Showing posts with label my MA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label my MA. Show all posts

22 May 2011

Thanking God I don't have exams to worry about too

No Science Museum over the weekend!

I have to say I am completely exhausted at the end of this week. I didn't get the last two photo challenge posts out on time because Thursday night was a bit hell-like as I got home at 7pm from a full day's work and then had to go straight to finishing of an evaluation report of our Geffrye Museum exhibition project. I ended up getting around 3hours sleep Thursday night (I just couldn't let the damn thing go - I think I deleted and re-did the illustrations 5 times) and was then up at 6.30am to get back to work, and then had to travel to UCL afterwards to hand it in.

Friday night, I pretty much got home and collapsed, and then had to be up early to work at the riding school all day Saturday.

Bad week was bad.

But anyway, that report was my LAST PIECE OF MODULE COURSEWORK. This is big. This means the only work I now need to complete that will be marked and affect my MA degree result is my dissertation, for which I have until the middle of September. This is the first time in what feels like forever I don't have a deadline coming up in the very near future and don't have an essay or something I really should be working on right now.

This is a very good thing, because working full time with a 3 hour round commute does not lend itself to productive evening working. Not. At. All.

More significantly, this is the first time in months that there is not something to do for our exhibition project at the Geffrye Museum!

Yes, that's right, the exhibition is up and running and open in its entireity: feely box, family trail, web interactives, slideshow, display cases and all. The social media initiative is finished, which means no more blogging, but that's still up there to see, with a load of behind-the-scenes pictures on Flickr.

Most importantly, the project has now appeared on the Geffrye Museum's official website, where you can also find the Interactive Map and Digital Story of Tea (!) made by me and my team mate, Hannah. You can also get a peek at some of the display.

We have a private viewing evening to go to this week. Pretty much the UCL team signing off! It feels slightly strange as, although it was hard work (mainly what kept me away from blogging for a while), I have really enjoyed working on the project and it's given me great insight into digital/online museum interpretation, which I will definitely want to investigate further no matter what I end up doing.

Bye bye Geffrye! I'll miss you!

16 May 2011

Science Museum Photo Challenge

I started my work placement at the Science Museum today! It's a compulsory part of my MA but I'm really glad I have this placement as it's going to be valuable beyond that. I'm working with the audience research team, doing some evaluation there, which looks like it's going to be a lot of fun and some good experience.

Anyway, since I'm going to be there for at least the next 4 weeks, I've decided to set myself a photo challenge! Every day I am working at the Science Museum during my placement, I'm going to post a photograph (at least one, anyway) of a different part of exhibit in the museum and say a little about it.

The photos won't be amazing quality, as I don't plan on carting my SLR into work through rush hour every day, but hopefully they'll be kind of interesting and a nice little extra project for me. Not like they haven't given me enough real work to do or anything!

So anyway, here's photo #1:

This is the Science Museum's 'Energy Hall' - the main hall you enter into - with 8 metre high 'Energy Ring' suspended from the ceiling which displays different Q and As from visitors around the topic of energy production and consumption. This is where I'm working!

And lord, I never realised how truly huge the Science Museum is! I predict I will get lost at least once a week. I already tried to be clever by taking the stairs somewhere instead of the lift and got myself very confused.

Oh, go on, one more photo:

5 May 2011

...is that Maps are Pretty

As I've said before, I think maps are awesome. It's the same thing as anatomical diagrams - I love to see schematics and things laid out in detail. I don't know how to explain it, but I think that visual representations of how things work, or how they're laid out, are gorgeous.

Anyways, for our exhibition project, we got to design an interactive world map.  Well, we decided we'd like to design an interactive world map - the free rein to be creative we've had on this project has been great. I thought I'd treat you to some previews of our first designs/colour schemes. The final version goes live on the museum's website this week - bit scary!



They're made using this website's wonderful outlines, this texture (which we may need to seek commercial use for if the designs are approved) and a wallpaper from the Geffrye's collection. The final version looks different to either of these two.

Maps. So pretty.

ETA: The finished map went live on the Geffrye website today - check it out!

