The wonderful world of…

On Monday morning, I dragged myself out of bed at 5… showered, crawled to the station and boarded a train for Manchester… where – after a brief tour of Chinatown and a walk back through the village – I arrived at a UKOLN workshop on… *roll out back drop of frankenstein mountains, bolts through the neck, gravely organ music and whisper* i.m.p.a.c.t… (like M.a.c.b.e.t.h for loveys… you have to say it quietly in case the funding devils come and take you away).

Anyway… as a part of that, I was introduced by Brian Kelly to the wonderful world of Twitter… I’m not sure what I’m going to do in that world yet, but for the hell of it, I’ve set up a Twitter account, and I’m going to play…

Two things… (contacts) have come out of this so far, however, which begin to allow me to blur the boundaries of BOS on the one hand, and Deaf Studies on the other… both linked into Web accessibility – perhaps more importantly, to the idea that the Web is not just ‘accessible’ or not, but variously accessible to different people.

I resist the idea of getting too involved with disability theory, since it’s a basic premise of DEAF space and Ability theory that what’s more interesting is exploring the far reaches of physically located productions of space… whereas ‘dis-ability’ theory, but its nature, tends to explore the way that bodies are constrained (as if there’s only one body…)… but the two are sides of a coin, and it will be interesting to see how far I want to take the extension of my work as it develops.