Community Arts (including Art and Health)

‘BRITISH PRINTED IMAGES TO 1700’ (bpi1700) is a project funded by the AHRC under their Resource Enhancement scheme. It represents a collaboration between Birkbeck, University of London, and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (King’s College London). The other partners are the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. It currently makes over 5,000 printed images from early modern Britain available online in fully searchable form.

Understanding how talk can help conciliation in post-conflict situations should help mediators and peace-builders work more effectively. New computer software allows talk to be displayed on a timeline, rather like a cardiogram, and, by looking across the display, we are able to see how metaphors contribute to the shifting of ideas as talk proceeds.

This project investigates the role of sound in the human perception of the non-human environment, focusing on human responses to the sounds of birds. Contrary to the view, commonly advanced in writings on human sensory perception, that vision and hearing are radically distinguished along the lines of a contrast between objective observation and subjective participation, we suggest that seeing is as much an experience of light as much as hearing is an experience of sound. Under what conditions, then, does sound enable us to hear things, as light enables us to see them?

Research in Bolivia, Peru and Chile,
combined with museum research there and in the UK, focuses on Bolivia,
Peru, and Chile on the basis of previous ethnographic, archaeological
and museological knowledge and contacts, and three time horizons:
Tiwanaku, the Inka-early colony, and the contemporary. The primary aims
of this project are: to link visual, computer and museum studies in
areas of cognition, and curatorial methods; to advance textile studies
in areas of structure mapping and correlations with socio-cultural data;