Tom Roper's Weblog

Cheltenham and Doncaster

I write this before I know the result of this morning's inspections, but, as long as they get the all-clear, I go for;
Cheltenham 205: Akilak
Cheltenham 235: Madison du Berlais
Doncaster 325: Khachaturian
Cheltenham 340: Fair Ahead
Doncaster 400: Give It Time
There's racing at Plumpton tomorrow too. I may pay a visit

No lottery funding, no comment

Those who watch the pages of the dailies for public library stories with the zeal of an owl in search of voles, seem to have missed Saturday's Financial Times (one article can be viewed free without registration, ten a month if you've registered)  which runs a story on the future of lottery funding. Though one could argue that there is something fitting about public libraries, gateways to knowledge, being funded out of a tax on stupidity, there has always been a danger that lottery funding could be seized on by councils as an easy way out of avoiding their responsibilities to fund a comprehensive service. The Big Lottery Fund has clear guidelines about what they will and will not fund. But as public expenditure decreases, so the boundaries will blur.

There is a further danger: if the population at large were to become statistically literate, then the lottery income would fall yet further.

Ascot and Haydock

Ascot 240: Petit Robin
Haydock 330: Fortification
Ascot 345: Will Be Done

An old library book

I'm going to see Aeschylus' The Persians, the Kings College London Greek Play, part of the University of London Festival of Greek Drama next month. I thought I'd better bone up on the text and, while I have the very fine Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis edition, by Denys Page, my faltering Greek needs a parallel text, so I ordered the Loeb edition from East Sussex. The copy is kept in store and, their inter-library transport being delayed by the snow, it took a little while to reach Seaford, but I have it now.

The binding is damaged, and the spine has fallen off, but it will serve very well. It is an old copy and I was fascinated by the date label, which tells me it was first borrowed in 1939, and by the book plate. How many libraries, of any type, use book plates these days?

And here is the Browne issue card

It's a good year for Aeschylus. Agamemnon is to be the Cambridge Greek Play.

Google and China

I was amused the other night to watch a Newsnight reporter try to demonstrate the iniquity of the Chinese government by trying to access Facebook,  YouTube and Twitter from an internet cafe in the Peoples' Republic and failing.  He could have carried out the same exercise in many of this country's further education colleges, with the same results. Site-blocking is on the rise, on arbitrary criteria, depriving students of the ability to learn how to use social media, and services like library and learning resource centres of the ability to use these platforms to promote and deliver services.

But, apart from the big story about Google and China, I came across, in the pages of Le Monde, a different aspect of the relationship between these two titans. A Chinese author, one  Mian Mian, is suing Google in the Chinese courts for scanning one of her books and adding it to Google Books. Ms Mian does not write in the high-minded Leavisian traditions of the novel. One of her works bears the title Panda Sex.

Le genou de Claire (Claire's knee)

I read the obituaries, regular readers will know, avidly. More and more, as I age, those who die were known to me, or influential in my life, few more so than Eric Rohmer who has died at the age of 89.
My serious interest in the cinema is intertwined with my youthful sporting career. Lacking any hand-eye co-ordination, and being slightly built, though tall, I was pretty useless at rugby, hockey and cricket, the games of autumn, spring and summer terms at my school. I have some scars to show from my time on the rugby field, but no caps or colours.
When we entered the sixth form, things relaxed and unless one was good enough to be in the first XV or X1, the Tuesday and Thursday afternoons of mud, ice and communal showering under the lascivious eye of a master could be replaced with other activities. I enjoyed cross-country running, a completely different activity to the sprints I was so bad at on sports days. Then came the chance to take up squash. In those days the school had no squash courts, so we used those at the Cambridge University Real Tennis Club on Grange Road. I was, of course, a rotten squash player, lacking speed and any ability to hit the ball. However, the great thing about this arrangement was that there were frequently no spare teachers to supervise us, so, provided we turned up and signed in, we could then treat the afternoon as our own. So I would frequently take myself to the Arts Cinema in All Saints Passage.
This was a period when, for me, cinema meant French cinema, and at the Arts I saw Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, Godard. I also saw one Godard film, Tout va bien, in the small hours of the morning in the entirely suitable setting of a student occupation of the University’s Sidgwick site. All appealed to me, but none more than Rohmer, in particular Claire's Knee, released in 1972. I loved the slow and subtle pace of the story of the hero’s obsession with a young girl and her knee. His characters do not always come out of Rohmer's films well. He described superbly the fallible process by which they stumble their way through the moral issue at the centre of the plot. In later life I have sought out his films and I think his masterpieces were the series Comédies et proverbs and, above all, his tetralogy , Contes des quatre saisons
I have not yet see his last film, one of his historical excursions, Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon.

