Leicester Hosiery: part of the East Midlands Oral History Archive |
Virtual Training Suite
THE RESOURCE DISCOVERY NETWORK (RDN) is a partner of HERO, but there’s no nepotism needed to make us recommend RDN’s recently expanded Virtual Training Suite (VTS), which is among the best resources for UK students and academics on the internet. Just a few years ago, the web was a frustrating proposition for anyone wanting to research a topic – the potential was obvious, but the material was sketchy. Now the problem is more about finding the considerable number of diamonds in the even faster increasing quantities of dross, which is what makes the VTS such a good browsing companion.
Whatever your subject, there is a tutorial to match, which will take you though the process of finding the best information quickly and verifying your sources. By way of an introduction to each topic, there’s a selection of some of the most useful links with a handy ‘favourites basket’ which allows you to bookmark sites that catch your eye as you go along. Most importantly, the advice is succinct and tailored to the needs of each subject area. If you’ve ever been left fuming after a fruitless web search, this is the therapy you need.
Leicestershire Hosiery
“I tell you what Harry, you can't beat a linked toe.” This, and other intriguing pieces of advice, can be found in the East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA), which exists to collate and extend a wealth of recordings offering us a glimpse into the past. Part of the site is devoted to an audio-visual exhibition, which gathers together period photographs and explores the lives of those who worked in the textiles industry early last century. In the 1920s, Leicester was regarded as a boom town, and attracted people from around the country to work long hours on the factory floor, creating a unique community at a time of industrial and social upheaval.
While hosiery production might not appear to be a hot topic at first glance, the authentic sources favoured by the archive bring the stories of the era to life. Disappointingly, the site navigation is clumsy and involves a great many back-clicks if you wish to work you way around the exhibition, but with perseverance you can access a generous number of period photos and interviews with factory employees. Ex-workers explain their decisions to move away from their families and home towns to find work, and recall the pre-unionisation days of ten-hour shifts with no breaks. It all seems a long time past, until you consider that it is mainly the geography that has changed, not the reality for millions still working in comparable conditions across the world.
rossandjohn.com
A shortlisted entry for the Mando Group Awards 2002 (recently won by Port Folio, featured in the last edition of HERO) rossandjohn.com is the online CV for computer artist Ross Cooper. A postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art, Cooper has garnered high-profile press coverage of his living arrangements – his bedroom is one of five garden sheds installed in the spacious East London warehouse he shares with four other artists.
A panoramic view of his unique home is one of many visual spectacles on this site, which gathers together his design work, both commercial and non-commercial. The ‘vista clock’ rotates 360 degrees every 12 hours, allowing the view of a garden to indicate the time of day. A screensaver designed for office use changes image according to how long the terminal has been left, suggesting that after half a day the user is ill and after two weeks probably dead.
With such a disparate array of projects, from a Nike promotion CD-ROM to Christmas party invitations, the site itself has less of a conceptualised feel to it than, say, Port Folio, and is less fun to explore. Nevertheless, there are plenty of great ideas on show, evidence that Ross Cooper will go on to push the limits of what we can expect to see on our screens.
Mill Hill Essays
Recent years have seen a surge in appetite for accessible writing on complex science subjects, as seen by the success of books by ‘celeb scientists’ such as Stephen Hawking and Stephen Jay Gould. The Mill Hill Essays have been published annually since 1995 to aid and abet public understanding of medical science, and they deserve an audience as wide as their ambition. From physical biochemistry to xenotransplantation, issues are tackled in lay language by scientists from the National Institute for Medical Research and guest authors, who find a happy medium between entertainment and information. Try Iain Robinson’s meditation on ‘normality’ and what our perceptions of ‘normal’ mean for our health, or Dimitris Kioussis’s article on the ethical implications of breeding mice with cancer-causing genes.
All seven volumes are archived on the site, and the most recent collection is also available free as a hard copy – making it even easier for those of us with no science background to demonstrate our surprisingly sophisticated grasp of medical issues. |
