Month: February 2015

BOOKS! What Are They Good For?

Billy Cummock / / Main Page

The task set to us to complete for 2nd February was to create a book as an art form by taking the

simplest definition of a book.

Definition:

A written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in

covers. (Oxford Dictionaries, 2015)

My Definition:

A book holds information.

Using this information, I devised the idea from one of my book titles. The Complete Collection Of

The History Of The Lizard Kingdom. Using this title as a stimulus I decided that I would create a book

that was a representation of the information held inside of it. Lizards can be pets. When kept as pets

lizard are kept in clear containers with no freedom to leave their surroundings unless exhumed by

their owners. I used this information in order to come up with the idea of using a plastic bottle and

shoving information forcibly into it, this would create a sense that not all information is obtainable

either, or that all information is set out as one would want it.

I gathered information on lizards and cut it into fragments, I placed it all into the bottle. Voila, my

book.

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Billy Cummock

OxfordDictionaries (2015) Book: Definition[Online] Available at: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/book

What The Math Is A Book Anyway?

Billy Cummock / / Main Page

On the 28th January 2015, our first real site specific seminar was based on the idea of what a library

is, what a library is ultimately doing and what in turn this means for the books in the library. Does

the incorporation of different materials presented in books change the meaning and ideology of a

library? Does it change what a library does? Does it change a library’s social context? What if the

categorisation of books was a massive contributing factor in how a person learns? Perhaps libraries

should be more social, perhaps a library should become what it entails in its book.

In this seminar, we were asked to clear our minds of all thoughts (if that’s even possible) and

subconsciously write 50 book titles. Whilst doing this task I adopted a method in which I counted

back from ten whilst controlling my breathing in order lose focus of anything around me. I had to do

this several times whilst performing the task in order to keep my desired mind state.

50 Potential Books: (yeah, right?)

1. 72 Virgins & Counting

2. The Complete Collection Of The History Of The Lizard Kingdom

3. What If We’re Not Alone?

4. Conspiracies theories about 911

5. Charles Manson: Our Lord & Saviour

6. This is becoming apparently futile

7. Life as we know could come to an end

8. The only thing you’ll ever need to read

9. 9/11 was a hoax

10. Stephen Fry is a Lizard

11. Bring me that horizon and other things Jack Sparrow said that no one really understands

12. OK, time for plan B

13. Wake & Bake

14. The Cruel intentions of David Cameron

15. Dragons and China

16. The Terrorist’s will win

17. North Korea: the Script for the musical

18. The Theories behind the conspiracies

19. Nuclear relationships: A blast of a time

20. Wibbly Wobbly Wongle Dong

21. The A-Z of Lizards

22. The encyclopaedia of the troubled north

23. Suicide Season is over

24. Bass is best

25. Come toward the light and live in fear forever

26. The Evil Living

27. Cut off from all

28. How to assassinate a president/prime minister or other worldly leader

29. Deicide

30. The Yoghurt Thieves

31. The universe isn’t expanding

32. I think you’re the fucking antichrist

33. Why are you wearing that stupid man suit

34. Farage is a dictator

35. Why being political is boring

Billy Cummock 1338304226th January 2015

36. What if we’re all to blame?

37. Or Maybe not

38. Grandma Death

39. Scream

40. How to have common courtesy

41. An open letter to no one

42. Watkins should hang

43. How to kill a vampire-werewolf hybrid

44. How to set a fire

45. How to not get caught

46. How to not plead guilty

47. Solar Plexus

48. Smoke

49. Cooking with fire

50. Breaking the 3rd wall

Okay, so maybe some of them are a little unorthodox. Next we were asked to come up with a few

categories in order to section these books off from each other. So here they are:

Potential Sections:

1. Conspiracy theories

2. How to:

3. Miscellaneous Items

4. Why we all hate politics

5. Statements

So maybe I’m a little disturbed but whatever, not like I’m actually going to publish one of these

books. Oh Wait…

Billy Cummock

Food Library – Experiment

Paul Chappel / / 101 Things to Do with a Trolley, Main Page

On Wednesday the 18th of February, we were asked to test out our idea for our final performance. Our idea is that during the day we set people who want a piece of food, a question or a riddle which relates to a certain book title or passage in the library. The reward for the correct answer is a snack of some kind.

