Collaborative Cross-Sector Writing

 Event 

Collaborative cross-sector writing: Is editing a book so different to creating a music compilation?

Part of the School of Education Research Seminar Series 2023-24.

About the seminar

In this lunchtime seminar, Michael and Sarah will discuss their recent experience of co-editing the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Springer book Human Data Interaction, Disadvantage and Skills in the Community: Enabling Cross-Sector Environments for Postdigital Inclusion (2023).

They will share with participants the pleasures and challenges of the critically reflexive process necessary to bring together an extremely diverse set of chapters from authors working across different sectors of the wider community.

The chapters are rather like tracks on a compilation album, mixtape, or playlist, drawn originally from the ‘live music’ of our collaborative, postdigital online dialogues about Human Data Interaction (HDI) and developed into a creative, academic collection.

Perhaps few people would argue with the notion that data and their sources need to be interrogated, rather than accepted at face value, particularly where the vulnerable in society may be disadvantaged. However, the book goes further to question where data begin and end, in an age of Artificial Intelligence, and as data of all kinds passes through our individual postdigital contexts.

This requires in-depth, ongoing discussion, when even this book has materialised as a form of data. So how then does it differ from, or overlap with, other forms of data, such as music or poetry?

About the speakers

Sarah Hayes is Professor of Education and Research Lead in the School of Education at Bath Spa University. Previously, she was a Professor of Higher Education Policy in the Education Observatory Research Centre at University of Wolverhampton.

Before joining the University of Brighton, Michael Joplin was Professor of Education and Director of the Education Observatory at University of Wolverhampton (2017-22) and Professor in Education at Northumbria University (2014-17). He studied at UCL, University Sussex and Goldsmiths, University of London and worked for Becta and the National College for School Leadership before moving into HE.