Obituaries:
The Guardian
Le Monde
Gilbert Adair's appreciation in the Guardian  

North doesn't matter

I have always walked in London, for reasons of poverty and speed when I first arrived, but also, perhaps more pretentiously, because I liked to think of myself as a Baudelairean flâneur. Though I no longer live in the capital, I still find it the most interesting and efficient way of getting around, in most cases, and I  feel an affinity with Iain Sinclair and Will Self as I walk from Tooting to Wandsworth, or around the centre of the city.

So I walked, of course, to the Sekforde Arms to attend CILIP in London's first meeting of 2010, on Legible London: A Wayfinding System for London. The speaker, Tim Fendley, of the Applied Information Group surprised us all by using a projector, something the faded grandeur of the upstairs room at the Sekforde Arms was not quite ready for, but he resourcefully improvised a screen from sheets of flip-chart paper.

The room was packed, though it was cold and snowy and the meeting came in the traditionally slow early part of January, and attracted a much broader spread of participants than usual. Stephen Cook introduced Tim, telling us that Ralph Adam, CILIP in London's usual master of ceremonies, having got lost on the way. He may have been joking.

Tim is Creative Director of the Applied Information Group and an information designer by profession; he asked if there were any others in the audience and one owned up. Tim has been an orienteer since childhood and is one of those at home with the symbolism of maps, but he said that most people can't read a conventional map. He showed us examples of the many imprecise ways people use to navigate around the capital, using the A-Z, asking for directions, which are difficult to give and to receive, or using simple trial and error. Not only do the millions of visitors to London need to find their way around, Londoners themselves may be unfamiliar with areas other than their normal places of work, leisure and home.

The Legible London project began in 2003 as an initial study working with the central London boroughs and business fora, aiming not just to improve signs, but to offer far better guidance for walkers. The project was to run a prototype, a measurable trial to prove the concept. They set about developing a taxonomy of walkers, but when they had discovered sixty different types and were still counting they gave up, and instead measured walking activity along two axes, the walkers' knowledge of the area and their speed, defined on a continuum from strolling to striding. Thus there can be knowledgeable striders, ignorant striders, knowledgeable strollers, ignorant strollers, and all point in between.

One of their key principles was that the system should be seamless, but information about places is controlled by many different organisations, and standards are not universally observed. Try finding a street number on a shop in Oxford Street. Even in the small space of the old congestion charge area Tim and his team found thirty-two different sign systems for pedestrians, including maps, diagrams and signs. Distances may be measured in walking time to a destination, or in metric or imperial units of length. There may be multiple signs showing the way to what is ostensibly the same place, but which send the walker in different directions, for example King's Cross. Yet all these signs conform to guidelines and are, in their own terms, accurate. In the picture Tim showed of signs to King's Cross, four organisations, each with its own system, had added a sign.

Signs can also be defaced, or can be inaccurately labelled with spelling mistakes. Street name plates in particular are a mess. Although there is a standard agreed by the London boroughs which stipulates, among other things, that there should be one on every street corner, it is a rule more honoured in the breach than the observance. The height of signs can vary, signs on road surfaces for cyclists and skateboarders can be inconsistent and confusing and direction indicators for exits can point in ambiguous or contradictory ways. Tim concluded this section with a picture of a plethora of signs at a splendidly anarchic Irish road junction.

