Following on from the last posting ‘OpenLIVES inspires Spanish singer/songwriter,’ there is an update! Just to remind you: internationally renowned singer, Clara Sanabras had written four songs based on the life of one of our OpenLIVES exiles, Germinal Luis Fernandez, to perform at a concert and complement her latest album, Scattered Flight. Turner Sims Professor of Music, Harvey Brough arranged the compositions and trained the University of Southampton Voices to accompany Clara. Over Christmas, one of the OpenLIVES team, Miguel Arrebola, from the University of Portsmouth, arranged for Clara and Harvey to meet with Germinal in Barcelona. Here is his account of the meeting:
Clara, Harvey and I met with Germinal in Barcelona after Christmas. Clara and I had exchanged a few emails earlier, but I met her for the first time at her concert at Southampton University. Just before her concert started she said “we are recording my songs for Germinal, I hope it works”. Seeing Clara singing so beautifully about the life of our friend was magical and I couldn’t stop smiling.
Miguel Arrebola, Clara Sanabras and Germinal Luis Fernandez
When a few days later we all met in Barcelona, Clara gave the recording of her concert to Germinal in an exquisitely handmade folder, full of colour and textures, much like her voice. Germinal was chuffed to bits and said he could not wait to go home and watch it. His grandchildren were there visiting from the USA, but he was going to wait and watch the concert with the whole family.
We were all very very happy and after lots of hugs and kisses we went our separate ways. Germinal has promised to tell me what he thinks next time I see him…
by Miguel Arrebola
And here is a video recording of two of Clara’s songs, based on Germinal’s story: America to Us and Y lo que es la vida. The first recounts his impressions on arriving in his home of exile, the USA; the second responds to his reunion with his parents after 7 years apart.
OpenLIVES material has inspired the internationally renowned singer/songwriter Clara Sanabras to write and perform 5 new songs, to accompany her upcoming album ‘Scattered Flight: songs of Spanish exile’. These songs were first performed on 29th November 2013, at the Turner Sims concert hall, at the University of Southampton.
Clara Sanabras
Serendipity
The link with Clara and OpenLIVES is entirely serendipitous…and comes about due to the work of Harvey Brough, Turner Sims Professor of Music.
Harvey Brough
Harvey is a very talented, versatile and inspiring musician and he began a community choir for Southampton University staff and students which would delight our lunchtimes and bring the ‘shower-singers’ out of hiding… With about 100 of my colleagues, I took up the opportunity of ‘no audition necessary’ and joined a group who meet regularly in the Turner Sims concert hall to sing the lunchtime away…
Concerts
After two local performances, Harvey presented our choir with a new challenge: we would support the gorgeous and brilliant Clara Sanabras in a concert of Spanish songs of exile, at the Turner Sims itself. A key aspect of Harvey’s work is bringing together amateur and professional performers, and so we were excited, honoured and (maybe a bit) terrified by this tantalising prospect! Harvey also mentioned, in passing, that he and Clara were still putting material together for the concert…at which point, I leapt out of my seat and pointed him to HumBox and the OpenLIVES collection online. In particular, the incredible interview, images and drawings recounting the life of Germinal Luis Fernandez.
Clara was moved and inspired by Germinal’s story of escape from civil war in Spain, aged 11. He was split up from his parents then and subsequently lived a life of exile as a refugee in France and the USA. He was reunited with his parents 6 years later in Venezuela, where they had emigrated to start a new life.
Clara wrote 5 beautiful songs based on his experiences with lyrics which replicated Germinal’s own words in telling his story:
Children of War; The Wrong Train; America to Us; The Lucky Ones; Y lo que es la vida (Such is life…)
The Performance
Part of the ‘Los Ninos’ exhibition
OpenLIVES information about Germinal
On the afternoon of the 29th November, I went up to the Turner Sims concert hall and put up an exhibition devoted to the story of the Spanish child exiles who took refuge in Southampton after the bombing of Guernica, in 1937. This exhibition was part of a research project carried out by staff in Modern Languages at Southampton (2008-11), and it had formed the basis of the material which OpenLIVES had digitised and published as open content.
I also displayed photos and information from the OpenLIVES online archive about Germinal.
So…we were all set for the concert!