4 May 2011

I'm back - nobody panic!

I haven't totally neglected this blog, I swear. I've just been so busy lately!

As well as all essays, projects and reports we have to do, our project at the Geffrye Museum has kind of taken over our lives, as we were kind of warned it would. It hardly seems believable that it's almost finished - my got the last of our portfolio contributions in yesterday, our interactive map is going live on the website this week and we're finished off our digital story about tea on Tuesday. The exhibition itself goes up in the museum on the 16th of May and is well worth a look.

I still have an ethnography to write, as well as an individual report on our project. And then there's a 4 week work placement (at the Science Museum!) and a dissertation to write.

So, much work left to finish. But what can I say? I missed blogging too much.

Anyway, here's a few of photos from the time I've been missing.

As I was saying, the Geffrye project does kind of take over. Been spending an awful lot of time there, but it's an awesome place to be.


And the project team have been great to work with.



I've found myself spending far too much time on tea-related activities in the last few weeks.


No, making 'tea' out of tea leaves wasn't strictly necessary for the project but it looked like fun and it's ended up going in our slideshow!

Between working, I've been trying to make the most of summer. Fun times with the gang and such:


Riding Michael when I can.



Mikey and I have been trying to practice our jumping.



We need a lot of practice.

Hopefully the summer will see a lot more time for that!


Promise not to abandon this again - it's my new month's resolution!

13 February 2011

My Reading List

I'm currently on 'reading week'. A little break from lectures and seminars; not so much a break from work.

Our Geffrye Museum project is now in full swing, with the web team's projects approved and deadlines set. Being a real project in a real museum, it doesn't really set store by academic timetabling, and our work is running on as normal, although we are without the weekly team meeting this Friday. So a large part of 'reading week' for me will consist not of reading but of playing with photoshop as we continue to work on our designs for an interactive map, images for our 'digital story' and ideas for a possible set of advertisement cards to lay about in the museum's restaurant.

We're very excited about the resources we're creating. We finally have some nice graphics set for the map, which will let people discover the international origins of objects from the English home. I can't wait until we have a name set for the project, at which point we can set up our Twitter, Flickr and Blogger accounts and start getting people to pay attention to our fantabulous participatory events.

There is actually some reading involved. Our digital story, along with a good deal of the blog content we will be posting, is focused on 'the History of Tea in English Homes' which, while something I always wished my undergraduate degree had included a module on, is something I need to do a fair bit of research to be able to write.

Cue wonderful books such as this and the browsing of tea-related blogs and things we can link to. I love it when work is enjoyable.

Less cheery, but just as interesting, this week I am also researching the heritage of gangs and violent crime in the capital. Fetishisation and commodification thereof. We might participate via the Kray Twins Walk. I am morbidly fascinated by morbid fascination.

This is all in aid of research experience for an ethnography we are expected to write for our coursework. I have yet decide on exactly what my subject should be...it's supposed to be London-focused, on a group or particular aspect of culture or lifestyle. I want to do something equestrian-related but I'm not sure how far going to a different yard  to my own with people I don't know would satisfy the requirement we try to focus on something unfamiliar to us. But anyway this means there's also reading on writing the enthography itself, which I've never done before! Scary!

But then I'd never written a report before last November and I thankfully got a very acceptable mark for that.

Lastly, my next piece of coursework is a report on an antiquities dealership! More reading, more field trips!


But first, I think his evening I will take some time to work on personal projects. I'm making a recipe folder!

21 January 2011

Ongoing projects

I said I would do a write up of the things I'm doing right now.

First of all there's the Geffrye project which, true to lecturer's predictions, does take over your brain a bit. I keep finding myself thinking of it when I should be doing other things. We had a sub-team (web resources) meeting yesterday (which went really well!), and spent 10am-6pm in meetings or work on the project today. We have to get our proposals for our sub-team's work in by Wednesday, and also write a draft for our part in the brief. Our work, though, will go on later, than that official end date. At the moment it seems to be that me and my sub-team mate are spending 2 afternoons (about 3-4 hours each time) working on it, either by ourselves or with our contact in the museum, and the whole team gets together for most of Friday (like today). Research and work for our individual contributions then has to be done in our own time.