The problem, he continued, is one of finding the right balance between information overload and information scarcity. In their work 44.5% of the people they spoke to used the tube map to navigate above ground! London is a confused environment, with few long views. One of the reasons why Oxford Street is a successful shopping street is precisely because it is long and straight. We do not have the grid pattern of New York, or Paris's long wide boulevards, designed, I was told in my youth, by Hausmann so as to ensure a clear line of fire for artillery when suppressing the future revolts that the Parisian bourgeoisie feared after they drowned the Commune of 1871 in blood.

Apart from the health benefits of encouraging more people to walk, many tube journeys in the central area would be faster on foot. Not only this, but many central London stations, Oxford Circus for example, are frequently over capacity, and rather than costly underground building projects, better way-finding above ground could help congestion. Transport for London;s journey planner gives journey times between stations but ignores the time it takes on stairs, in lifts or on escalators to reach the platform or the surface .

Tim told us that in China, Japan and Korea, where building numbers are allocated, if at all, chronologically, people will use mobiles to guide visitors or their taxi drivers to their destination. They studied a Korean student living in London: she used the underground for very short journeys, believing it to be safe and practical. There are many other such curious perceptions. Many think that Westminster Bridge, since it crosses the river, must run north-south, but in fact it runs east-west. We navigate by shops, by nodes or by visible landmarks such as the London Eye.

Drawing on neuroscience, he reminded us of the studies showing that black cab drivers have an enlarged hippocampus†. We are apparently good at perceiving structures, but poor at understanding angles, bends and distances

To the indignation and dismay of those of us taught to read maps and orientate ourselves properly, as soldiers are, he shocked us by saying north doesn't matter. Only 60% of the people in the study drew a mental map with north in right pace. We use latent addressing systems: areas, villages or neighbourhoods.

To implement the pilot in the Bond Street area he and his team used a SecondLife-like virtual environment to experiment with signs and hit on the idea of the 'mini-lith'. As an aside, Google maps, he suggested, are useless as walking maps. For example, Wigmore Street, carrying the course of the A5204, is shown as a much bigger thoroughfare than Oxford Street.

They had to choose the right number of landmarks to include, and orientated maps the way people are facing, to give people the confidence to find the way.

In the prototype, they put nineteen signs around Bond Street, the cue for another aside, in which Tim pointed out that in Bond Street underground station there is only one reference to Bond Street itself. This station of course debouches onto Oxford Street and New Bond Street is a small but significant way away, a fact that causes endless confusion to tourists, who believe that since the station is called Bond Street, they must be on Bond Street.

They found that 1.9 million people used them; people use a series of tools, maps, mobile, signs and audio information. They conducted 1300 before and after interviews, 300 behavioural observations and 50 before and after functional tests to how information was found and used.
In questions and answers I asked how they managed the difficulties of nomenclature of London areas, for example according to estate agents most of North London is ‘Hampstead borders’? Tim replied that they had debated with residents what areas should be called, citing the example of Fitzrovia, which some wish to rename Noho (as in NOrth SOho). 

The questions came thick and fast and my notes are incomplete. Here a few of the points raised:
Would it help if, at notoriously difficult underground stations exits, TfL used pictures of the scene above ground to help people orientate themselves?

Will they extends the project to all thirty two London boroughs?  At the moment the project has in principle support from every central London and they are running pilots in South Bank and Bankside, the Clear Zone Partnership area (Covent Garden and Bloomsbury) and Richmond and Twickenham. Might they include the Olympic boroughs (Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest? They’re talking to the Mayor's office and the London Development Agency

Are there any examples elsewhere in the world? No, not as far as Tim is aware. Hey started with a project in Bristol.  I see they have recently done some work in Brighton.

How did they decide how many signs were needed? It was based on a footfall analysis. On routes such as Oxford and Regent Street signs need to be provide on both sides of the road. Ideally they should be on every street corner, but if not, how far apart can they be, should they be only at key junctions? People have to trust the system, so it has to be consistent, unlike for example Transport for London’s real-time bus system which is not trusted.

The mini-liths have to be visible in crowded conditions.

How corruptible are you, someone asked? Are you open to bribes to send people to particular shops? Money doesn’t change hands when deciding what to put on a map, only the logic of way-finding. Tim pointed us to the example of Dubai, where the names of the metro stations have been sold to the highest corporate bidder leading to exceptionally unhelpful station names.

