Day 77 - I love it when a plan comes together

Today, I gave the inaugural lecture in my research centre's new series of open lectures entitled 'Music in a Globalised World'. Given the modest advertising I put out, I was actually quite pleased with the audience of around 15 who heard me speak and asked questions afterwards.

In the large scheme of things, that's not a huge number, but I'm not going to fixate on that right now. I'm very aware that everything has to start somewhere and we can't always expect the first event in a series to be oversubscribed. A reputation builds, and this is what I'm hoping for my little series.

The lecture was videoed, and, once I've edited it, I'm planning to upload it to iTunes U so that it is available to everyone with internet access. This is my plan for the entire series, should the speakers be happy, as it enables us to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, we are building a genuine research community within the campus that complements the existing research communities, but on the other, we are also dipping a toe in the water of open access online presence.

When I was an undergraduate student, I attended the department's guest lecture series and got quite a lot out of it. When I was a PhD student at the same institution, I was a regular fixture. When I came to my current institution to teach, I did really miss that. I think it's important for academics to continue to engage with what their peers are developing, and that research doesn't just stop with our own interests.

I think it is especially important to provide a platform for academics to hear their colleagues, within the same institution, speak about their research, as it builds awareness and mutual respect, and although I think that we largely share a lot of respect for each others' teaching, respect for research can only generally function on the basis of productivity and visibility rather than on interest and quality.

So today was a tiny step in developing this idea. I'm hoping that the audience will return in October for the next session and that they will grow.

Day 58 - Just write

Today, after what felt like a long morning spent with a couple of our instrumental tutors covering a variety of topics, I went home to compose. I spent a fruitful afternoon and came up with a harmonic structure for a new piece with which I was happy.

In my inbox was an email from a fantastic performer, thanking me for an essay I had sent to them detailing some structural analysis of a piece that I wrote around 15 years ago.

I'm happy that I'm writing music, but not happy that I'm not writing words down. I've thought for some time that it was worth going back to essays such as that one, combining it with other things I have noted, and seeing if there isn't a grown up analytical paper there. But I don't.

It's easier to 'know' that you could do something if you put your mind to it, than to put your mind to it and risk failing.

But I'm writing music and trying to switch off from other pressures from work. I definitely feel like I have a way to go when it comes to compartmentalising the different aspects of my job, but at least, for one afternoon, I sat down at manuscript paper and wrote some music that I will hear soon.

And that's a great feeling.

Day 53 - Changing Face of Research

Today, I'm not really talking about the actual way that the sector is changing. I don't really think I have enough experience to discuss that. It's more that I want to talk about how the way that my institution is thinking about changing things.

Currently, we have six different centres for research based around English and Creative Writing, Publishing, Design, Media, Music, and Film respectively. Some of these research groups coincide with departmental (and therefore managerial) hierarchies, but not all. Some of these research groups coincide with REF Units of Assessment, but not all. Some of these centres have defined identities that function almost as a brand, others are more amorphous.

For me, looking at these groups, it seems clear that some of these groups are built around areas of excellence, where a clear specialism has been identified, but others are there to support research activity irrespective of any top-down strategic thought. I think that both approaches have their place, but that they shouldn't be confused.

Recently, we discussed the possibility of reshaping research areas into four: Music and Performing Arts, Art and Design, English and Creative Writing, and Media. I think that it's likely that existing 'brands' will remain as centres of activity, but not necessarily centres of support. From my perspective, this is a good move, and it means that it will be easier to develop a narrative around Music, Drama, and Performing Arts for the next REF in 2020. It also addresses the confusion (mentioned above) between areas of excellence/activity, and areas of research support. Although it means that more research areas will not map on to department areas, I don't think that this will lead to more problems, but may well alleviate areas where this is an issue.

This isn't just a matter of achieving consistency, but it's a matter of achieving parity. If there are many areas where the person in charge of the research centre is not necessarily the person managing the staff within the research centre, then there has to be a protocol or shared practice for including research in their workload, rather than the rather piece-meal approach we have at present. At least that's what I'd like to think.

While there are potential drawbacks to this approach (I will have more staff to support but no more time to do it in, for example; I will also have to liaise with at least two line managers rather than one) but I believe that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

It is somewhat ironic that this is happening as the University decides to reintegrate the two parallel areas of organisation that were established a few years ago: schools and institutes. Now, all research activity will be managed within the school, and teaching and research brought closer together. The parallel path would have been to ensure that all research centres were integrated with departments, but I'm glad that the opposite has happened. I suppose it could be said that the true irony was that although the School and Institute were separate, many of our Centres were identical to our Departments (and therefore the structure did not really change what was happening at 'grass roots' level, but problematised its management and organisation), and that this proposed change could energise rather than restrict research activity.

