset as this will help in your preparation and will inevitably influence the questions you ask, the tone, the writing and the editing.
What is the story? Why should we care?
This American Life’s Alex Blumberg says you should be able to pitch a story in this way:
According to Alex this simple formula will give you the story. Other people talk about this as ‘the angle’ of your podcast. It is certainly an essential stage to go through in the preparation for your podcast.
To decide what is the angle, have a preparatory conversation with the academic whose research you are covering and really pin him/her down on the following questions:
Remember, one way of finding the angle is to see if there is an ‘est’ word associated with the research – the first, the best, the worst, the biggest, the smallest, the most, the last etc. Ask the academic.
After that conversation, think about it yourself. Decide: What is this podcast about?
The audience
Part of your preparation should be to think about your audience and what would interest them. Pod Academy has a broad audience, but it is helpful to imagine just one listener, because then you are more likely to make an appealing podcast, that works as a communication from one person to another. Try this listener:
A bright, engaged 28year old who is prepared to listen to and maybe even sign up with Charity street fundraisers, who probably plays or watches a bit of sport, has good friends who he/she values, has a favourite soap opera, and listens to an eclectic range of music. Importantly, has a 40 minute commute to work, during which time they listen to podcasts.
How can you engage/entertain/inform this listener?
Chunking the content
Think of your content in 4 chunks (note: they might not divide up as neatly as this suggests – for example, in the interview you might ask some of the more detailed questions in Chunk 4 when you are on chunk 3 about the significance of the research.)
Chunk 1: Why did they undertake this research?
You are looking for 2 main things here – personal motivation, any important background/context about this field.
The sorts of questions to ask……
Chunk 2: Why is this research important?
You are looking for the significance of the research for people, the planet, the field. This is still a broad sweep chunk – helping you to tell the audience why they should care.
Chunk 3: The detail
This is where you drill down to discover the findings of the research – key facts and figures, and, very importantly, – examples, metaphors, anecdotes, stories to illustrate the findings. Try to have at least 3 examples, stories, word pictures per interview.
The sorts of questions you might ask are:
Chunk 4: Reflection
This is a chance to get the academic to think about what they have said, maybe even re-visit some of the ‘why this research is important/ what’s the story’ issues
Possible questions:
Remember the angle you want to pursue. Ask questions that ensure the whole thing will hang together, around this angle.
Preparation 2: Preparing around the STRUCTURE
You will mainly think about structure once you have the interview(s) in the can. However, after you have had your preparatory conversation with the main academic about the significance and take home messages, you will need a broad plan for the structure.
A Pod Academy podcast is most likely to follow one of the following structures:
Make a diagram of your structure: A storyboard.
To tell the story, what do you need to record?
Try not to record too much material, it will make your editing job very difficult – work to a 2:1 ratio (or even less) if possible.
To tell the story, what might you need to find:
Make sure they are not copyright protected (unless you have lots of money to pay the rights holder!). A good source of Creative Commons licensed material is CCSearch
Recording an interview
Technical issues:
Make sure you have a recorder that records in WAV, and ensure it has enough memory and fully charged batteries. Use a microphone.
Choose a quiet spot to record the interview. Before you start, listen to the atmosphere in the room through your recorder and earphones – you are far more likely to be aware of the distracting air conditioning, or people in the room next door if you listen in this way. If ambient sound is bad, see if you can find somewhere else, if that isn’t possible, ensure that the interviewee’s voice is louder than the ambient sound by holding the mic close to his/her mouth (though not so close that there is lots of popping). Also, you will probably have to make a feature of it in the podcast eg ‘I met up with Jim in a busy student café’.
Before you start the interview, record a minute of ‘silence’ ie the atmosphere in the interview room – it could come in very handy in the editing room!
Sit alongside the interviewee to record the interview. This produces better sound than sitting opposite them and poking the mic in their face. Wear your headphones (with one phone over an ear, and the other not over an ear – that way you can hear what is being said, and hear the sound quality).
Get some level by asking the usual ‘What did you have for breakfast’.
Craig Barfoot has given us some great tips for recording over Skype.
Asking questions
Have a prepared list of questions, but don’t be afraid to go off it with….
Other issues during the interview:
Straight after the interview
Editing your interview
We use Audacity – it is free sofware, it is easy to use and does a good job. There are lots of videos on YouTube showing you how to edit with Audacity, how to cut out ums, delete sections, move things around, add music and other voices.
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Apparently, the average Brit eats 7000 calories on Christmas Day, amid a week of eating mince pies, chocolates and Christmas cake. No wonder many of us are calorie counting in the new year!
But according to two academics at Harvard University, Richard Wrangham, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Rachel Carmody, Visiting Fellow in Human Evolutionary Biology, the calories listed on food packaging may be misleading. Cooked, mashed, and blended foods yield more calories than the unprocessed foodstuffs on which calorie labeling is based.
