Much as we hope Open Plaques will support and expand public exploration of our surroundings past and present, we didn’t imagine a selection of our community’s content gracing an ebook in the Kindle store quite yet. Our mistake clearly, as that’s exactly what’s happened in photographic terms… Early last month (5th September 2011 to be precise), Simon Harriyott of our team received a message via Flickr about usage of some of our photographs in a forthcoming ebook. The prospect seemed intriguing, and it’s since turned out to be even more complementary to our aims than we’d initially guessed. It seems that almost without realising, we’ve managed to gather together through our user-contributed service a collection of photographs that helps overcome the usual limits of publishing. The ebook in question – London’s Blue Plaques In A Nutshell - features some 1029 illustrated plaques, 259 photographs of which come from those displayed on the Open Plaques website. Each reproduction is also clearly accredited to its individual creator, in line with the attribution license that photos need to have to be included in our service. A book is of its time – that’s half its strength and attraction, and central to how we value both the artifact’s meaning and the author’s perspective. But it’s equally true that as our physical landscape changes – and the amount of historical plaques constantly shifts with both losses and gains – something like a “blue plaques guide” is hard to keep current for more than a matter of weeks. Add to that the sheer mass of plaques to be captured (we currently have 1,625 listed in London) and in this scenario the digital, community-driven collection comes up trumps. The Contents area of the ebook divides the plaques up into 21 categories, framed by what the person commemorated is most notable for (the nearest equivalent on the Open Plaques site being ‘roles‘). Most are quite precise such as literature, science, theatre, music and politics; the notable exception is ‘overseas visitors’ (this category has some 53 entries, including Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Karl Marx and Napoleon). Of course the ebook also allows you to navigate freely between plaques, with the categories acting as a useful but optional pathway. “A native of Scotland, Boswell, was forced to spend a lot of his time in Edinburgh practising Law with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Long known only as the friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson the recent publication of Boswell’s journals revealed one of the world’s greatest diarists. Boswell was gregarious, high-spirited, sensual, attractive to women and he found in London the combination of gross and refined pleasures that he needed.” The Open Plaques team is delighted to help facilitate a project produced by someone who has real form in uncovering and curating London’s past and is also a veteran of the digital space. After obtaining at PhD in physical chemistry, author Bill McCann researched and lectured at Imperial College London, before joining the Museum of London where he worked as an archaeologist and managed a geophysical laboratory. Whilst there, McCann made an interesting intervention in the debate around the likely architectural accuracy of the replica Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre three years after it opened in 1996. From from 2000 to early 2011 he also ran StoryOfLondon in his spare time – a website that explored “the odd and unusual” history of the capital. Snapshots of this can still be viewed in the WayBackMachine part of the Internet Archive project, but the site is due to be revived shortly. Bill has always been interested in language, and moved to China as a TEFL teacher in January 2006. He has now settled in Suzhou, and has developed a keen interest in Chinese dialects, particularly those of Wu group, of which Suzhouhua is the premier dialect. He is currently the Associate Editor for China on the International Dialects of English Archive. The preface of the ebook also adds this illuminating detail: “The origins of this book go back to 2004 when I worked with Robbie Stamp and Stuart Williamson on a project that would have delivered short stories from history directly to people’s mobile phones. At that time I wrote a single aphorism for each of the Blue Plaques in Central London and these, together with short biographies of selected individuals, were to be recorded and made available to anyone dialling a special number on his or her phone. A number were indeed recorded by Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley, but alas, the project was ahead of its time, and the necessary start-up financial backing proved elusive.” There’s a parallel of sorts with another project then engrossing one of McCann’s partners. Robbie Stamp who had co-founded the collaborative online encyclopedia h2g2 with Douglas Adams, was at that time also executive producing the film of Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, released in 2005, a project that itself had struggled for several years through many incarnations and funding hurdles before coming to fruition. The trio of McCann, Stamp and Williamson were were ahead of their time with their portable history project. Seven years on, we’ve finally squared the circle: ebooks and the evolution of the web more broadly has caught up with their vision. Mindful too of the time constraints imposed upon busy urbanites and any rushed visitor to the capital, the textual content attached to each each plaque entry has retained the aphoristic brevity first planned by McCann in 2004. “The 1st woman to sit in the House of Commons, Nancy Astor’s sharp and acid wit was more than a match for her male colleagues, including Winston Churchill. She was led into the House of Commons by Arthur Balfour and Lloyd-George, both of whom had said that they would rather have a rattlesnake in the House than her. Mr Speaker advised her against wearing hats in the House; changes in fashion would excite idle comment. Ignoring him, she wore a toque on her first day.” The rabbit hole with any plaque and its underlying story – should you chose to select it – is yours to plunge down, via the Wikipedia links on the Open Plaques website and in many other places. But as a starting point for Kindle users to explore and discover six centuries of London encapsulated in plaques, this looks like a great primer. If you happen to get this ebook, we’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on it. [Extracts from James Bowell and Nancy Astor plaques copyright of the author Bill McCann]
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I posted to wordr.org
Plaque to the future: the ebook edition
http://blog.openplaques.org/2011/10/plaque-to-the-future-the-ebook-edition/
October 26 2011, 1:32pm | Comments »
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