For this module, there are also, most weeks, 2 hour lectures.

Then there's my core module. For this, we have weekly 2 hour lectures for which we are supposed to do weekly readings. This is where I am falling down at the moment in trying to fit everything in. The readings are supposed to compliment our work, but there aren't immediate deadlines or any kind of 'judgement' on us having done it, so if there's a ton of other stuff pressing it's hard for the readings to get lost.

The core module also consists of weekly ethnographic field trips around London, which we have to self-direct. These require research before we go, coordinating a trip, research on-site and writing up findings/uploading photos (the project is based on facebook) afterwards. That's in our own time and there's a weekly hour-long seminar for group feedback.

I have one more module, which consists of weekly 2 hour lectures, plus an hour seminar on a case study. The week after next I have to research and prepare a 20 minute presentation for this. This module also has weekly readings (see above comment on that).

Saturdays I'm at the yard all day. Sunday is my only day off.

So that's my weekly schedule for the next 10 weeks. 3 hour round trips to commute every week day.

In addition to that, we have coursework deadlines. Luckily 3 out of 5 of mine fall after the Easter holiday. The project is ongoing until the end of April, and our individual write-ups and team project brief (5000 words with as many appendices as we have material for) are due on the 6th of May. We have an ethnographic project due after Easter, as well as another essay. I still have an essay due on the 10th of February and a report due at the start of March this term. All essays require fairly extensive readings - they are not 'one night jobs'.

We also need to get this work placement thing sorted! I've sent 5 emails now, but am awaiting a response from every single one. I'm going to speak with the coordinator in person this week, given that I can't get a response from her via email either.

And I need to get an internship application in this week. I always spend an age trying to get personal statement letters right.

At least we've been told we don't need to worry about our dissertations at all yet.


It's not just the hours of work, which honestly you could allow to fill every waking second if I didn't have to, you know, eat and stay sane and things - the hours are manageable, if you work hard, which I fully expected to have to do, although it'd be nice if I didn't have to spend so long on travelling every day - it's the fact that it is so many different things that's tricky. Often totally unrelated things. All of which require significant attention. 50 different deadlines you're working to at once, all of which are spinning round in my head. That's why I wanted to write this up: it's nice to have it set out in one place.

I swear I spend more time trying to schedule and prioritise my work than actually doing it.

On the plus side, at the moment I definitely feel like this course is preparing me for a career right now! They didn't lie about that.

19 January 2011

False Promises

Whatever happened to the fact arts students are supposed to have no hours, no work and tons of free time?

I had lectures and seminars from 11am until 5pm today, which, I know, isn't even a full working day (I'm not going for 'poor me' here) but then there is the hour and a half commute on either side alongside the fact I am an arts student. Boyfriend is a lawyer and spend less time in college than I do.

Not to mention none of this time includes the weekly field trip, presentation, facebook contributions (extensive notes + photographs), multiple readings and research we are supposed to do every week. At some point I will list here all the different projects I'm working on right now.

On Friday I have to be in meetings in uni from 10am until 6pm. That's not including travelling time.

Stereotypes are false promises.

10 January 2011

Every 43 Seconds

I have a thing about anatomy and skeletons and the like. I wouldn't term myself a scientist, if only because of the art/humanities direction my education took after age 16, but it's still a personal interest. Above all, I love images of anatomy. I think they are beautiful and fascinating and...I don't know. I like looking at them. Is that weird?

My cultural heritage studies lecturer can't stand what she terms 'the inside outside'. I felt more than apologetic explaining to her that the focus of my MA dissertation this year will be on the display of human remains in heritage contexts.* Personally I love the 'inside outside'. I think my interest in anatomy comes from loving to look a the way things are made, how they're constructed down to the little details, and what makes them work. I had this book when I was younger, showing hugely detailed cutaway diagrams of animal anatomy I could look at for hours...**

Anyway, I'm surprised it's taken me this long to find these, but they turned up on Fubiz today and I think they're gorgeous. In my slightly weird, apparently slightly macabre sense of aesthetics.