This blog was first posted on The Conversation website on 5 January 2015.
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Food labels seem to provide all the information a thoughtful consumer needs, so counting calories should be simple. But things get tricky because food labels tell only half the story.
Calorie tables tell only half the story
A calorie is a measure of usable energy. Food labels say how many calories a food contains. But what they don’t say is that how many calories you actually get out of your food depends on how highly processed it is.
Food-processing includes cooking, blending and mashing, or using refined instead of unrefined flour. It can be done by the food industry before you buy, or in your home when you prepare a meal. Its effects can be big. If you eat your food raw, you will tend to lose weight. If you eat the same food cooked, you will tend to gain weight. Same calories, different outcome.
For our ancestors, it could have meant the difference between life and death. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, when early humans learned to cook they were able to access more energy in whatever they ate. The extra energy allowed them to develop big brains, have babies faster and travel more efficiently. Without cooking, we would not be human.
Animal experiments show that processing affects calorie gain whether the energy source is carbohydrate, protein or lipid (fats and oils). In every case, more processed foods give an eater more energy.
Take carbohydrates, which provide more than half of the world’s calories. Their energy is often packaged in starch grains, dense packets of glucose that are digested mainly in your small intestine. If you eat a starchy food raw, up to half the starch grains pass through the small intestine entirely undigested. Your body gets two-thirds or less of the total calories available in the food. The rest might be used by bacteria in your colon, or might even be passed out whole.
Oats – cooked and uncooked
Even among cooked foods, digestibility varies. Starch becomes more resistant to digestion when it is allowed to cool and sit after being cooked, because it crystallizes into structures that digestive enzymes cannot easily break down. So stale foods like day-old cooked spaghetti, or cold toast, will give you fewer calories than the same foods eaten piping hot, even though technically they contain the same amount of stored energy.
Highly processed foods are not only more digestible; they tend to be softer, requiring the body to expend less energy during digestion. Researchers fed rats two kinds of laboratory chow. One kind was solid pellets, the type normally given to lab animals. The other differed only by containing more air: they were like puffed breakfast cereal. Rats eating the solid and puffed pellets ate the same weight of food and the same number of counted calories and they exercised the same amount as each other. But the rats eating the puffed pellets grew heavier and had 30% more body fat than their counterparts eating regular chow.
The reason why the puffed-pellet-eaters gained more energy is that their guts didn’t have to work so hard: puffed pellets take less physical effort to break down. When rats eat, their body temperature rises due to the work of digestion. A meal of puffed pellets leads to less rise in body temperature than the same meal of solid pellets. Because the puffed pellets require less energy to digest, they lead to greater weight gain and more fat.
Our bodies work the same way. They do less work when eating foods that have been softened by cooking, mashed or aerated. Think about that when you sit down to a holiday meal or dine in a fine restaurant. Our favorite foods have been so lovingly prepared that they melt in the mouth and slide down our throats with barely any need for chewing. No wonder we adore them. Our preference is nature’s way of keeping as much as possible of these precious calories.
Unfortunately, of course, in today’s overfed and underexercised populations nature’s way is not the best way. If we want to lose weight we should challenge our instinctive desires. We should reject soft white bread in favor of rough whole wheat breads, processed cheese in favor of natural cheese, cooked vegetables in favor of raw vegetables. And to do so would be much easier if our food labels gave us some advice about how many calories we would save by eating less-processed food. So why are our nutritionist advisers mute on the topic?
For decades there have been calls by distinguished committees and institutions to reform our calorie-counting system. But the calls for change have failed. The problem is a shortage of information. Researchers find it hard to predict precisely how many extra calories will be gained when our food is more highly processed. By contrast, they find it easy to show that if a food is digested completely, it will yield a specific number of calories.
Our food labeling therefore faces a choice between two systems, neither of which is satisfactory. The first gives a precise number of calories but takes no account of the known effects of food-processing, and therefore mis-measures what our bodies are actually harvesting from the food. The second would take account of food-processing, but without any precise numbers.
Faced by this difficult choice, every country has opted to ignore the effect of processing and the result is that consumers are confused. Labels provide a number that likely overestimates the calories available in unprocessed foods. Food labels ignore the costs of the digestive process – losses to bacteria and energy spent digesting. The costs are lower for processed items, so the amount of overestimation on their labels is less.
Given the importance of counting calories correctly, it’s time to re-open the discussion. One idea would develop a “traffic-light” system on food labels, alerting consumers to foods that are highly processed (red dots), lightly processed (green dots) or in-between (amber dots).
Public health demands more education on the effects of how we prepare our food on our individual weight gain. Calorie-counting is too important to allow a system that is clearly limited to be the best on offer. We need a major scientific effort to produce adequate numbers on the effects of food-processing.
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