Later, the choir gathered with Clara, Harvey and the Elysian Quartet to perform Clara’s songs of exile plus the ‘Germinal’ set. We had a big audience of nearly 200 and so nerves and excitement were high! During the concert, I read edited extracts from an English translation of Germinal’s story (in his own words), which had been created by Southampton student, Laura Davies, for OpenLIVES. When I recounted his reunion with his parents after 6 years, you could have heard a pin drop:
In July 1947, Germinal got on a plane to Caracas to meet his family. He had been in the United States since he was 11 years old and was leaving it at 17, so his father would hardly recognise him. He saw a man standing looking at him, and Germinal knew it was his father, even though he was shorter than he remembered. Germinal said: “you’re my father, aren’t you?” and his father went crazy! He had bought a watch for Germinal which he was wearing at the time, and he took it straight off his wrist and put it on Germinal’s.
Clara followed this extract with the moving ballad ‘Y lo que es la vida.’ Her wonderful music and words had captured Germinal’s story and his own words in telling it. It was an amazing privilege to be part of the concert, and the ‘Germinal set’ fitted superbly with the rest of Clara’s songs which illustrate various aspects of Spanish exile including 15th century ballads, songs from the trenches, a Scottish folk song about a Scots fighter in the Spanish civil war, and contemporary responses to exile.
Watch a recording of two of Clara’s songs from the Germinal cycle: America to Us and Y lo que es la vida.
And what happened next?
The choir finished the concert high as kites…none of us could get the songs out of our heads and I’m still constantly humming either ‘Children of War’ or ‘Y lo que es la vida.’ We are all anxiously awaiting the imminent release of Clara’s album ‘Scattered Flight,’ so we don’t have to live without the songs any longer! This album will not feature the Germinal songs, but will feature many of the others that we sang.
“This has made my day!”
Germinal himself was contacted by a member of the OpenLIVES team and told about Clara’s songs based on his life story, and the performance. He was overwhelmed and said “This has made my day!” Arrangements are being made for him to meet with Clara and Harvey, in Barcelona, of which…more soon!
Rumba sin rumbo
Read more about a member of the community choir’s experiences of the concert on the Music at Southampton blog
…And here is an extract from the concert, in which Clara sings ‘Rumba sin rumbo’, from her album of songs of Spanish exile.
At the LLAS Youtube site, you can also see some longer interviews with team members talking about the impact of the project on their professional lives.
The OpenLIVES project has now finished, but the work we’ve started continues! I’m going to talk about it at the OER13 conference in Nottingham next week (Tuesday, 26th March, 2pm) and I’m looking forward to showcasing the amazing work of our team in Modern Languages at Southampton, Leeds and Portsmouth.
As the OpenLives project draws near to a close we are being invited (by the project funders) to consider the value and uniqueness of our project now and in the future. We had a bit of a brainstorm about this and came up with the following thoughts:
Preserving and doing justice to research data
A bank of testimonies has now been created which is making use of data which would otherwise be sitting unused (and unloved) on an office shelf. The people who gave their stories to the researchers were very keen that their experiences should be heard, so in sharing these testimonies as open content we feel we are doing justice to these stories and the people who lived them.
Student-centred teaching resources
In addition to being an archive these oral accounts are now being re-lived through the work that students and teachers are doing with the material in the classroom and beyond. Engaging students with the testimonies has involved classroom-based activities such as creating a magazine article using the data as well as actually helping to prepare the material for publication as OERs, which inlcudes writing summaries in English of the mainly Spanish language material. Indeed, in one case the students have actually had (indirect) contact with one of the people interviewed during the original research project. Students listened to his testimony then drafted questions to be put to him when their tutor met up with him in Barcelona, where he now lives. The resulting video was then subtitled in English by a different set of students to produce an entirely new OER (see http://humbox.ac.uk/3664/).
Curriculum innovation and originality in teaching
This project has also led to innovation in the curriculum with one partner creating a new module based around the material which as been approved and is now in progress. For the project partners, themselves, the sharing of teaching ideas and the opportunity to link research and teaching has been particularly powerful. Talking to each other about the testimonies and how to incorporate them into the classroom has given a whole new lease of life to the research and has inspired some really excellent teaching ideas. Clearly OER does not lead, some might fear, to sameness or lack of originality in teaching as the ways in which the research data is being used and the personal stamp each partner is putting on the material shows how flexible and heterogeneous these OERs can be. They are very much living objects which can be mixed, matched, adapted, expanded, remixed and updated in a wide range of ways, each of which is unique and different.