Every 43 seconds is a campaign highlighting death from gun violence. One example of the aesthetics of human anatomy being used to convey a powerful message.

I learnt via Street Anatomy (well, via Google really, but Google led to the discovery of the awesomeness that is Street Anatomy - it's going in the sidebar) that, although Fubiz only credits Jung von Matt for the creation of the project, the photography is the work of Francois Robert, who is definitely worth a look. They come from his 'Stop the Violence' gallery, which takes the message of 'every 43 seconds' even wider.

The internets: a never-ending maze of links to awesome.



* Can we just take a moment to pause and reflect on that terrifying prospect. DISSERTATION. I have to write one. Another one. I still have flashbacks.

** I did in once work as a gallery assistant for a display of some of the artist's work, but for the life of me his name has slipped my mind right now.

18 December 2010

It's only once essays are over I realise how much else I have going on right now.

Apologies for lack of posts, particularly so early in my blogging effort. My only defence is that I am terrible an concentrating on other things when I have coursework essays to write (I had 2) and not practised at all when it comes to coordinating blogging with 'real life'.

I'll get there. I promise. New year's resolution to blog at least once a week.

Anyway, Big News: it's snowing! No, not really.

I mean, yes, it is snowing - there is a considerable amount of snow - but that's not the Big News. Big News is I did go to Olympia despite the snow, which is all very well and good (and pretty) if you have nowhere to go, but otherwise a bit of a pain.

Olympia was awesome, as usual. I'd never been on Puissance night before, so that was a treat. I'm hoping I got myself a few decent photos (I haven't looked through them yet, given that the Canon raw codec will not work on my laptop but it's alright because I have Lightroom...that's another saga) since I got to borrow my lovely boyfriend's 100-400mm Canon L lens. Very exciting for me in my little 400d/50-250 ownership. I will get round to editing those now, along with some other things to get onto Flickr and subsequently here.

Did I mention I tend to neglect other things when coursework deadlines loom?

I was very pleased I did manage to get my first 2 MA coursework essays done in time for Olympia, actually, given my past track record of using every available minute until the deadline to finish such things. I've now done a report on a museum mission statement, a rather abstract and conceptual essay on 'living' and 'intangible' heritage (with liberal use of inverted commas) and a more grounded on the role of volunteers. I have Christmas off to start making moves toward organising my work placement next year (20 days minimum) and do some research on our exhibition project.

Ah, yes, exhibition project. This is the other Big News. Scary and exciting all at the same time. Our 'Museum and Site Interpretation' class are working with the Geffrye Museum in London to produce an exhibition as part of the Cultural Olympiad 'Stories of the World' project. Sounds very big and important, doesn't it? Supposedly it's tough, and will take over our lives, but it's also a fantastic opportunity to get some real experience of heritage sector work in a fabulous setting.
Two of us are assigned as the 'web resource development' team, I suspect mainly due to the fact we expressed a greater than normal familiarity with certain social networking sites and visual media. We did both feel the need to make completely sure the role didn't require any in depth technical knowledge - coding is not a strength I possess. I think it was enough we knew enough to ask if coding was required.
Our role is set out as:
To create an SOTW web resource inspired by the objects selected for the concourse case displays, this could be a digital story or podcast. The team will also be required to tweet and blog about the project, however they will need to have a corporate awareness about the content of the posts and what/where/when things are posted.
So, very exciting. And gives my blogging here another justification as 'work experience' I suppose. I find the new importance (or lack of importance, depending on your view) of digital aspects of heritage work and I'm quite looking forward to spending the holiday looking at the kinds of things we could bring to the project before we start really working on it next term.

So much to coordinate! But first, I am having 'fake' Christmas at home before flying to the states on Tuesday (weather permitting) for Christmas in Memphis with boyfriend's family.

Adventures!


I also think maybe I'm not cut out for Adventures. I'm currently lying in bed with a hot water bottle on my hip I have done indeterminate minor damage to, either related to hauling heavy stuff around in aid of looking after ponies in the snow all morning or to pushing a car up a frozen hill. One of the two.