How do they update them? Much of the information is presented as digital print behind glass, so is easily changeable. The vitreous enamel plinths on the other hand, are made to be durable and so are less easy to amend.

One lesson in the way people look at information is the case of signs to say ‘you are here’ . Although they included these in many of the prototypes, people missed them and commented that a ‘you are here’ sign would be useful. They need to be unmissable.

† Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2000 Apr 11;97(8):4398-403.
Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers.
Maguire EA, Gadian DG, Johnsrude IS, Good CD, Ashburner J, Frackowiak RS, Frith CD.

See also accounts of the meeting by Richard Hawkins and Ham Life

On haggis

I never cease to sing the praises of the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required, but most public libraries have one...in fact now anyone can join any public library anywhere, if a local authority is too mean to subscribe, all one need do is join another that is less short-sighted).

The new lives for January are an interesting batch. Among better known entries such as that for Muriel Spark, or Roger Keith Barrett, or Syd as he was better known, one can find Macsween, John Angus (1939–2006), haggis manufacturer. I shall be eating one of his haggises on Burns night.

CILIP's big conversation

Who remembers the 2003 Big Conversation? It was Blair's attempt to divert attention from his invasion of Iraq earlier that year and draw the public into a discussion of such weighty issues as whether councils should have greater power to ban workplace smoking or if rowdy city centre pubs and clubs should have to contribute towards policing costs. Seven years later, nothing remains of it except for an internet domain, now unoccupied.

Why, then, when looking for a name for a debate about the future of CILIP, as the organisation approaches its tenth anniversary in 2012 and the 120th anniversary of the Library Association's Royal Charter in 2017, should such an unpropitious name be chosen? Apart from its infamous history, the phrase fails in two ways:

Big: What meaning does the word big have? A debate in which each of CILIP 18,490 members participates? Or every one of the more nebulous group of 40,000 members of the 'CILIP community' of 'members, consumers, subscribers and stakeholders'? I draw both these figures from the 2008 Annual Report. I doubt it. I think that big is merely a piece of puffery.

Conversation: this too has become a meaningless vogue word, mostly used by politicians, advertisers, marketing people and other riff-raff.

It's a pity, for a debate about the future of CILIP is desperately needed. I think the first task of the Project Board, now being recruited (see the Expressions of Interest section at http://www.cilip.org.uk/about-us/people/president/pages/big-conversation.aspx ), should be to change the name.

A drink-sodden, sex-addled wreck

Not a description of me after Christmas, but an example of the hours of fun to be had in the titles of academic papers. This year's Classical Association Conference boasts two sessions that are particularly fruitful.

Doctor Who and the Classical world: Time -travelling beyond Pompeii

Panel Convenor: Tony Keen (Open University)

Melissa Beattie (Cardiff) Stoicism in Gallifreyan society (or how I learned to stop worrying and not interfere)

Penelope Goodman (Leeds) ‘That’s not right!’: Doctor Who and historiography

Amanda Potter (OU) Turning to Stone in Greece and Rome: Petrification and the Classical Past in Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures

Graham Sleight ‘It is in the nature of poets to misuse their sources.’

And

The Transition to Empire in HBO-BBC’s ROME, Season Two

Panel Convenor: Antony Augoustakis (Illinois)

Antony Augoustakis (Illinois) Cheap Bodies, Vile Politics: Effacing the Female in HBO-BBC’s ROME, Season Two

Monica Cyrino (New Mexico) ‘The Price of Fame’: Atia’s Triumph in Rome Season Two

Rachael Kelly (Ulster) ‘A drink-sodden, sex-addled wreck’: Performances of Deficient Masculinity in Rome’s Mark Antony

Arthur Pomeroy (Wellington) Gangsterism in HBO-BBC’s ROME, Season Two

I'm not sure why they have to qualify this dire soap opera with the names of the broadcasting stations involved. Is it a bizarre intellectal property requirement? As for deficient masculinity, it sounds like the sort of thing that spam e-mails claim to cure.