The Spoken Word web site and blog will be unavailable from 3:00pm on 28th December until 12:00 noon on 30th December 2009. This is due to statutory High Voltage maintenance being carried out at Glasgow Caledonian University on the supply to all server rooms. We apologise for this and will try to ensure that disruption to web site access is minimised.

A Glasgow Caledonian University network upgrade is planned for this coming weekend and this means that access to many web services will be disrupted on Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th November 2009. Every attempt will be made to minimise the length of disruption, but unfortunately you may not be able to access the Spoken Word web site and blog for some or all of this period. Please accept our apologies for this unavoidable downtime.

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On the 20th of January 2009, Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States of America. This Spoken Word Collection marks the occasion by looking back at Obama’s journey to the White House, as well as considering some of the issues he will face as he begins his term in office. There is also archive BBC footage of the immediate reaction to his election victory, and debate about the roles played by both race and religion in the election.

The World Tonight.
Robin Lustig assesses the significance of Barack Obama’s victory for race relations in the US and asks if the world will see many changes in American foreign policy.

Up all night – US Presidential Debate: 27/09/2008
Coverage of the first debate between US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, live from the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.

The Wednesday documentary – My senator, my vote: Episode 1.
Following the Democratic and Republican national conventions, we know much more about the two men fighting it out in the US presidential race, and what they would do in office – but what does the electorate itself want? In My Senator, My Vote the BBC’s Robin Lustig travels to each of the candidates’ home states to meet four ordinary Americans, and finds out what issues have determined their choices. In Part One, we go to Illinois – the state that Barack Obama represents as Senator. Two middle class residents of Chicago explain why they are on opposite sides of the political fence, and foreign policy looms large in their considerations. Should the United States deal with the rest of the world from a position of overwhelming strength, or would its people be better served by a more conciliatory approach? As Robin discovers, it’s not only a question of international strategy, but also one of national identity. Both programmes lift the lid on typical Americans’ lives, highlighting the kind of everyday hopes and fears that will help decide who goes to the White House. Each programme has a sting in the tail however – when Robin asks his subjects to sit down and debate their choices for president. Whose beliefs will best stand up to scrutiny? And will any voter change the other’s mind? Find out in My Senator, My Vote.

Panorama: what now Mr President
Barack Obama takes over as US President with a promise to dramatically change America and make it a fairer place. He is inheriting the worst economic crisis in almost a century, and a country so unequal that 23,000 people die every year because they cannot afford basic healthcare. To close the gap between rich and poor Obama will have to take on the might of the corporate world, which wields enormous influence in Washington. Can he change the world’s most powerful country, and should he?

President Obama: – The Inauguration
Live coverage of the Inauguration of President Obama, with Huw Edwards and Matt Frei in Washington.

Photo by Flickr user Shutterblog, used here under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic .

I missed this announcement towards the end of last year. Not sure yet of the significance for Spoken Word but an interesting step, especially the news that Tony will ‘develop common standards and policies which can be used across all BBC archive activities’.

‘The BBC’s Director of Archive Content Roly Keating has made his first appointment, with former BBC Controller, Internet Tony Ageh joining his team as Controller of Archive Development.

The BBC’s Archive Content team has been set up to maximise on-demand access to the world’s largest audiovisual archive on public service and commercial platforms and through external partners.

Working with Roly and colleagues across the whole of the BBC, Tony will play a key role in developing the BBC’s archive strategy, with specific responsibility for developing ways of making the archive easily understandable and accessible to users………’

Full Press Release from the BBC

The Spoken Word has recently been involved in providing technological support to a class that is part of the MA in Multimedia Journalism based at Glasgow Caledonian University. The class is run by Claire Dean who is a former reporter at STV’s Scotland Today programme.

The Spoken Word has set up blogs for the each of the students in the class and has introduced them to various new media tools that are currently being used such as tagging, live updating through twitter and polling.

Today’s session of the class included a talk and question and answer session given by Kyle MacRae. Kyle is co-founder of the website Scoopt. Scoopt is an online service that allows members of the public to upload their photos on to the site in the hope that the Scoopt staff can sell the image to news agencies from around the world. The idea for the website came to Kyle after watching the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami that took place on Boxing Day 2004 and the lack of images that the media could source of the event.

It was interesting to hear about Kyle’s experiences both generally and from the point of view of the work that the Spoken Word carries out – specifically in relation to the various rights clearance issues that he has encountered.

Scoopt has now been bought over by Getty Images but despite this Kyle believes that citizen journalism still has not found its feet in the online world. It appears that there is still some way to go before public input is fully embraced by the giants of the media world.

