Clare’s Walk is the latest production by Steve Waters, Director of Studies in Drama at Homerton College, Cambridge. In the words of the Menagerie Theatre’s web page:
“Clare’s Walk takes for its inspiration the nightmarish journey of 1841 by poet John Clare (1793-1864) from the lunatic asylum where he was incarcerated in Epping Forest to his home in Northborough in North Cambridgeshire, along the route of the A1.
“Playwright Steve Waters and actor Patrick Morris re-walked the route in June 2005, looking at how the landscape has changed since Clare’s day, and the development issues the entire region faces, examining the themes aired in Clare’s verse in a modern context: the connection between self and environment, between ownership and dispossession.”
The production has been appearing in small venues along the route Clare walked - we saw it back in April at
Milton Country Park, Cambridge. It is a wonderful one-man performance by actor Patrick Morris who re-walked the route with Waters last summer. We enjoyed it immensely - it has both laugh-out-loud funny moments and deeper heartfelt moments - a magical way to spend 90 minutes, especially if you are interested in the countryside, its past and its future. Personally, I think that it is an important work that needs to be seen more widely. Maybe it could be made into a tv production?
I have come across only one review of Clare’s Walk by Jill Sharp for The British Theatre Guide.
Anyway - you have one more chance to see it. An extra production is being staged this Friday, 14 July, 6.00pm, at
The Junction in Cambridge as part of the
Hotbed 2006 Cambridge festival of new writing for the theatre.
The play’s main source is a short journal Clare kept on his walk. This journal is freely accessible online - near the end of the ebook The Life of John Clare by Frederick Martin (thanks to Project Gutenberg, a large online repository of freely available ebooks). The Library holds many works by and about Clare and we currently have a small display on the first floor commemorating him and Steve Waters’ production.
Other links to John Clare include:
The John Clare Page
The John Clare Society
John Clare weblog [a poem a day]
Poem Hunter - John Clare [full text of 53 poems by John Clare].
Coincidentally, The John Clare Trust reports that, on Tuesday 4 July, it was awarded a ‘Stage One Pass’ from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for its project to buy and restore John Clare’s Cottage in Helpston [near Peterborough] and to open it to the public for the first time. This is where Clare was born and brought up.
Update (September 2006):
Sadly (for us), Steve Waters has left Homerton College to take up a drama post at University of Birmingham as Lecturer in Playwriting. Read his new profile.
A very long post a long time ago covered the start of this subject upon which so many hopes were pinned, hopes that the results of publicly funded UK research would be made openly accessible online. As well as being published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, the researcher would place a copy of the research in a digital repository accessible online to all - a process termed ’self-archiving’. Many UK research establishments are setting up these ‘institutional respositories’ - for example our very own DSpace@Cambridge. Eventually, if this happened, any research could be found and freely accessed online - irrespective of whether your establishment subscribed (or could afford to subscribe) to the publishing journal.
We have been waiting since last October for the outcome to the Research Councils UK (RCUK) draft policy on access to research. The original draft policy, issued on 28 June 2005 - exactly one year ago from the new announcement - stated:
“From 1 October 2005*, subject to copyright and licensing arrangements, a copy of any published journal articles or conference proceedings resulting from Research Council funded research should be deposited in an appropriate e-print repository (either institutional or subject-based) wherever such a repository is available to the award-holder. Deposit should take place at the earliest opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication.” [The asterisked addition reads: “* Date to be amended on release of final Position Statement”]
Unfortunately, it seems that the eight separate research councils which make up the RCUK could not reach an agreement. The final result, after all this time, is that each funding council will be left to decide its own policy. As Peter Suber notes in the
latest issue of his excellent and highly rated Open Access Newsletter:
“On June 28, the Research Councils UK (RCUK) issued its long-awaited open-access policy, one year to the day after it released a draft policy for public comment. The new policy is not as strong as the draft, but is nevertheless a very significant step forward that will mandate OA [open access] to a good portion of publicly-funded research in the UK.
“The draft policy mandated OA for all RCUK-funded research, but the new policy lets each Research Council go its own way. There are already signs that they will diverge. Of the eight Research Councils, some will take a few months to finish their deliberations, one will take at least until 2008, one has chosen to request rather than require OA, and three have chosen to mandate OA.”
