1. The audience entered a small studio and sat facing a thrust stage on their level. I had been standing next to the door as they entered. On stage (centre) was a small table with two pizza boxes stacked one on top of the other, a chair behind it, a bucket stage right (decorated with jewellery) and a wine glass and jug of water stage left.
2. I walked past the seated audience and into the performance space. I was wearing a puffball skirted almost tutu-like salmon pink dress with garish pink eyeshadow, glitter, heavy eyeliner, false eyelashes, false nails and glittering pink shoes to replicate the image of a pageant entrant. The tutu-like appearance of the skirt also provided a fleeting reference to dance, the reason for which I will explain briefly.
3. I gave two balletic curtseys, blowing kisses to the audience, then sat on the chair, took an elegant swig of water and opened the first pizza box. Inside was a pan-based pepperoni pizza.
4. My backing track began with five talking-clock style “pips” (a nod to the entertainment industry). Using this as a countdown, I instantly began to eat the pizza as fast as I could. The intention was to aim to match or break the unofficial record of a 24″ pizza eaten in fifteen minutes held by Richard LeFevre (according to the Major League Eating & International Federation of Competitive Eating website). It lasted the duration of my twelve-minute time allowance, and prompted the audience to leave with five further “pips”. The track continued for another three minutes, announcing the point at which the record had previously been held with a final five “pips”.

The following tracks featured in my real-time backing track, to represent various areas affecting womens’ body image:

• Paper Doll originally by the Mills Brothers, covered by Michael Bublé (representing the necessity some women feel to adhere to physical standards set by men)
• Don’tcha by the Pussycat Dolls (the effect of celebrity on womens’ body image)
• An interview with the family of Sarah Siskin, who died of bulimia in 2003, available here
• Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky (the effect a career choice has on womens’ body image, i.e. dance, sport, acting)
• Vogue by Madonna (The effect fashion has on womens’ body image)
• An interview with “Liselle”, conducted by NHS Choices, who suffered from bulimia for more than ten years, available here
• 4st 7lbs by the Manic Street Preachers (the lyrics of which describe the horror of an eating disorder)

Unfortunately, I failed to break the record. However, the response I received from the audience was extremely interesting, as you will discover here.

Waiting for the show to start.

I was happy with the way it went in the end. And to hear people coming up to me telling me it was good and it touched people emotionally and made a few cry was amazing (if that is the right word). I didn’t think it would to be honest. But it did.

Anyway I just wanted to do a little update about it. More will follow tomorrow.

Hannah x

The performance went so much more differently than I had rehearsed, it just went so much more slicker and more funnier than I expected. As soon as the audience came in the looks in their faces as they saw the free alcohol really made them happy. Which was so interesting to observe, with the music and the alcohol, a club atmosphere was set. The lighting was multicolored and flashing when they entered.

The audience participation was so much better than I expected I knew straight away that it was gonna be a good show, because when I said my first line ‘My name is Michael Francis Anthony O’Hare’ straight away the audience was laughing this told me they were up for a laugh.

The whole performance was a lot ruder and cruder than I originally planned but speaking to the audience afterwards they agreed it worked because it  fitted in with the show. One audience member Cedric Sedo commented to me that he was laughing so much he cried. Which made me extremely happy…not that he cried but that he enjoyed the show so much he came up to me and told me face to face, which a lot of the audience did.

There were 6 stages I had in the piece:

Stage 1, audience coming in me welcoming them, they take there drinks either sit or have a little dance.

Stage 2, I started with the first story which was losing my viriginity.

Stage 3, was the Edinburgh seduction story and getting a taxi out of Edinburgh all for the sake of a threesome.

Stage 4, this story I found was the funniest to do. This was when I had sex in the engine shed toilet.

Stage 5, the final story was the boat nicking story, where I became a pirate.

Stage 6, this stage was the end of the show people were invited to come up and have a dance or leave it was totally up to them. It was really nice to see a lot of people come up and dance at the end.

I was drinking on stage and contrary to what the audience thought I wasn’t drunk not one bit… but merely enjoying the show and playing to the audience.

The music I chose really worked it had comical effect and worked well with the club scene.

When the audience walked in the music was:

Pass Out by Tinie Tempah

Blame it by Jamie Fox

Buzzin by Mann

Losing My virginity music:

Sexy and I know it by LMFAO

Edinburgh story:

You to me are everything by The Real Thing

The engine shed sex scene

The Best of You by Boyce Avenue

Bump n Grind by R Kelly

Boat robbing story

Regulate by Warren G

End of show

Big Booty Bitches by T Spoon DJ squad

Staging

The staging of my play was so simplistic and simple. It was a chair. When using audience members in scenes I would ask them to bring their chairs up and at first when rehearsing it I thought it would be a hassle but it went really smoothly and I was really pleased with that.