In our miniature version, we tested out an example of a question and reward system with the groups in our class. Everyone in our group came up with a different question to test on the other groups. My task was: “Find a book that was written by a Drama Lecturer at the University of Lincoln in under 15 minutes”. The premise being that, even though we as students are taught by these lecturers, we are unaware of their work and how it is kept within the University Library. The group had to find the book without resorting to the dependency of technology and the search tablets within the library. Unfortunately the task turned out to be a lot easier than I had intended it to be, within no time at all they had found 1 of the 10 known books which were in the library. So, I gave them an additional task to try and find another book by a drama lecturer… which they did just as quickly as the one they found the one earlier. The group were very pleased with themselves, deservedly so, and were rewarded with their snack – a bag of sweets.

The simple idea behind the task is that students are motivated to learn through a physically active game as well the prospect of free food as an award. In my mind, it builds upon the idea of both: the metaphor “Food for Knowledge”, and the student food-reward system (where a student rewards themselves with food if they have completed the amount of work on their essay that they have done)

 

Paul Chappel

Let’s talk about books, baby

Andrew Brooks / / Main Page

Since we are all going to be performing in and around the library, I felt it only natural to write something about books. Not just what we expect from a book, but also inclusion from what we have talked about in seminars where we questioned: What is a book?

So what do we expect from a book? Many pages together to form a novel, or a collection of stories or poems, or something informative. As much as someone may want to avoid books because they don’t like reading, it is hard to avoid them as we grow up with them, we learn from them in school and they can help to shape who we are. In fact, most of us will have had one when we were babies or toddlers and had them read to us from our parents. But also at this early age, they can help us to talk and read, so books are important to us as we grow up.

Books not only help to shape who we are as we grow up, but as we have grown up, we read more and more and learn more and more from the books we read. Even from fictional books we read as teens, the books we class as teen books, can help us understand things socially, help us find ourselves at a time in our lives when we really need to find out who we are. So for me, books are incredibly important to us as humans, so that we can develop and learn.

However, if we look at books from an academic perspective, then they help us learn, but in a completely different way. They help us have an understanding of the wider world and help us form an opinion on matters we may learn about, for example, from a personal perspective on academic learning, I found this in the first lecture for another module. We were told about the politics of teaching and how the arts were basically getting kicked out, and this made me form an opinion of a matter I previously had very little knowledge of.

But as we, as a group, have explored in seminars, books aren’t just something we read, they aren’t just the stereotypical object we fine in libraries or Waterstones, but could be a plastic food box filled with marshmallows and strawberries and inspiring quotes. They can be something we listen to, or even a plastic bottle filled with facts. It’s as if you could do anything and still call it a book as a book, seemingly, could be anything. Literally anything.

Andrew Brooks

Food for knowledge test run!

Samantha Foster / / Main Page
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Josh looking for the answer my question. In the Merry Wives of Windsor what are the mistresses names?
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So close!!
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Looking for the answer 😀

On Wednesday, 18 February we were asked to do a trail run of our idea piece that are to perform in our site-specific location of the library. Through a miniature version of our performance we decided that we were going to give people questions to find the answer to questions about certain library books. If they found the answer within a certain amount of time (10 minutes were allocated) they were given a piece of fruit or sweets as a reward. Finding knowledge and getting rewarded with food became quite a fun game to play in the library as lots of students like munching when writing essays in the library.

To help support our idea we started looking at Blast Theory. (Blast Theory, 2015). Blast theory looks at the concept of using site-specific work by the use of games. There was an example of “Can You See Me Now” where they used real-life people and people playing online.  It was a big game of  “ hide and go seek”. This example shows that a game can be used in a big city environment and shows that shows the link that people can have with computers in everyday life.

We were asked why we want to look at the link of food and knowledge. Our answer is that food is a basic necessity and that in modern society knowledge is becoming one of the key factors of everyday life as well.  In this University library trial run, these two crossed over in more ways than people realise. Nowadays when we study we use food as a reward after we’ve done a certain amount of work and if we can make students use the old way of finding knowledge, by just using a library book and no technology and reward them with food, they may go away from this experience with a new information without them realising it – due to them being rewarded with a basic everyday thing that is food.

The feedback that we got on our trial run is that fellow students were asking how it would be done. We were looking at using one of the library group rooms or some empty library shelves to indicate our base. Once a question was answered correctly and the ‘contestant’ picked his food reward from the shelf, the empty space would be filled with the book where the information had been found from.  Then this shows the sources of information the participants had used to gain the answers for the day by the use of the reward of food.

Blast Theory. (2015) Chronology. [Online] Brighton. Available from: http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/our-work/. [Accessed 12th March 2015].

Samantha Foster.