Finding Inspiration
Imagining Questions of Travel
Starting to Locate Resources
Finding Inspiration
Choosing your topic and writing a learning package will depend upon a whole range of factors. One thing is certain: worthwhile learning takes enthusiasm, patience, time and an open mind.Remember thatyour ideas can make a difference! Learning more about how history, society and culture is woven into our everyday life is an enlightening process.Try to choose a topic that will take you and your audience on a journey, raise questions and open new perspectives. From the very start of any learning journey it is absolutely crucial to talk to others. Ask for advice, make contacts, e-mail people, chat, find help and get others involved.
Ideas for research can come from many directions: conversations, reading matter, art, family histories, social events, buildings in the street, random curiosity, radio programs, websites, or perhaps from a strong sense of political commitment to social justice, class values, racial equality, gender rights. Although it is a large and multilayered website, the underlying ideas behind the Connecting Histories project emerged from some simple but important issues: how has a city such as Birmingham developed over time? What different people have lived here? What shared experiences exist between so many different communities? And how important is it to renew a sense of ‘social justice’?
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Imagining Questions of Travel
The idea behind the Questions of Travel exhibition was inspired by a painting that hangs today in the Local Studies and History collection of Birmingham Central Library on floor 6. The idea for a learning package was born from a sense of curiosity about the large Victorian portrait of a gentleman standing next to a world globe: Sir Benjamin Stone. A brief learning package was imagined to uncover the context of this painting. What was Stone’s relationship to Birmingham, the library, and the rest of the world?
Birmingham today is a culturally diverse city. The Connecting Histories website contained an exhibition page called city stories aiming to give introductions on less well known aspects of Birmingham’s past. This section offered one way of presenting a learning package on someone like Stone. Would Benjamin Stone’s life and painting link back to the themes that were central to the rest of the website, such as ‘social justice’ or ‘migration and settlement’?
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Starting to Locate Resources
Once you have a rough idea for your project, you need to know what materials may be available. To do a learning package, you will need to find some historical sources on your chosen subject. In the case of the Questions of Travel exhibition, getting some initial biographical information and an initial sense of what collections were available was vital, if an exhibition was going to be possible. So who was Sir Benjamin Stone and what archives or collections were available at Birmingham Central Library? This was quickly assessed by:
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consulting biographical sources (DNB; ‘Local Obituaries’; Websites)
establishing the archive sources on Stone.
This meant visiting the City Archives and Local Studies and History, consulting staff, checking library catalogues and consulting an old fashioned ‘card index’ to the Benjamin Stone ‘Photographic Collection’.
At this early stage, a number of things had become clear; Stone was an important 19th century pioneer of photography and travel whose reputation was local and national. His life was linked to key issues of how to ‘represent’ places, landscapes, and people. Meanwhile, the Birmingham Central Library was discovered to hold a massive collection of photographs which could be accessed, researched, and explored though microfilm. The ideas for an exhibition theme were now starting to emerge: ‘how did Birmingham experience the world through the photographic images taken by Sir Benjamin Stone’. However, this would need much more work and thought to develop. Some short working titles were considered, such as ‘The Pleasures of Travel’ ‘Questions of Travel’, ‘Birmingham Photography and Education’ and ‘Exploring the Empire’.
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Author: Dr Andy Green
Image: Dr Andy Green
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