So, there is change in the air, which is just as well because there's change in the air nationally as well. There may be trouble ahead, but while there's moonlight, and music, etc...

Day 33 - Workload (part 3)

Now we come to the hardest part of the workload, which is also the most controversial.
I think that the allocation of a specific budget of time to a specific research project kind of cuts against the grain, especially in the humanities, and perhaps most so in the creative arts. I've been writing music for almost all my life, but if I was to estimate how long it's going to take me to write this piece I have on my desk right now, I would struggle.

I've been doing some reading about managing the creative arts but haven't come to any conclusions yet. I think that it's worth chipping away at, because it enables us to put our research activities on a more professional basis, and I refuse to entertain the idea that could be a bad thing!

The typical research allocation for an academic at my institution is 130 units per year. That works out as 10% of the workload, and therefore around half a day a week (3 hours 30 minutes), but the actual allocation of this research time is problematic. Line managers don't always allocate this, and it we've been told that it is not a guaranteed allowance. My philosophy is that if we allocate specific projects with specific durations and outputs, rather than just assuming that we have half a day per week to do open ended research, we're more likely to be productive and more likely to get allocated the time.

We get an allocation (negotiated with line manager of course) for roles such as Research Centre Director, and I'm given 130 units for this (so 10% of my time again). I believe this is pretty much normal for my institution.

PhD supervision is allocated as 195 units per student across their entire study time (3 years for full-time students, 5 years for part-time students). This works out as 65 units per year for F/T PhD students, and 39 hours per year for P/T PhD students (around 105 minutes per week for F/T, and around 63 minutes per week for P/T).

On top of this there is funded research as well, and knowledge transfer, and commercial activity.
This is a bit of a hot topic in my institution at the moment, as the difference between these different areas is masked by them being lumped into one category and leads to (quite often) an undignified scuffle over how research budgets are divided. For a time, my institution regarded research as being an area that it didn't want to invest too heavily, focusing instead on industry engagement through KT and on money-making commercial activity.

KT (engagement with industry) is a difficult area for me. My specific research is problematic for any money-making venture, but also I'm not sure how I feel about how the relationship between academia and industry can be negotiated. I've recently been in discussions about establishing a KT partnership with a commercial partnership (a concert hall), but this wouldn't be an area that I'm really engaged with, and I would really only be steering the partnership. I suspect I will have more to say on the subject on the future.

Commercial activity consists, for us, mainly in our summer school activities. We currently run three summer schools, only one of which is run by our institution; the other two are run by other agencies and only use our building. This does mean that we have a steady income every year, and this has been really helpful for our research activities, and much more helpful (financially) than the REG (Research Excellence Grant), which is top-sliced to such an extent that we don't get a large amount of it. After the upcoming REF (Research Excellence Framework) assessment exercise, we will probably have even less (because my institution did not contribute in my field... a story for another day!), so this is a fantastic financial resource.

Sensibly, commercial activity workload allocation is divided into Commercial Support, which I believe would include the administration of these projects (being a Principal Investigator), and Commercial Delivery, which would involve the actual activity itself.
This division into administration and delivery enables (again) line managers to assign appropriate workloads, and should counter the standard approach of assuming that administration time is invisible in projects such as this.

There's a big responsibility on the shoulders of managers to understand and implement these allocations, and the relationship between top-down and bottom-up management of these allocations is a tricky one.
I'll have cause to talk about the difference between top-down and bottom-up management another day, but for the time being, I'll just say that the difference is primarily whether you manage allocations from the perspective of looking at the entire academic team as a potential resource amongst whom you can divide various responsibilities, or looking at individuals and managing them as such. My own perspective is that you have to start off with a top-down approach, but customise it to be bottom-up later in the process. Both perspectives have to be maintained simultaneously, rather like those Magic Eye pictures.

It's not easy, but I think it's worth the effort.

Day 28 - And sometimes you will have a better idea

Yesterday, I reflected on the problem that I had with a particular concert.
All day today, I've been discussing it with others and turning it over in my mind.
By the end of the day, I had a solution.
And do you know what?
The solution was better than the plan it was replacing.

Rather than holding one concert in October with student work and my own music, on the basis of which a competition would be judged, I'm proposing two events:

1. A shorter concert of my own music demonstrating the relationship between maths and music in my practice, a 20 minute paper on this connection by me, a similar 20 minute paper from someone from the Mathematics department on the connection that they perceive between composition and maths, and the announcement of the competition;
2. A concert of specially composed music by current and former students of my institution, culminating in the announcement of the prize.

