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Arts Week 2015: Scribblers

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This post was contributed by Steve Waters, playwright for stage, radio and screen, and also senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

A script-in-hand performance of his new radio play, Scribblers, will be performed during Birkbeck Arts Week 2015 at 43 Gordon Square on Monday, May 18 at 7.30pm. The play charts the stormy relationship between two real life characters: young playwright Henry Fielding and the First Minister Robert Walpole.

Ahead of the sneak-preview performance on May 18, Steve offers some insights into the creative spark behind his latest theatrical work.

ScribblersScribblers’ developed out of a mystery.  I was looking into the notorious Theatre Licensing Act of 1737 with which in effect Robert Walpole used to extinguish an increasingly virulent culture of theatrical satire and noticed in Hansard, published a century later, there was mention of a particular play which provoked Walpole to use the power of the law against playwrights.

This play, ‘The Vision of the Golden Rump’, was apparently brought to Walpole by theatre manager Henry Giffard; yet despite Horace Walpole’s assertion that he saw it amongst his father’s papers, no trace of it has ever been found, nor has it authorship been established.

Yet the target of the law was clear – Henry Fielding, who we now know as a great novelist, but who then was famous for his amazingly bold and inventive satirical plays which were staged outside of the safe circuit of the licensed stage, in the semi-legal world of theatres such as the Little Theatre in the Haymarket.

But on closer inspection Fielding’s reputation as arch critic of Walpole’s tired Whig government was also more complicated. Wasn’t this the playwright who’d written a sycophantic preface to his innovative drama ‘The Modern Husband’, lavishing praise on Walpole who elsewhere he sent up as a dodgy butler (in ‘The Grub Street Opera’) or as the source of all political corruption in ‘The Historical Register of 1736’?

In pondering these mysteries, and looking closer at the fascinating interplay between stage and state in the 1730s, the play emerged as a tale of patronage and revenge. It begins with Fielding thrown on the mercy of Walpole as the Great Man fears he is about to lose his position under the new king; and we see Fielding attempt to bend his wild talents to please power – but in his failure, we see the birth of a radical stage where the truth is voiced whatever the consequences.

Yet whilst my heart is with Fielding I was also compelled by the figure of Walpole, Britain’s first ‘Prime Minister’, who lived and died a political animal and presided over the gradual throttling of the bold ideas of 1688. Walpole shaped a world of politics which resembles our own in its fast-track between money and influence, its paranoia and defensiveness.

So out of these mysteries emerged SCRIBBLERS, a vivid and all too familiar world of writers, theatres and politicians….it’s a comedy that gets darker as it proceeds; and a fable about art and power that I hope illuminates our times as well as revealing this fascinating moment in our past.

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Attention Machines: The science of cinematic perception

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This post was contributed by Sofia Ciccarone (master student of Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology, Birkbeck University of London)

It was exciting to be a part of this event, which took place in Birkbeck cinema in Gordon Square during Science Week.

Birkbeck CinemaThe people who participated not only had the opportunity to experience the amazing and capturing cinematography of The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky; they could also be both the participants and the researchers of a live experimental study.

The experiment was interested in how viewers’ attention changes throughout a movie. To this aim, audience’s attention was measured by locating their eye position on the screen. This was done by making the image disappear sometimes during the film and briefly substituting it with a flashing grid, which filled the whole cinema screen and contained a series of letters and number combinations.

The audience was asked to pay attention to this grid and to report (using their smartphones) the letter and numbers pairs (e.g. S76) they could identify among the other pairs contained in the grid. This procedure, which is known as crowdsourcing gaze data collection, is a method proposed in 2012 by Rudoy and others for collecting gaze direction from any number of participants simultaneously.

The eye movements of one volunteer from the audience were instead recorded using a portable eye tracker. The eye tracker was calibrated right before the start of the film and the participant sat in the front row of the cinema and enjoyed the film while her eye movements were being recorded.

After a shot practice trial, the audience’s eye movements were collected for the first part of the film. During the second half, while participants were allowed to watch the film without distractions, Dr Tim Smith and his team used the available time (48 minutes!) to analyse the answers submitted through the smartphones and the data recorded by the eye tracker.

After the film finished, Dr Tim Smith presented the results of the experiment. It was really surprising to find out that the two eye movement collection methods showed similar results: people mainly focused their attention on the centre of the screen. This is where the more frequently detected letter-number pairs were located. The gaze of the volunteer who wore the portable eye tracker also seemed to be mainly focussing on that area of the screen.

Why does this happen?

The composition of the shots, the camera movements, the staging and the editing of the scenes are some of the ways in which filmmakers direct viewers’ attention. As opposed to films shot in the past, modern TV and Hollywood cinema use a compositional style which involves rapid editing, bipolar extremes of lens length, wide-ranging camera movements and close shots.

For example, the scene in “The shop around the corner” (Esnst Lubitsch, 1940) where the two protagonists meet in the café, lasts 9 minutes and contains 20 shots lasting 27 seconds each. The same scene from a recent remake of this film, “You’ve got mail” (Nora Ephron, 1998), lasts 9 minutes and contains 134 shots of 4 seconds each.

This style causes the audience to have a unified experience of the film being watched, as it induces spectators to focus their attention on the centre of the screen, a type of behaviour defined as central tendency by Le Meur and others in 2007.

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Curiosity: A study about babies and ways to learning

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This post was contributed by Aline Lorandi, a visiting postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Prof Annette Karmiloff-Smith, investigating the precursors of phonological awareness in Down Syndrome.