Did having my friends in the audience effect the outcome of my performance?

I honestly don’t think so, yes there were people in the audience who knew me but there were also people who didn’t and to my eyes they enjoyed it as much as my friends if not more.

How did I as the performer feel after show

Exhausted, nervous and truth be told a little bit tipsy. But still very proud of myself for going out in what I can proudly call a BANG and a laugh.

Today, if you want to optimize your site, you can do it by yourself, of you can get an expert to do it for you. SEO Nottingham is a firm that specializes in the provision of various SEO services. Therefore, if you need to optimize your site, then this is the right firm to help because it uses various techniques to optimize sites.

One of the most common optimization techniques that they use is keyword optimizations. These experts regard keywords as important because these are the words that will drive in traffic, and tell the word what the site is all about. Therefore SEO Nottingham will usually get your keywords, and then make sure that your site uses them in the right places, so that crawlers and bots may pick them up.

Link building is also another common strategy used by SEO firms including SEO Nottingham. This is a technique that works in a very simple way; a site gets linked to other sites that are ranked higher, and also better indexed. Then due to these linkages, a site’s performance increases due to the fact that search engines will rank it better since it has been linked to better performing websites. Therefore, this is one of the more popular techniques used today to optimize sites.

There are many more techniques that are used in optimization of sites. It is usually up to the firm that you hire, to look for the best way to help your site get ranked. Therefore, when looking for an SEO firm, you need to make sure that the expert has a lot of experience, and that they will listen to your needs, and then work to meet them. If on the other the service provider is rude, then you should look for another who is ready to meet all your needs.

• https://orbital.lincoln.ac.uk/project/c014fb3845e7b054/public

We’ve done this as part of our involvement in the Copac Activity Data Project, a.k.a. SALT2. Along with data from the universities of Manchester, Sussex, Cambridge and Huddersfield, our circulation data will be used to power a ‘recommender API‘, which libraries will be able to use to build “People who borrowed X also borrowed Y“-type services. The API will benefit from the power of aggregated data from multiple institutions of different types, containing tens of millions of circulation events.

You’ll notice as well that we’ve chosen to host the data on our brand-new Orbital (v0.1) research data management application. Each dataset has a persistent citable URI. We’ll be keeping the data up-to-date, and generating a new activity data file from our library circulation logs shortly after the end of each academic year.

The data consists of a number of CSV files (one for each academic year since 2000-01, plus a huge file of all the data), containing the following fields:

I’ll blog in detail another time about exactly how we created the data extracts. In short:

1. There is a table in the SirsiDynix Horizon library management system called circ_tran which records every instance of item number X borrowed by user number Y at time Z. [#1]
2. There is another table which provides a lookup between item numbers and the numbers of the bibliographic works of which they are a copy. [#2]
3. Dave Pattern at the University of Huddersfield wrote a Perl script which scrapes all the bibliographic data (title, author, ISBN) for each work from our OPAC (Horizon Information Portal) and writes it to a text file. [#3]
4. Developer, Jamie Mahoney of CERD/LNCD then stepped in, using some pretty heavy SQL on the original 3 data extracts, to:
• Hash the internal Horizon user and work ID numbers to provide anonymity;
• Convert the internal Horizon date and time stamps in extract [#1] from a version of Unix time into a readable datestamp (formula hint: cko_date*86400 + cko_time*60);
• Used the item/work lookup table [#2] to pull in the bibliographic details for each loan in [#1] from the bibliographic table [#3] (an epic SQL JOIN query), removing items which are no longer represented in our library system;
• Removed any items without an ISBN, which are of no use to the SALT recommender API;
• Tweaked the punctuation and formatting;
• Split the data into separate files for each year.

Once again, the data is at:

• https://orbital.lincoln.ac.uk/project/c014fb3845e7b054/public

Thanks are due to Chris Leach and Dave Pattern for Horizon-fu, and to Jamie Mahoney for his patient wrangling of several millions of lines of data!

You can find out more about the Copac Activity Data Project/SALT2, at: http://copac.ac.uk/innovations/activity-data/

A Big Welcome…

We’d like to take a minute to say a hello and welcome to the students who have been using the Academic Commons over the last month. It’s been great to see so many people using the space!

The Academic Commons provides a quiet and comfortable space for private study, study groups or even an alternative place to chat with your supervisor. There is also both tea and coffee available for free to keep you going throughout your studies.

Remember, the Academic Commons and our smaller area, the Classroom are available to be booked out by both staff and students – just drop us an e-mail at graduate-school@lincoln.ac.uk and we can book you in!

