So with this new ability to be able to blog directly from my iPhone I shall be making full and proper use of this facility. This weekend sees the Weird 10 conference at Warminster which I will be attending also be writing a review for the Paranthrpology journal if you’re going along to weird 10 I’ll see you there!
Well it’s often said that life gets in the way and I guess that’s why it’s been a while since I last posted. I thought I would just promote that there is a new newsletter dealing with matters of the Psi and paranormal / spiritualist research matters. ‘Parathrapology’ is imminently going to be available from this website. I have been lucky enough to contribute regarding my methodologies in approaching research into spiritualism within contemporary British society. Please check it out.
Really looking forward to checking out the film ‘Paranormal Activity’ in the next couple of days. In terms of my research study it is very interesting to see that the promotional trailer for the film centers around the audience’s reactions to the film. The trailer dedicates very few seconds of actual footage while majoring on film of the audience. Arguably here the makers want to get the message across that the scare factor is the appeal to going and seeing the movie. I will await to see how scary it truly is, or whether as some people have reported already, it’s just a big fictional disappointment.
If unfamiliar with this terminology, this is short for Electro Voice Phenomena. A great example of the concept of EVPs is the depiction of them in the films White Noise. The basic principle is to record, usually through tape or in some cases digitally a controlled area where no people have access and there are no other forms of noise contamination.
The recordings of essentially room atmos are then reviewed to see if there are any sounds that cannot be attributed to anything that is paranormal. This is an area that I intend to extend my post PhD research as audio is an area that, through my work in radio is already of great interest to me.
I was passed this audio a while ago by a colleague of a recording made at a band practice, in a school, no children we present, yet this recording seems to contain the voice of a child…
[audio:http://www.davidwoollatt.com/sounds/evp.mp3]
interesting to say the least
Well, I got back from the exploring the extraordinary conference yesterday, and wow what an incredible event, all credit to Hannah Gilbert from the University of York for organising an amazing event which saw a number of papers being presented on the unexplained, Dr. David Luke and Dr. Chris Roe were among those presenting. I was most impressed by the different disciplines involved and the way their presentations had things that were very relevant to my own research.
I have come back absolutely buzzing with ideas and a drive to get on with writing up my research. The academic disciplines covered at the conference ranged from parapsychology, folk law, philosophy of science and sociology.
On with the writing up then…
Recently I have really got into using twitter, I think not only can it while away a long train / bus journey but after chatting to a number of people I also found that it can be far more than the fairly vacuous past time of browsing facebook. I found of the people that were following me, a lot actually really did read the updates and were interested. This lead me to think about the real possibilities of using twitter for more serious business-like reasons, such as promoting radio / production goods and services but also using it as a research tool for the PhD. There are plenty of people tweeting out there on all manner of different subjects and using the search engine on tweetie I can follow them. This has already lead me on a fascinating journey around the web reading articles and journals I would never have known existed, up to Twitter I say 
Well with Halloween approaching, I’m off to York University on a one day conference delving in the unexplained, really hoping that meeting with other people grappling with this area as a PhD will spark new theory and greater depths of thinking into my area of studying shifts in Spiritualism and mediumship within contemporary society.