Research Journals

John Barker is both a novelist and an author of non-fiction essays about political, social and cultural issues. Barker's essays, published in magazines such as Variant or Mute Magazine, bristle with historic depth and accuracy of information, woven into critical narrations written in a dense prose. This evident richness of background research is maybe a result of Barker being inspired by the research methodology of a great of the 20th century, C.W.Mills. In this guest contribution, written specifically for thenextlayer.org and the taxi-to-praxi workshop, John Barker introduces us to Mills' concept of intellectual craftsmanship.

(please excuse the note form of this article)

Background
I am involved in a number of drupal projects, both new and legacy, some as paid projects, some volunteer.
I am involved or want to help with the maintainence of the code base (security patching, upgrades etc). However not all of the projects are on my own server. And as I am not a hosting company that is how things should be.
However, patching and upgrading is a pain, especially over many sites. How could this be managed efficiently and cooperatively?

The Solution in general

I have had to use subversion recently for a job, which is great as i've been meaning to start using it for ages! Here is an intro to subversion, and following a suggestion of how it could help next layer and related projects in a very practical way.

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Subversion is a "versioning system" that is used most often by coders and documentors to store text files, but can actually be used for any kind of data.

The Copenhagen Free University (CFU), together with other "self-institutions" such as the Universite Tangente http://utangente.free.fr/ in Paris and the University of Openness, London, successfully promoted the notion of the need to create ones own institutions and hijack the meaning of the established institutions. The free university exists outside the hierarchical and commercialised model into which Europe's universities have been turned. The CFU promoted a more egalitarian system where everybody could use the tag 'university' to their own ends. The CFU ceased its activities by the end of 2007 and in connection with the abolition of the institution its founders, Henriette Heise & Jakob Jakobsen have written the following statement:

Knowledge Transfer Conference Scotland
St Andrews University
Friday the 4th April 2008

Part One

Knowledge Transfer (KT) involves the two-way flow of ideas, skills and people between the research and higher education community and wider users in Society in the public and private sectors.

Solid Knowledge
As privatisation of educational structures progresses, the Academy assumes corporate and business mind-set, while we assist to a shift of the educational mission in society from inclusive to exclusive. The influential play of industries has permeated most academical disciplines, in particular regarding the adoption of technologies. The choice of educators has become biased by logics of short term profit, rather than Solid Knowledge.

Dear all, I have thought about the questions put to us by Taxi to Praxi. I will elaborate a bit.

How do you define practice-led artistic research?

One has to look at the context, the Bologna Process aims to create a European Higher Education Area by 2010. Due to this process the Belgian Academy’s and University’s recently are merging into one structure. This evolution has created a need for 'PhD candidate researchers in Fine Art ' in the Belgian. academic world.

Inventing Methodologies is a series of conferences designed to provide a platform for the discussion of the novel and highly-contested notion of practice-based research in art practice.

Practice-based researchers are faced with a dual challenge. The first is the intrinsically bifurcated nature of a research project composed of a written element in conjunction with a practical element. The second is the interdisciplinarity inherent in writing art. These structural complexities are also an enduring characteristic of the practice/theory relationship.

These are images of the Greenfield Scalp transmitter that serves North Fife and Dundee in Scotland, UK. This is an AM radio transmitter that is owned by the commercial National Grid Wireless network.