Curiosity is unique to humans. There are many stories and quotes about curiosity in literature and in mythology. Sometimes you can get in trouble because of your curiosity, as Pandora did when she opened the box that she was given by Zeus and discovered what was inside.

Experiments at babylabWe are all curious, but there are some researchers who are curious about curiosity, as Katarina Begus, who talked about “The development of human curiosity: A few baby steps”, during Science Week.

Some researchers have shown that curiosity activates the same areas in the brain as when we consume chocolate, nicotine or when we win a race. If curiosity seems to be linked to pleasure, why is it so difficult to awaken curiosity in some people?

Driven by the curiosity about curiosity, Katarina is investigating curiosity on babies. She maintains that children seem curious about things, and that the universal gesture for showing curiosity about something is pointing. However, how can we know what babies mean by pointing?

Katarina presented a series of tests that aimed to verify in which situations babies point, including informative versus non-informative parents, different kinds of objects, and spontaneous pointing. She also reported that theta oscillation (during EEG/ERP) is found in the hippocampus during situations that involve reward.

The more motivate a child is, the more theta oscillation is found, and, consequently, the greater is his or her learning. Based on this assumption, Katarina invested on tests that can look at brain activation during play, in order to attest whether the babies would recognise some objects that they saw before as a sign of learning and motivation.

When testing learning of nonwords in informative versus non-informative contexts, she found greater theta oscillations in the brain when babies were expecting for information in informative contexts (contrasted to non-informative contexts, where no real information was available).

Although Katarina Begus has already found some very exciting results for how children demonstrate curiosity, her work is still going on, and her curiosity about curiosity never ends:

  • What is the role of technology in our curiosity?
  • How will children explore their curiosity using technology?
  • How the studies about curiosity and learning can help us prevent dementia?

Those were questions that Katarina would like to address in future researches. The audience was also curious, a fact that was shown by the questions made by the end of the talk:

  • How far children go with non-informative teachers?
  • What about their reaction to surprises?
  • What about the effects of surprise on learning?
  • How can we make people more curious?
  • What is the role of the environment on curiosity?

As Albert Einstein once said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” Let’s keep curious!

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The importance of Web Science

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Richard has a BSc in Physics from University of Leicester and an
MSc in Advanced Richard Brownlow copyInformation Systems from Birkbeck. He has over 20 years’ experience in industry as a Software Engineer and Software Project Manager and is currently studying for a PhD at the London Knowledge Lab where he is a member of the Weaving Communities of Practice Project. His research is in the design of tools to help domain experts integrate heterogeneous data sets.This post was contributed by PhD student Richard Brownlow. 

 

Annually at Birkbeck, the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems celebrates the work of its founder, the late Dr Andrew Booth, who was a pioneer in computer hardware and machine translation. Hosting this year’s Andrew Booth Memorial Lecture was the London Knowledge Lab, a unique interdisciplinary collaboration between two of the UK’s most prominent centres of research – Birkbeck and the UCL Institute of Education.

This year, we were honoured to have Professor Dame Wendy Hall present. She has played a foundational role in the development of the Web, the Semantic Web and Web Science, with her current research focussed in applications of the Semantic Web and in exploring the interface between the life and physical sciences. Along with being the first person outside of North America to be elected to the post of President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), she has also been hugely influential and inspirational in promoting women’s careers in computer science.

Along with Professor Hall’s lecture, a broad range of London Knowledge Lab research was on show in the Department, for staff, students, alumni and guests from other institutions and across the industry. Opportunities for future collaborations and research were discussed. Some of the research demos included projects relating to Learning Technologies, such as LIBE which supports literacies through lifelong learning with inquiry based education. Other research demos were in the areas of ontology querying and mobile location analytics. I was also given the opportunity to demonstrate some of my own research interests including the knowledge base developed for the Weaving Communities of Practice project.

The importance of Web Science

The magnificent Keynes Library in Gordon Square was the setting as Professor Hall kindly delivered her lecture, captivating the audience with her insight on what the discipline of Web Science means in the context of the history of the World-Wide-Web. This was especially interesting given the foundational role she played in the development of the Web, including her collaborations with other giants of the sector such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

internet

Discussing the role of the Web in knowledge creation and sharing and the need to understand it in terms of both its technical and its social aspects, she also spoke on how this multidisciplinary field has come to be known as Web Science and the establishment of the Web Science Trust (WST) in 2006. She went on to describe how Web Science encompasses the theory and practice of Social Machines and how such machines are quite different from Turing Machines, which lie at the heart of every computer.

Professor Hall described the establishment of the Web Science Trust Network of Laboratories (WSTNet), an initiative furthering academic excellence in the field. There are currently fifteen such labs, including two in the UK. She then went on to describe a new exciting initiative called the Web Observatory, through which global partnerships are established to share data sets (both open and closed) along with associated Metadata and Analytics tools. Through these initiatives, Professor Hall described how Web Science aims to understand the origins, current state and possible futures of the Web, and to further the development of new research methodologies.

It is just over 10 years since Professor Hall delivered one of the inaugural talks at the London Knowledge Lab. In her vote of thanks, Professor Alex Poulovassilis – one of the two Co-Directors of the London Knowledge Lab – drew links to that inaugural lecture, firstly in the role of the Web in knowledge acquisition, sharing and dissemination, and secondly in the need to keep historical “memories” of the Web in order to enable the longitudinal analyses required for understanding its evolution and future.

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