Beyond education
Out there in the wider world there is the potential for ongoing interaction with a broad audience who might also be interested in, inspired by and active in using the raw data and the OERs created from it. Putting these very personal stories out into the world is reaching out to a range of audiences who, it is hoped will, in their turn tell new stories through their engagement with and use of the material.
Collegiality and trust
In the highly competitive world of higher education this project has clearly shown that when colleagues work together across universities as a community of practice collegiality rather than competition prevails. Rather than giving away their institution’s Crown Jewels participants in this project are showing how their work can contribute more jewels to the crown through their creative use of the source material and indeed of the ideas (OERs) of others. Finally we feel that, thanks to the work of its contributers (including the project partners) the HumBox now becoming a trusted source for the humanities community.
Over the summer, we have been beavering away on the OpenLIVES project by digitising all of our raw audio files, embedding and attaching licence information to them, digitising other related files, editing videos…and putting some of our lovely recent Spanish graduates to work!
A small group of recent Spanish graduates from Southampton and Leeds have been working hard, listening to the recordings and making synopses in English for us. This invaluable work will help others to access and make better use of the recordings in research and teaching – and we are very grateful for our translators’ efforts! All synopses are being finished off at the moment and will appear alongside the recordings within the month.
As we approach the start of the academic year, each member of the project team is getting ready to start using OpenLIVES materials in their teaching (see previous posts) and I look forward to reporting the results here.
Antonio Martinez-Arboleda (Leeds) and I gave a presentation about the work of OpenLIVES at the LLAS/UCML/AULC conference ‘Language Futures: Languages in Higher Education,’ 5/6 July, in Edinburgh. Find it on HumBox.
Irina Nelson (Southampton) has also been out and about promoting the project at EdMedia, in Denver, USA, 28th June, and garnering a huge amount of interest from the Spanish speaking community who attended that event. Her slides are also on HumBox.
We are doing a lot of shouting about our project – but then we think we are doing a lot of amazing work! Come and hear more at EuroCALL 2012, in Gothenburg, 22-25 August, when Miguel Arrebola (Portsmouth) will be talking about his work on the project involving students as producers of content. Say ‘hi’ to me too, as I’ll be there talking about creating different communities of OER-sharers for languages…
The project team held a workshop on 23rd May, as part of the HEA OER seminar series, ‘Collaborative working using open research data to create open educational resources for the humanities.’ This interactive event was attended by local Southamptonites and welcome visitors from further afield, and was the first time that the whole project team have been together to present our work. It proved to be an exciting and inspiring day!
The data to be published:
Alicia Pozo-Gutierrez described why she became involved with the OpenLIVES project: she explained how she had collected a wealth of research data for another project, but then it been archived on “on the shelf,” destined to gather dust forever…however, the JISC project had offered the chance for that material to have a continued life. The materials that she had collected were primarily oral testimonies from Spanish emigres who had left Spain during the civil war, and had either remained exiles, or had returned at some point in the intervening years. Alongside the recorded testimonies were images, drawings, ethnographic notes from the original research team and other ephemera. All of this will be digitised and published under a creative commons licence for the OpenLIVES project. She admitted to being “totally seduced by this concept” of openness for her data, and by the enticing prospect of seeing students across different institutions producing new materials based on her work, and of collaborating with colleagues in innovative and inspiring ways to produce OERs.
She noted that for her, there had been some worries about how the data may be used, or misused – she felt it would be important to make sure that metadata and the context of presentation reflected “the spirit in which the materials were collected.” She also noted that this particular group of interviewees had experienced extreme cultural oppression, and had a mistrust of officialdom – this meant that the issue of requesting additional permissions for open sharing was one which required great sensitivity. Alicia’s presentation led to an interesting group discussion on licensing, permissions and creative commons. The group agreed that increased sharing will be the situation in the future, and all staff and students need to become literate in how to do this effectively.
The OERs and embedding into teaching:
Alicia was followed by her project colleagues showcasing their ongoing work embedding the research data into their teaching. Irina Nelson, at Southampton, revealed how she is creating learning objects, using the LOC tool (an authoring tool developed at Southampton featuring an in-built pedagogical template), on the topic of research skills for oral history, for example, one LO deals with how to create effective questions for interviews. These materials will be piloted and evaluated by students in the next academic year, and made available as OERs.