The idea will be, with the initial concert happening in October, a deadline for submission in December, and a second concert happening in February.

This, to me, gives more scope and possibilities to the whole project, as well as raising the profile and awareness of the whole thing. It is possible that I may be accused of promoting my own work to the detriment of others though, and I'm not sure what to think about that.

Day 26 - Effectively shared

One of my plans for the summer is to start uploading my research a lot more to my institution's research repository.

'What' I hear you cry 'is a research repository?'

The Repository@Napier is intended to be an Open Access showcase for the published research output of the university. Whenever possible, refereed documents accepted for publication, or finished artistic compositions presented in public, will be made available here in full digital format, and hyperlinks to standard published versions will be provided.
Edinburgh Napier University staff and research students are required to place in the repository, post-refereed, accepted texts of documents being published, together with texts of papers given at conferences; but data sets, programs, images, scores, music, and exhibition catalogues should also be lodged in digital format.

For many composers, there can often be a lot of research which is never effectively shared (to use REF speak). We may present a final score with a recording, but the nature of the research questions that went into the process may be left to wide interpretation. Why is there so little research published about technical or aesthetic details of composers' work? I suspect it may arise in part from the fact that composers spend their time writing music, not words, but I think that we should be looking to engage a bit more with looking at how we present composition at research. I'll touch on this more another day - it is too late and I am too tired - but for today, I want to get back to the respository.

I like the fact that I will be able to deposit conference presentations, or even sketch material (if relevant), and other forms of presentation of my research questions on the repository. I've already started linking (on my website) to the PDFs of some of the scores that I have uploaded, but I want to take this much further, and encourage my PhD students to do the same.

I'm a big fan of open access, although I am keenly aware of the usefulness of peer-reviewed journals to establish your name in a field. It might be interesting, if anyone has the time, or if it is even possible, to do a quick review of the journal articles published by academics in the 2014 REF (once it is completed) and see whether the higher rated articles are still in the higher rated journals. Although the regulations say that location of publication is irrelevant, with that number of outputs to be reviewed and with the small length of time allowed for the process, I'm not confident that there will be much difference. The rating of a journal is still apparently considered as criteria for notability of research within my own institution, and I suspect that may be the same across the sector.

I'm quite excited to be preparing presentations for INTIME 2014 on notation (and which will also feature a performance by me), and for Music and shared imaginaries: nationalisms, communities, and choral singing at University of Aveiro, Portugal on the Scratch Orchestra's Nature Study Notes. Once I've finished these presentations, they will be available on the repository and I will link to them from here.

Day 18 - Research lifecycles

Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Actually I don't believe that.
Actually I do, sort of. In that by the time that you've listened to the story, the way that you remember it, irrespective of how it has been told, is as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think it's how our brains are wired up, or how we are culturally programmed to remember our experiences of the world.

So, every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Every research project similarly has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
You may feel like you didn't know that the beginning was truly the beginning until you were in the middle of the middle (or the middle of the end), but in retrospect, you can begin to diagnose what happened.

Something that I have noticed happen within my own practice a lot as a creative researcher, is that I tend to view my compositional activities as a block - I am composing, and it doesn't matter what I am composing - rather than as individual projects. This is something which I am beginning to recognise could change, and could change things within what I do for the better.

Just as I have a sort of plan in my head for how my articles and my book proposal pan out over the next few years, I am beginning to scramble together ideas for my compositional projects. So rather than just thinking about writing, I'm thinking about the entire life-cycle of the process. This includes the conception of the piece and the initial research to develop a methodology, contacting performers who may be interested in playing it, or in collaborating, carrying out the methodology, and then editing the notation, and producing a final score (if applicable). Of course, then the interesting stuff begins as you can incorporate the performance into your research process, especially if the performer(s) is/are going to do it more than once. Is the 'new knowledge' that you have 'effectively shared' through the medium of a score artefact and a live performance artefact appropriate for another medium, for example an article?

In this way, I am hoping to transform my experience of plugging away at composition, enlivened by the occasional performance, into something a bit more dynamic. It may sound a little corporate, but I think that it is what I need (and connects to what I was talking about yesterday). I'm also slightly interested in looking at this from the angle of the Research Development Framework which my institution has adopted. I'd be very interested to see any comments from anyone who has experience of this framework.

Every story has a beginning, a middle, or an end, but a story is always a tracing, not a map. It doesn't describe the larger narrative of your compositional/musicological/performative trajectory, with its many interpenetrating variables, but it's a useful way of organising what you do in a way that can fit into a workload allocation, and in a way that is in a language that any academic should be able to recognise, no matter what their discipline.