To begin to strategise our advertising plan we had to consider the question of “who is the target audience? who uses, purchases, decides? Where is the audience?” (Farbey, 1998, p. 19). Once we can establish our target audience then we can design our types of advertisement.

Target Audience:

Our target audience will be  students at the University of Lincoln, tutors that teach them and the people of Lincoln City.  Therefore this will effect where and how we advertise for our performance.

Where To Advertise And The Types Of Advertising Implemented:

The types of advertising that we agreed to use where as follows:

• Posters.
• Stickers (for coffee stirrers and ‘coffee cup advertising’).
• Word of mouth.
• Previous performances.

The locations for these types of advertising will be where our target audience will be from Monday 14th May onwards such as the LPAC and around Lincoln city. The justification of these locations are that 3rd year Drama students and lecturers are in the LPAC this week either performing or watching performances, furthermore students using the library for revision purposes use the LPAC cafe for refreshments. This will potentially give us a vast range of audience members to watch our performance.

As well as this, advertising our posters in various locations around Lincoln city such as high street shops will extend our range from those that are on campus to those not from the University.

The next step would be to design the posters and the stickers. The design of the poster was taken from my initial idea of a black background with white lettering stating our company name and behind this in white lettering will be numbers to represent our statistics. Improving on this was crucial because as Bryan Holme states in The art of advertising “the poster artist aims to achieve instant contact with the viewer, so the advertisers message- perhaps no more than a single word- hits them at first glance” (1985, p. 5). So what we developed was the writing on the poster so that someone would find it interesting enough to read it. So the new posters state in large white lettering THIRTY STUDIO 2 7PM 17. 5. 12 and behind this writing is one of our statistics copied multiple times to fill the poster. This will instigate curiosity in someone who sees our posters with them trying to make sense of what the statistic means in relation to our piece. Furthermore we produced posters with different statistics so those that see them will become even more curious and want to see our piece.

As well as posters we printed out stickers that state a statistic and information about our piece. With the help of the staff at cafe Zing in the LPAC we were able to stick a batch on some coffee stirrers and then the majority will be stuck on to coffee or tea cups by the cafe staff. This ‘coffee cup advertisement’ works well as this will lead to conversations about what our performance could be about and therefore creating a snowball effect of conversation and interest for our piece.

One problem with the posters is where to place them in the LPAC because the “advertisement can suffer from its surroundings, from ad’s with conflicting messages and aesthetics” (1985, p. 5) in that there are a lot of other posters around the LPAC advertising both students performances and professional performances. To tackle this we put up over twenty posters across all three floors of the LPAC including the cafe area, main doors into the building, faculty door and most of the studio doors.

Our advertisement campaign has already been given great feedback from staff and students alike in the way we have designed our posters to encourage curiosity from our target audience. We are confident that our simple yet effective way of advertising will help us to achieve the high number of audience members that we want.

Farbey, A (1998) How to produce successful advertising: A guide to strategy, planning and targeting. London: Kogan Page Limited.

Holme, B (1985) The art of advertising. London: Peerage Books.

For the time being, sign-in access to Orbital (http://orbital.lincoln.ac.uk/) is restricted to invited individuals only.

Orbital v0.1 allows a researcher to:

• sign in using their University of Lincoln credentials
• create and describe a project
• upload their data to the project
• choose a license for the data
• add a Google Analytics code to measure project analytics
• published data at a persistent URI (id.lincoln.ac.uk)
• leave feedback on the Orbital application

You can read more about this first release on the Orbital blog. We’ve also written a basic development roadmap for Orbital which gives an idea of the kind of features you should see becoming available between now and Christmas 2012.

School director Zaneta Trajkoska and senior lecturer Snezana Trpevska came over for a short visit, and they filled in a lot of the blanks for us.

We’re connected on Facebook and on Twitter, which might help the process – though I think we all want to run this project by the book and make sure everything is copied into university systems for the record. We have email accounts on their network, which is a great help for this.

Zaneta and Snezana were very helpful on the technical issues, and gave us a short briefing on the students.

The students
We’ll have 19 students on the team, and they’re all journalists with varying experience.

• They’re aged between 26 and 40;
• Most have journalism degrees, but the team will also incude business, marketing and literature graduates.
• They come from a range of backgrounds, so we should have representatives from all (or most) of the communities in Macedonia.

First step
As a first step, we need to find out more about our students. We’re asking them to do a short survey about their background and experience to get an idea of how much technical support they’ll need. We also want to get to know them as much as we can in a short time. It’s important to try to get as close as we can to the same relationship we have with our Lincoln students.

Tech issues: computer says  …  yes
These are just about solved. We’re going with the system in Skopje. We’ve all been given accounts to access their intranet, and we’re using WizIq to deliver the course.