The RCUK position on issue of improved access to research outputs provides links to the policy of each individual research council - some have yet to make up their minds. Only three of the eight have so far decided to mandate Open Access to the research they fund:
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) - ‘deposit required’
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) - ‘deposit mandatory in specified repositories’
- Medical Research Council (MRC) - ‘deposit required’
However, none of them state ‘immediately’ under ‘when to archive’. The MRC comes closest by stating: ‘earliest opportunity and within six months’. But, true Open Access as defined since the
Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in February 2002 requires
immediate archiving - that is, concurrent with its publishing date in a peer-reviewed journal. The BOAI stated its purpose was to see:
“…world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”
A new SHERPA JULIET web site is keeping tabs on the situation with each Research Council. JULIET is a sister site to the original SHERPA RoMEO site which monitors the policies of journal publishers towards researchers self-archiving a copy of their published paper in freely accessible online repositories [RoMEO stood for Rights MEtadata for Open archiving, JULIET is not an acronym as far as I can see]. Interestingly, as the RoMEO site shows, the vast majority of publishers - around 80% - already allow self-archiving of research papers!. The problem is that, without it being mandated it seems that only around 15% of researchers will take the minimal trouble of making the few extra keystrokes to upload a copy of their paper to their institution’s repository.
Stevan Harnad, a leading advocate of open access via self-archiving in an institutional repository, and whose opinion on OA developments is always worth reading, writes Fixing the few flaws in the RCUK self-archiving mandates by pinning down WHEN and WHERE to deposit, 30 June 2006 (Stevan Harnad) in his weblog Open Access Archivangelism.
The open access material already available can be found by the standard web search engines such as Google and Yahoo! Search. However, specialized search engines such as Elsevier’s Scirus, OAIster, Google Scholar or Microsoft’s new Windows Live Academic search attempt to confine their results to academic material including much that is openly accessible in digital institutional repositories.
Other links:
JISC: JISC welcomes RCUK’s statement on access to research outputs.
Ths Scientist: UK research to be open access.
The Guardian: Boost for free internet access to public-funded research.
BioMed Central [UK based Open Access e-journal publisher]: BioMed Central welcomes UK research councils actions to promote open access.
The Times Educational Supplement (TES) has announced plans for an autumn term relaunch as a full colour paper and new glossy magazine.
Bernard Gray, Chief Executive of TSL Education:
“The new TES will comprise a modern, redesigned newspaper with strong news and features content and a glossy, modern magazine, (plus new, full colour, jobs sections). The new TES will be a trusted source of news, information and advice for teachers and the education community and will provide an unrivalled service in print and online for education professionals and advertisers.
“The new full colour format will enable us to offer full colour to readers and advertisers throughout the paper for the first time.
“The paper will continue to be first with education news and will explain and analyse what matters to teachers and the education community and why. There will be new content relevant to teachers’ careers and professional lives, including incisive columns and dedicated sections, and it will be easier to find. as well as a strengthened online presence.
“The new magazine will combine the personal and professional sides of teachers’ lives and complement the main paper by appealing to those who want more than hard news, with features and insights into teachers’ working lives. There will be new specialist sections that will be relevant without being hard work, upbeat without being unreal.
“Our online presence will be greatly strengthened - with new content and resources, better navigation, an enhanced jobs site and better ease of access for advertisers and for job seekers.
The Times Educational Supplement was launched in 1910 as a free insert in
The Times newspaper. In 1914 it began publication as a weekly stand-alone title selling for one penny. In 1971 the then owner, The Thomson Organisation, launched the
Times Higher Education Supplement (THES). In 1981, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (then already owner of
The Sun and
News of the World and soon to take a major interest in
Satellite Television UK - the precursor of
Sky TV) acquired the whole business of Times Newspapers Ltd from Thomson - including
TES and
THES. In 1989 Times Supplements Ltd changed its name to TSL Education Ltd. In October 2005 a ‘buyout shop’,
Exponent Private Equity, acquired the education businesses from News Corporation making TSL Education a stand-alone business. As well as the TES and THES, it also publishes
Nursery World.
The Times Educational Supplement is the leading education publication in the UK selling around 70,000 copies per week (source: ABC). It is available in the library, along with the THES.