On Monday, January 5th, 2009 New York City will host the 123rd annual meeting of the American Historical Association. The programme is extremely varied and there is a multitude of sessions that concentrate on a wide variety of historical subjects.

One session chaired by David Suisman from the University of Delaware is of particular interest to the Spoken Word. It is entitled ‘What is Sound to a Historian? – Critical Perspectives on the Use of Recordings as Historical Sources’.

We thought it would be interesting both for us and for the Chairman and Panel of this session if we contacted them in order to let them know about the spectrum of historical resources that the Spoken Word project can offer to the educational community.

We have recordings on a host of historical subjects ranging from Leonard Cheshire’s eyewitness account of the atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki to recordings of various parts of the trials at Nuremberg.

The following is a list of the names and conact details of the panel that will be attending the event:

Chair

• David Suisman, University of Delaware, dsuisman@udel.edu, http://www.udel.edu/History/bio/suisman_david.html

Panel

• Charles A. Hardy III, West Chester University, chardy@wcupa.edu, http://www.talkinghistory.org/hardy.html

• Elena Razlogova, Concordia University, erazlogo@alcor.concordia.ca, http://elenarazlogova.org/index.html

• Jonathan Sterne, McGill University, jonathan.sterne@mcgill.ca, http://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/faculty/sterne/

• Emily Thompson, Princeton University, emilyt@Princeton.EDU, http://www.princeton.edu/history/people/display_person.xml?netid=emilyt

• Derek Vaillant, University of Michigan, dvail@umich.edu, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dvail/

We will update the blog and let you know about any progress with the correspondence.

Hi all. I was reading the ‘Culture’ section of the Sunday Times on…Sunday and came across an article about the release of voice recordings of some of the world’s most famous personalities by the British Library Archive.

Some of the recordings include Florence Nightingale giving a speech in Aid of the Light Brigade Relief Fund, Conan Doyle speaking about Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Miller talking about being married to Norma Jean.

The article, along with a selection of the recordings, can be found here.

On the 18th August 2008 Ewan MacPhee of Spoken Word Services presented to a gathering of around forty members of the eLearning Professionals and Practitioners’ forum at a rain soaked University of Edinburgh.

The forum is designed for members of educational staff who ‘consider themselves to be either professional eLearning/Learning Technology practitioners, or those who make use of technology within their own teaching practice and would like to engage in a more substantive way with others undertaking similar activities’. It is also designed to cater more generally for those interested in unlocking the potential benefits that eLearning may hold for education.

The event on the 18th was entitled ‘Podcasts, Echoes and Tags – multimedia learning objects and activities at the University of Edinburgh’. Despite the title of the event it was not designed exclusively for those based at the University of Edinburgh. Outside groups – including the Spoken Word – were invited to give the proceedings some Glaswegian flair.

The meeting was organised by Michael Begg who is the eLearning Manager for the Learning Technology Section at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the convenor of the eLearning Professionals and Practitioners Forum. The Spoken Word was originally invited to the event by Erin Jackson, one of our collaborators who is based at the University of Edinburgh.

Ewan’s presentation began with a brief history of Spoken Word Services and then moved on to an explanation of the various stages involved in ordering, processing, digitising and presenting BBC materials to the academic community.

Despite the horrendous weather and the fact it was the Summer holiday season the number of attendees far exceeded expectations.  There was a lot of interest and questions from the audience after Ewan had finished presenting. The event seemed to be a great success.

Justice Edwin Cameron is a South African Supreme Court of Appeal Judge. He is widely noted as one of the first key South African figures to publicly announce that he is living with HIV/AIDS. After contracting the syndrome Justice Cameron has campaigned tirelessly to raise awareness of the various social reverberations that are a direct consequence of the disease. These include drug company pricing, lack of access to medication and governmental denial.

He lived privately with the knowledge of his illness for a significant period of time before allowing this information to become public. He was inspired to act after learning of the death of a young carrier of AIDS named Gugu Dlamini who was stoned and stabbed to death after admitting on a Zulu language radio that she was infected with the disease.
Justice Cameron has employed strong rhetoric throughout his campaign speeches and has compared those governments and officials who do not act on the issue of AIDS with those who did not act when Nazi Germany and Apartheid began to creep into the consciousness of the international community. He has been instrumental in the fight to bring the fight against HIV/AIDS to the forefront of International politics.

The following ‘Spoken Word: Collection Highlight’ is a personal and moving interview with one of modern history’s great campaigners. The radio programme is presented by Fergal Keane who orchestrates an interview that uncovers the motives behind the actions of a dying man.

• Taking A Stand

Photo Courtesy of Ben Oswest