My home is headlights winking at me, reflecting off my glasses / My home is police sirens, singing to me like opera / My home is autumn leaves, crunching beneath my feet (Year 6, Bevois Town Primary School)

What is home to you? Where is it?

Home could be the place you live. Home could be a memory, the place you left behind. Home could be drinking a cup of cocoa with your family.

Now, more than ever, as we live in a world come alive from the pages of a dystopian novel, home allows us to anchor ourselves in the familiar.

If your heart swells with emotions when you think about home, poetry is the way to express it.

This hour-long workshop will give you the chance to explore what home means to you through a series of guided activities.

All you need is some paper, a pen and your thoughts.

Join Aiysha Jahan, English at the University of Southampton, for the opening event of Hands-on Humanities Day Goes Digital 2020!

The workshop is free, open to children and their families, and will run in Blackboard Collaborate. Please book your ticket to Hands-on Humanities Day to receive the joining instruction with the reminder emails.

Join puppet Pythagoras in an exploration of science and music making. Pythagoras will provide the tools - join us as an investigating music creator.

How does music work? How is it built?

Pythagoras has made a video with the help of University of Southampton, composer Benjamin Oliver, puppetry director Rachel Warr, acoustics expert Dr Matthew Wright, musicians from Ensemble Paramirabo and cellist David Lale.

Watch the videos and get involved in your own collaborative experiments, we'll show you how!

- Pythagoras' Tool Kit - Constructing Music (in the video section below):
https://youtu.be/Ava5yJhDB3M

- Pythagoras' Tool Kit - How Does Music Work?: https://youtu.be/czXb9TRZ8Dc

And get some more help and tips from our friends at the John Hansard Gallery at: https://jhg.art/resources/

You can upload your own experiments on our own central Library of Geometric Sounds on the Padlet board in the Photos tab below.

-> Please submit your scores by THURSDAY 19th NOVEMBER at 12:00PM (GMT)!


** Hands-on Humanities Day Goes Digital **

Finally, see your own experiments come to life! Tune in to watch composer Benjamin Oliver play your experiments on the piano on 21st November 2020 - this event will broadcast live on YouTube as part of Hands-on Humanities Day, so please do not forget to book your ticket!

Pythagoras' Tool kit at is part of a wider project in development with Ensemble Paramirabo from Canada. A live show with puppetry and music is due to be performed at venues in Canada and the UK in 2021 & 2022. For more information watch this space: https://ensembleparamirabo.com/en/node/889

Grab your smartphone, headphones and your VR headset and experience the world premiere of an immersive, luminescent ride through a virtual 3D electronic music performance.

Human beings have both innate biological and learned cultural reactions to the sound of their environment, and to sounds in their environment - Dr Drew Crawford's research foregrounds these profound responses in his composition practice by working with music and sound in relation to the space(s) in which they are experienced.

Waves of... was originally composed for concert performance, a piece where the performers moved around the stage in a choreography of spatialised sound. Partly as a response to the COVID-19 restrictions on performance, the piece has been reimagined as a virtual reality experience where you can be inside the performance space, amplifying the affective spatial aspects of the piece impossible in real life.

* The VR experience is available for Android in the Downloads section. Instructions on how to install the programme in Android are available in the Videos section below.

* The team wanted to make an iOS version of Waves of... available publicly but that hasn't been possible at this time. If you have a Mac you could experience Waves of... on your computer, minus the VR headset by downloading File 2

Translating the piece to a virtual environment using the popular game engine Unity represents the first experiments working as part of a team with colleagues from the Winchester School of Art, James Stallwood (Teaching Fellow, Games Design and Art) and MA Communication Design student Andreea Ogledean, exploring how to tackle the problem of creating a believable hyperreality using Unity's audio capabilities.


** Hands-on Humanities Day Goes Digital **

Finally, do not miss a final video premiere and live Q&A session with Dr Drew Crawford, James Stallwood and Andreea Ogledean on Saturday 21st November for Hands-on Humanities Day Goes Digital.

The event will stream live on YouTube but please don't forget to book your ticket on Eventbrite!

Brought to you in cooperation with Southampton's John Hansard Gallery, we are pleased to present a panel of expert speakers in conversation about the idea of 'being human as praxis', speculative futures, and the future of the (post)humanities and creative industries more broadly.

The event will include discussion and audience Q&A.

Featuring contributions from (in alphabetical order):
- Larry Achiampong (artist)
- David Blandy (artist)
- Dr Kevin Brazil (academic, English Literature)
- Dr Megen de Bruin-Mole (academic, Media Studies)
- Dr Sarah Hayden (academic, Literature and Visual Culture)
- Professor Nicky Marsh (academic, Faculty of Arts and Humanities)
- Florence Okoye (ux designer and coder)
- Dr Kurt Sylvan (academic, Philosophy)

In addition to forming part of Southampton's Human Worlds Festival, this event will mark the launch of the University of Southampton's Institute for Arts and Humanities (SIAH). SIAH supports, promotes and develops arts and humanities led-research in order to expand the scale of what we can achieve. SIAH will enable scholars to use the critical, creative and theoretical approaches of the Arts and Humanities to lead on large and ambitious projects.

This event will broadcast live on YouTube - please do not forget to book your ticket for Hands-on Humanities Day Goes Digital

Tracy Chevalier, author of the international bestselling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, will talk about her most recent book, A Single Thread, set in Southampton and Winchester shortly before the start of World War II. In a reading and discussion led by Carole Burns, the university's head of creative writing, Chevalier will explore ideas around the intersection of writing and history and how she crafted her new book.

"A Single Thread" weaves a tale about Violet Speedwell, a woman who moves to Winchester in 1930s Britain after her fiance dies in World War I, then falls in love with a married man whom she meets while volunteering to embroider cushions for Winchester Cathedral. As in many of Chevalier's novels, the hero is not a well-known historical figure, but an everyday person. In Girl with a Pearl Earring, she focused on the young servant who posed for Vermeer, not the great artist himself. Here, Chevalier explores this "surplus" woman - one of the many left single after World War I - and teases out the largeness of this one individual woman's story.

"This was a unique generation of women... but their stories feel familiar nearly a century on." -- The Guardian

Tracy Chevalier official website: https://www.tchevalier.com/

This event will broadcast live on YouTube - please do not forget to book your ticket for Hands-on Humanities Day Goes Digital