Call for Interest – January 2021 Symposium

Cinema memory: 1930s Britain and beyond – a Symposium

We are delighted to launch a call for interest for what will be a unique symposium, held (virtually) at Lancaster University on 22 and 23 January 2021. As part of the Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive research project, the symposium will offer an opportunity for a small number of scholars to engage with a sample collection of holdings from our archive. An exclusive pre-launch portal will be set up, containing a range of ethnographic participant data and other relevant artefacts, and we invite speakers to incorporate these materials into their papers. Of course, how this material is integrated is up to you – we anticipate that some may base their entire paper on the collection, whilst others may use the materials to complement or contrast their existing work and findings.

Speakers at the Cinema Memory: 1930s Britain and Beyond symposium will be amongst the first to have digital access to material that Annette Kuhn, a co-investigator on this project, collected and curated during her landmark Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain project, ahead of our roll-out launches over the coming year. A small example of such material can be found on our Twitter account – @cinema_memory – or on our current work-in-progress website – https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/cmda.

Once interest is registered, we will in due course provide access to the password-protected portal and ask interested parties to provide a brief abstract for their paper.

To register interest, please contact Jamie Terrill – j.terrill@lancaster.ac.uk

 

Featured Item – 17/07/20

Following a brief gap, we’re back with another featured item! This time it’s not an item from the collection, but rather an area of the website that I would like to highlight; one that may prove to be of particular interest or value to academics interested in the process and life-span of a research project. Today’s featured item is then our timeline of the original Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain (CCINTB) project, an area of the website that started life as a tool to help the project staff learn more about what had preceded Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive (CMDA).

The timeline traces the history and important moments of CCINTB, before, during and after its funded period (1994-1997). You can click into each milestone to read more information about  the event, and often there are links to further reading of useful documents. For example, for ‘Funding Success! (1994)’ we have provided a copy of the original funding application/proposal to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Later, ‘Final CCINTB Report to ESRC (1997)’ includes, as the title suggests, Annette Kuhn’s final report to the ESRC about the success, challenges and outcomes of the project to that point – certainly this is the type of document that I, as an early career researcher, had previously not had access to. Elsewhere, we have endeavoured to include PDFs or links to relevant publications, conference papers, example research questionnaires and other documentation that we hope will prove to be insightful and useful.

A final value of the timeline is in how it conveys the length of life of such a project – nearly thirty years in this instance. Often as a researcher it is easy to see a project’s funding dates (1994-97 for CCINTB) and assume that represents the totality of the endeavour. Yet, the timeline tells a very different story, a project that was a few years in the making, had three years of funding, yethas maintained a life ever since, culminating in a new project and funding period (CMDA, 2019-22).

Please feel free to take a browse of the timeline by clicking here or on the image below.