 |
Cornwell Internet became sponsors of the Durham Literature Festival in 2001. Our contribution as first-time sponsors was acknowledged by the Sponsors Club for Arts & Business. Roger was among the sponsors presented with a certificate by the actor Tim Piggot-Smith, at a ceremony at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle on November 23rd. |
We were specifically involved with two events, both on Wednesday 13 June 2001. In the afternoon we made the practical contribution of running a workshop in the City Library, entitled A Web of Words, offering an introduction to the internet as a literary medium; in the evening we sponsored a poetry reading by three northern poets at Waterstone's bookshop.
If the internet is the world's biggest library, how do you find what you want to read? And how do you get your work on the shelves?
In 6 years the Internet has grown from nowhere to being the biggest library in the world - and the worst catalogued!
There are sites devoted to making the literary classics freely available, and to selling Stephen King's latest novella. There is scholarly information about great writers, and praise by enthusiastic fans. There are bookshops for new books, for second-hand books and for e-texts (whatever those are...). There are amateur reviews, short stories and hypertext novels (whatever those are...).
So how do you find what you want to read? And, if you're a writer, how do you get your work onto the shelves of this virtual library?
And how do you get readers to take it off the shelves?
In this hands-on session, internet designers Jean Rogers and Roger Cornwell gave an introduction to finding information on the internet and demonstrated how plain text can be turned into a web page suitable for reading on-line. We provided a web page of useful links, and a space for haiku written on-line by virtual visitors to the festival.
Celebrating new collections from leading Northern poets with readings from Andy Croft (Just as Blue), Gillian Allnutt (Lintel) and Cynthia Fuller (Only a Small Boat).
 |
 |
 |
Chaired by Peter Lewis of Flambard Press.