We’ve excellent ICT support from both sides. A test run on May 9 was a bit rough at the edges, but everyone was confident it would be much smoother on the night. We’ve arranged another test for May 16, so more to follow on this.

Management structure
We’ve run along fairly smoothly, but it’s obviously a bit ad hoc, given that it’s a first for us, and that the schedule is very tight.

For future reference, we might think about a clearer split between technical, curriculum and admin tasks. UNESCO is involved in funding the project, so there is some fairly onerous bureaucracy, and we’ll have to look at how the workload panned out.

We also need to think about balancing email overload with making sure everyone knows everything they need to know.

All that having been said, I quite like the overlaps. It isn’t that confusing; and it does mean you get oversight of your task, and input from colleagues.

We tend to break up into small teams for particular tasks anyway, and we’ve been able to support each other as needed. I’d much prefer to stay at this end of the formality spectrum. It seems more in line with this type of project.

The LSM undergraduate degree show this year is scheduled for June 1st, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

All graduates welcome to drop in!

Still in the planning stage of course, but we are told that Head of School Sarah Barrow will open the show in the Jackson between 10 and10.45 a.m. and then work will be on display in the Media Building  – sound theatre, photography studios, digital production room, Co-op and Cargill lecture theatres and TV studio A. And there might even be some merriment later in the Tower Bar. No, seriously, it’s all about networking……..

The notes below have been turned into tasks on the Orbital project Pivotal Tracker site.

BL = Bingo Wing-Kuen Ling.

1. BL successfully viewed Orbital v0.1 in Internet Explorer 7 on the UoL corporate desktop and was able to sign in and grant access to the application using his UoL credentials. BL was able to create and describe a new project.
2. BL tried to upload a file from his desktop to Orbital using IE7 and received an error (this is a known bug with Orbital in Internet Explorer). He was then unable to delete this file.
3. Switching to Firefox, BL uploaded multiple files from his desktop to his project in Orbital (it wasn’t clear from the page that this was possible). This completed successfully: but because the files sizes were small, he did not receive any feedback on his upload.
4. Returning to the original file upload screen, BL had to manually refresh the page to view the changes made (files uploaded). Files scheduled for processing are marked as ‘queued’ however this status does not update automatically without refreshing.
5. Joss Winn demonstrated the file and project metadata pages, citable URLs for files, and Google Analytics on projects. The display of file metadata needs to be more complete, and G.A. needs a better explanation and links to sources of help.
6. The group discussed BL’s requirements around project calendars/timelines. BL wants to be able to view project events (meetings, deadlines, etc.) for each project (but not aggregated) and is not particularly concerned about notifications on activity/changes to files. The group discussed this and will explore ways of presenting timelines made up of three sorts of events (project events, activity stream, and comments) with each type of event suppressible in the timeline. A timeline overview will be displayed on the Orbital ‘front page’ once a user has logged in.
7. BL also would like to be able to organise project and data files in all Orbital workspaces using folders/tags, and to allow bundled file download by organising files into collections.

You can read about Orbital v0.1 in this blog post, and about the roadmap for development and release of future versions, here.

The notes below have been turned into tasks on the Orbital project Pivotal Tracker site.

BL = Bingo Wing-Kuen Ling.

1. BL successfully viewed Orbital v0.1 in Internet Explorer 7 on the UoL corporate desktop and was able to sign in and grant access to the application using his UoL credentials. BL was able to create and describe a new project.
2. BL tried to upload a file from his desktop to Orbital using IE7 and received an error (this is a known bug with Orbital in Internet Explorer). He was then unable to delete this file.
3. Switching to Firefox, BL uploaded multiple files from his desktop to his project in Orbital (it wasn’t clear from the page that this was possible). This completed successfully: but because the files sizes were small, he did not receive any feedback on his upload.
4. Returning to the original file upload screen, BL had to manually refresh the page to view the changes made (files uploaded). Files scheduled for processing are marked as ‘queued’ however this status does not update automatically without refreshing.
5. Joss Winn demonstrated the file and project metadata pages, citable URLs for files, and Google Analytics on projects. The display of file metadata needs to be more complete, and G.A. needs a better explanation and links to sources of help.
6. The group discussed BL’s requirements around project calendars/timelines. BL wants to be able to view project events (meetings, deadlines, etc.) for each project (but not aggregated) and is not particularly concerned about notifications on activity/changes to files. The group discussed this and will explore ways of presenting timelines made up of three sorts of events (project events, activity stream, and comments) with each type of event suppressible in the timeline. A timeline overview will be displayed on the Orbital ‘front page’ once a user has logged in.
7. BL also would like to be able to organise project and data files in all Orbital workspaces using folders/tags, and to allow bundled file download by organising files into collections.

You can read about Orbital v0.1 in this blog post, and about the roadmap for development and release of future versions, here.