Tweeting It Up @ #bavs2012

By Jo Taylor It is the first evening at BAVS 2012 (@VictorianValues). Delegates lounge around the bar at The Edge, our venue at Sheffield University, discussing such critical matters of Victorianist interest as William Morris’s relationship to bubble-wrap, the various ‘funny Victorians’ Tumblr pages, and the benefits of ice cream provision. In a dark corner, a table is surrounded by silent academics, lit only be an eerie glow from beneath. The sparse light falls on fast-moving fingers and slightly glazed

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A Year on Social Media Part 1: Twitter

August bank holiday marked an important milestone for me. It was a year ago that my friends David and Jamie persuaded me that I needed to join Twitter. Of course, I knew about Twitter but was at the time rather dismissive of it. I thought only people like Stephen Fry and Sarah Brown tweeted. When my mother asked me ‘Why aren’t you on Twitter?’ I replied with smug confidence that ‘Twitter isn’t really used by people of my generation; it’s

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Twitter in a Higher Education Classroom: An Assessment

Adeline Koh “Okay, everyone, now I want you to take out your phones or laptops and log on to Twitter.” My students gazed at me wide-eyed as I said those words last semester. One of them started laughing, saying, “Man, I never thought I’d hear a professor saying that.” Social media is often decried as one of society’s new ills. Many condemn social media for creating a “distracted” generation, one with gnat-sized attention spans, and make heartfelt appeals for a

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Will Abberley, ‘To Make a New Tongue’: Natural and Manufactured Language in the Late Fiction of William Morris

In 1885 William Morris wrote that poetry had become near-impossible in the modern age, since ‘language is utterly degraded in our daily lives, and poets have to make a new tongue each for himself: before he can even begin his story he must elevate his means of expression from the daily jabber to which centuries of degradation have reduced it’ (IIB 483). Abberley explores the intellectual influences that shaped Morris’s belief in such linguistic degradation, and how his late fiction

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This week

It’s been a busy couple of days here at JVC online with Lisa and I attending the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS) annual conference. It was also the first time that we had met in person. Accompanying this post is pictorial proof of our encounter (taken after 3 days of heavy conferencing!). Thanks to Jim Mussell and Amber Regis, we’re fortunate enough to have the conference Twitter feed for anyone interested in looking at what was about ‘Victorian Values’.

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The Tweets of BAVS2012

#BAVS2012 has come to a close and soon the hash tag will be no more. For those of us who are on twitter we will no longer be scrolling through the tweets wondering what people are hearing or have heard. For those of you who might not have attended the BAVS conference but use twitter their might be feeling of relief that all mention of BAVS2012 will shortly be over and that threads will return to normal. Of course, you

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Walking the Corridors of the Past: A tour of Singleton Abbey

Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Liverpool John Moores University) In a recent blog for History Workshop Online, Toby Butler suggests that field trips should become ‘an essential part of the…university curriculum’, noting that ‘[s]urely no history degree taught in a city could not find a place for a visit to a museum or a historic site, and perhaps a talk from a curator?’ I agree with Toby. As university teachers, I believe we should be thinking of imaginative ways to teach our modules

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Encountering the Fin-de-Siècle: Utilising Archives for Undergraduate Teaching

Dr Sarah Parker (University of Birmingham) Never judge a book by its cover. Clearly the late-Victorians didn’t hold much by this adage, or we would not have inherited so many stunning examples of book design from the fin-de-siècle period. As critics such as Nicholas Frankel and Joseph Bristow have emphasised, one of the central goals of the aesthetic and decadent movements was to produce the ‘beautiful book’ as an objet d’art in its own right. John Gray’s Silverpoints (1893), for

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Teaching the Victorian City

by Matthew McCormack, University of Northampton matthew.mccormack@northampton.ac.uk How do you teach urban history? Moreover, how do you inject life into the midterm slump of a 25-week, second-year survey module? These were questions that I sought to address three years ago as I prepared to teach HIS2006 ‘Victorian Britain’ at Northampton University. I had taught the module since 2004 and – as every ‘action researcher’ should – had altered it slightly every year in the light of my experience of teaching

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Teaching with Blogs: “The English 19th century Novel”

Dr Charlotte Mathieson (University of Warwick) Context The English Nineteenth-Century Novel is an honours-level undergraduate module in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, on which I teach 3 classes of 15 students in weekly 1.5 hour lecture-seminars. I set up a teaching blog for this module at the start of the 2011-12 academic year, having previously experimented with using a teaching blog for a first-year literary theory module. There are many ways in

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