Recap: Glasgow Picturebook Conference Day 1

When the information about this conference popped into my inbox I was totally thrilled and confirmed my attendance almost immediately. Then the list of speakers came out and I thought WOW - and booked my train tickets in a state of high excitement.

As I struggle through writing my upgrade report I do sometimes feel like I am the only person in the world (or at least Newnham library) who cares about picturebooks. Rationally - I know this is not the case. But when other grads discuss their ~*~very important~*~ work on haematology, oncology, global warming, legal rights for refugees, my talking and thinking about picturebooks becomes very small in comparison.

However this conference kicked off with a glorious presentation from Scottish Booktrust on the wonderful work they do getting books into the hands of children, giving out bags of books from birth to almost 5 years old, inspiring us all to think about how books actually get to the children who are primarily meant to be reading them. Then we moved on to the AMAZING (capslock apology but I can't help it - there's no other word!) Debi Gliori, whose discussion of the process of picturebook making demonstrated the strenuous research, emotional investment and altogether the genuine love that goes into the creation of such an object really made us all think about the author's vision of the picturebook and the impact it will have - I also think her reading of 'Dragon Loves Penguin' made many of us tear up a little bit! I also fangirled embarrassingly and told Debi how much I loved the 'Pure Dead...' series when I was younger - bring back Nanny McLachlan, please!

Definitely buying this for my mum.

After a break, we heard from James Robertson of Itchy Coo, talking about Scots language books and the importance of 'legitimising' them as a form of literature as they work in the language that many children and young people in Scotland use comfortably every day instead of the more formal English. This issue is really important and James' talk was so informative and the work that Itchy Coo does is so fun and inspiring. Learning that a monkey is called a 'puggie' in Scots was probably the highlight of my day.

One of Itchy Coo's most brilliant products (IMHO)

Actually, it wasn't. Because the last speaker was Dom Kingston from Nosy Crow, who publish children's books, but specifically for me they publish picturebooks which play with notions of interactivity and the work of the reader in insanely great ways. They develop apps as standalone items rather than relying on translating or transposing a book to the screen and they also have some incredible codex books which work in different ways - such as folding out to a playmat. Dom's presentation was so fascinating - although as Head of Publicity he described himself as 'the last baton runner in the race' and the view on how publicity is changing with book blogs, social media, and increasing reader activity was really cool, I was most interested when Dom showed a video of an app's code being mapped to demonstrate the pathways that are available to the player/reader of the app. The video below is just a small snippet of how Nosy Crow make their apps but unfortunately doesn't show what I'm talking about with this code mapping thing!

Please Nosy Crow can I have this for my PhD? I promise I'll treat the technology right and use it nicely...it could be just the thing to allow me to finally map in an unconvential sense (rather than just grids of screen tracking) how a child experiences an app. Any chance of you sharing it with me?

I'll stop being cheeky now and leave, but I'll recap day 2 very shortly!

Row AWAY

The thing about rowing is that you can't back out of an outing without a very good reason.

It's not like running where you can just not go if you don't feel like it; even training for a team sport, you feel like you SHOULD go but there's no need apart from your own desire for improvement, and not annoying your teammates.

Rowing though...rowing, they need you to move the boat. At Cambridge, CUCBC (the dedicated bods in charge of college rowing) have made it actually a finable offense for a crew to be incomplete. So there has to be eight rowers, and this weekend I just have not felt like being one of them.

Don't get me wrong; I stick at this (fairly stupid? discuss) sport because I love it, but when you're down in the dumps and want to crawl under a duvet and watch Friends, being MADE to go DO EXERCISE in a BOAT when it's RAINING (sorry I think my capslock finger is acting without my knowledge) is not what you want.

Take it from me, it's not.

Staring out from this weekend into the first week of my Loch Ness marathon training, in a pretty barren PhD-ideas/work place anyway, watching my parents drive back to Manchester, I really was not keen on getting in the boat. But I did - because my captain would have killed me if I didn't, and because I would have hated myself for finding a sub.

I'll be glad in 3 weeks time during Bumps, but for now, I still hate rowing and I am bitterly resentful that it took time away from my very important 90s TV watching. Stupid team sports. Even the endorphins barely made a dent to help; but at least I got out of my room, otherwise the girl living next door to me would have complained again about hearing 'I'll Be There For You'.

Row away, rowing. Row away.