Miguel Arrebola, from the University of Portsmouth, has been actively using the OpenLIVES interviews in his teaching in the last semester and he could provide current examples of his students’ work. He got his year 2 students to create interactive magazines based on the life experiences of the emigres and this involved them researching around the stories, collecting other information to use as illustrative material, collaborative working to produce the magazines and acquisition of technical skills. The magazines are currently being checked and marked but will all become OERs in their own right once this has been done. Miguel conducted interviews with his students to document their experiences of creating the magazines and you can see his video of their comments on HumBox. He noted that he was impressed by their conscientious approach to obtaining permissions from third parties for use of content.
A glorious cross-institutional collaboration – students as producers
Miguel also showed a video that he had recorded with one of the interviewees (Germinal Luis Fernandez) in Barcelona. His students had recorded questions, in Spanish, to put to Germinal – and Miguel videoed his responses. When Miguel returned to Portsmouth, he passed the video to Irina, in Southampton, who set some of her students the project of subtitling it -which they did magnificently. The Southampton students worked as a team to understand subtitling conventions, methods and techniques for good subtitling, and to decide who would subtitle which sections. Then they taught themselves how to use the technology to do it – and they did it! This video is available as an OER.
A new module based on OpenLIVES materials
Antonio Martinez-Arboleda, from the University of Leeds, spoke about his plans for a new module which will run in the next academic year: Discovering Spanish Voices Abroad in a Digital World. This final year module will require students to work with the primary data and to create their own responses to it in the form of video documentaries. Students will acquire a range of technical, critical and research skills – and will be encouraged at every stage to make their work available as open content and “give it back to the community.” Antonio also intends to create a series of autonomous learning activities which other teachers can use in conjunction with the OpenLIVES interviews in working with their own students. See an example on HumBox.
The afternoon saw workshop participants setting up accounts on HumBox and looking through the resources. Alison LeCornu, from the HEA, attended as Academic Lead for Flexible Learning and explained the work of the HEA and the various events and funding opportunities available through that body. She recommended becoming an HEA Associate…which one of our team noted sounded like a free employment agency – which has to be a good thing! She also flagged up the Learning and Teaching Development grants on offer, and played a key role in workshop discussions and activities.
It was an excellent day representing a project which is a joy to be part of, and which is producing a rich and creative collaboration from all involved – the project runs until January 2013…follow us and see what happens next!
On 12/13 May, the University of Southampton hosted a weekend-long event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the arrival of Basque child refugees in Southampton. The children were housed in a camp at Eastleigh and were welcomed warmly by the local community (if not by the UK national government) and were entirely maintained by public subscription and local support. This report by ITV tells the refugees’ incredible story.
The event was attended by about 250 members of the public, niños and their families, the Spanish ambassador, members of the Basque government and senior leaders within the University. One of the organisers of the event, Alicia Pozo-Gutierrez, is also one of the OpenLIVES project team, and it is her primary research that will be published as open content as part of the project.
The OpenLIVES team (plus our excellent student helpers) were there on the day, taking pictures, recording interviews and videos. Find these open resources on HumBox and learn more about the project.
The 12/13 May will see celebrations in Southampton to commemorate the arrival of ‘los ninos’ (child refugees) in Southampton. They were fleeing the civil war in Spain and were welcomed and given a home in the Southampton area (amongst other areas in the UK and across the globe).
On the 12th May, there will be a ceremony to hand over the archive of the Basque Children’s Association officially to the library at the University of Southampton, and on the 13th May, there will be a day devoted to discussion around how the stories of the Basque children have been represented in film: When history meets memory and the arts: The story of Spanish Civil War evacuee children in film. Two key OpenLIVES researchers have been involved in organising the weekend of activities (Alicia Pozo-Gutierrez and Irina Nelson).
Research work around the stories of the Basque children is related to the work of the OpenLIVES project. However, we intend to digitise and publish a broader range of emigrant testimonies relating to returning migrants and refugees who fled to countries other than the UK and at different times during the civil war. I will attend the weekend event to document and collect new materials for sharing as part of the project.
The OpenLIVES project blog 