Tom Schofield

The Eighteenth-Century Political Participation & Electoral Culture (ECPPEC) project ran from 2020–2023 to explore how people participated in parliamentary elections in England in the period from 1695 to the Reform Act of 1832.

Part of the project collected, transcribed and digitised polling records from 20 case study constituencies. This database contains those voting records (as at 07/11/24) in a single file that contains:

Voter_id (an ID for each record, for internal use)
Election_id (again, our internal ID)
Election Year
Election Month
Constituency
Type of Constituency (Borough, County, University)
Election Type (by-election or general)
All candidates running in that election
Candidate(s) seated as result of election
Voter surname
Voter forename
Occupation (if available)
Candidates voter voted for

Plural Heritages and Community Co-production is a landmark contribution on the nature and plurality of heritages and how they can be creatively and ethically presented in urban space.

Providing an overview of the concept of plural heritages, this book explores the theory, politics, and practice of community co-production as they intersect with currents in critical heritage thinking, walking as ethnography, and digital design methods. Told through a central case study in Istanbul, Turkey, this volume aligns with cultural and political imperatives to consider the plural values, meanings, affects, and relativities of heritage sites for the multiple communities who live – or, as for diaspora and displaced groups, have lived – with them. It suggests a range of methods for locating and valorising alternative perspectives to those centrally deployed through museums or other institutions, such as UNESCO World Heritage listing, while also exploring the complexities of the past in the present and the ontology of heritage.

Plural Heritages and Community Co-production will be of great interest to researchers, academics, postgraduate students in the fields of heritage and memory studies, museum studies, history, geography, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and politics. The book will also be of interest to heritage professionals, policy makers, and site managers involved in community engagement and participation.

This article draws on a multi-disciplinary project based on the David Almond archives at Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The project combined archival research, augmented reality (AR) technology, Almond’s magical realist writing and experimental workshops to explore whether AR can enhance young people’s engagement with archives and literature. In the process it highlighted the extent to which Almond’s fiction is itself a form of augmentation that represents a particular geographical location—the North East of England—in ways that challenge official accounts of that place. This aspect of Almond’s writing corresponds to what Michel de Certeau describes as tactical spatial practice and is closely associated with some forms of AR.

At a time when it is particularly urgent to identify models of intersection across the digital and cultural sector to respond to an emergent funding and policy environment, this article contributes to a body of scholarly work around designing digital interventions for museums by identifying the role of cultural content in shaping design spaces for collaboration. The context of the article is a research project that brought together magical realist literature and the development of an Augmented Reality smartphone application realised through a public programme held at a museum of children’s literature. This process created an open-ended design space within the organisation embedded into the development of public engagement workshops around magical realism and place making. It investigates how the cultural content (from archival material) occupied a key role in shaping technological development and suggests strategies that could grant autonomy and sustainability to cultural organisations in engaging in digital transformation.

The default position towards temporality in designing for the web is to treat it as unfortunate constraint that negatively affects user experience. In contrast we look to the complex temporal interactions of networked technologies as a site of theoretical and aesthetic interest with the power to engage users in speculative and critical attitudes towards technical infrastructure. We argue that by valorising the temporality of networks and considering new forms of representation we open a range of creative possibilities with the potential to engage users in fundamental questions about technological infrastructure: who owns it, where it is and how it intra-acts. We provide examples of two artworks that treat with the subject of network time and discuss a basic guiding taxonomy to inform future work in design.

The recent proliferation of a reality TV genre that focusses on welfare recipients has led to concerns that prime-time media experiences are exacerbating misconceptions, and stifling critical debate, around major societal issues such as welfare reform and poverty. Motivated by arguments that 'second screening' practices offer opportunities to engage viewers with issues of political concern, we describe the design and evaluation of two smartphone apps that facilitate and promote more critical live-viewing of reality TV. Our apps, Spotting Guide and Moral Compass, encourage users to identify, categorise, tag and filter patterns and tropes within reality TV, as well as reinterpret social media posts associated with their broadcast. We show that such interactions encourage critical thinking around typical editing and production techniques and foster co-discussion and reflection amongst viewers. We discuss, more broadly, how these interactions encourage users to identify the wider consequences and framings of reality TV, and offer implications and considerations for design that provokes criticality and reflection in second screening contexts.

The development of critical discourse and experimental practices in computer art of the 1960s and 1970s was informed by new forms of collaboration between artists, scientists and institutions. This paper acknowledges the debt owed by modern visualization practice to developments of this period but suggests that much of the artistic and philosophical legacy has been largely ignored in this area. It is argued that criticality in visualization practice should be informed by a number of aspects of 1960s and 1970s computer art practice, including implications for collaborative practice, thinking about mediation and the integration of aesthetics with life experience.

There are tensions, apparent to us now as never before, between the polished gloss of consumer technologies, their intuitive design, their smooth interfaces and the hard, angular and unforgiving infrastructures of programming, electronics and electrics which make them possible. Ongoing industry directions to cluster and integrate in services such as Apple’s iCloud present disparate agents as one unified object. This ideological project of gathering, abstracts users ever further from the affordances and techne of things in themselves. A gap is perceived then between image and canvas, between surface and depth.A short survey of the critical and philosophical implications of this dissonance will be undertaken with an emphasis on the discursive territories opened for artists and in particular the creative opportunities of directly using examples of ‘machine voices’: glitch, static, recordings or traces of magnetism as art making materials. It will be argued that such materials allow practitioners to collapse distances between image and object. Two recent artworks will be discussed which explore such possibilities in the context of screen-based art.It will be further posited that technological development has depended on a subjectivity distributed between humans and non-humans and that to acknowledge this is crucial in evaluating not only our own relationships with and attitudes to media but also outside the sphere of human concerns in the great outdoors of metaphysics.

Hoy en día son más aparentes que nunca las tensiones existentes entre la reluciente pátina de las tecnologías de consumo, su diseño intuitivo y sencillas interfaces y las rígidas, inflexibles y rigurosas infraestructuras derivadas de la programación, la electrónica y la electricidad que las hace posibles. El interés de la industria actual por agruparse e integrarse en servicios como iCloud de Apple presenta a agentes dispares como un objeto único. Este proyecto ideológico aleja a los usuarios de las funcionalidades y la techne de los objetos en sí mismos. Existe un desfase entre la imagen y la tela, entre la superficie y la profundidad.En este artículo se repasan brevemente las implicaciones críticas y filosóficas de esta discordancia, haciendo especial hincapié en los territorios discursivos que han introducido los artistas y, en especial, en las oportunidades creativas que supone utilizar ejemplos de «voces de máquina» –glitch (fallos técnicos), ruido estático, grabaciones o restos magnéticos– como material artístico. Se argumentará que estos materiales permiten acortar la distancia entre imagen y objeto. Se analizarán dos obras que exploran estas posibilidades en el contexto del arte basado en pantalla.Finalmente se postula que el desarrollo tecnológico se ha basado siempre en una subjeti-vidad repartida entre seres humanos y elementos no humanos y que reconocerlo es esencial para evaluar no sólo nuestra relación con los medios sino también para definir lo que queda fuera de la esfera de las preocupaciones humanas para adentrarse en el gran espacio abierto de la metafísica.

The direct indexical relationship between text and material is not only structurally embedded in the computer systems which manage, facilitate and entertain us, but rests in a history of science, belief, law and magic. While text is compiled in machine code, enacting the processes which turn on our street lights, render our videos and send data packets to the server, older societies performed other enactments of text, containing their own syntax and lexis. Religion, sorcerers, alchemists, writers of constitutions brought forth, with hubristic self-certainty, the world as we know it; spells, gold and human rights in that order. Burj Babil (Tower of Babel) is a video installation work. To create the tower, the source code file has been subjected to a number of transformation processes which corrupt and destroy the tower in different phases. The processes transform the vertex and face coordinates from the source code file into ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange 2) characters. The results are then fed into language translation services (babelfish.yahoo.com). Most of the file is ignored since the sequence of characters do not correspond to real words. However when chance causes the ASCII sequence to form a recognizable word this will cause a corresponding physical translation of that vertex point. The resultant corrupted code is then used to re-make the model causing its eventual collapse. The final result of this process is a number of video sequences showing the destruction of the tower as its source code file is translated into different languages.