Saturday, June 11, 2011

Mary on Dutch TV

I mentioned some time ago that the Dutch Humanist TV channel is producing a series of twelve hour-long programmes on philosophers, of which Mary Wollstonecraft is one.

Their researcher Josephine Krikke happened to mention Mary's name on Twitter a few months ago, and thanks to my permanent state of alertness (due not to attention-concentrating drugs but a "Wollstonecraft" column on my Tweetdeck) I picked up on this. Running her initial tweet through Google Translate gave me:
Exploring the similarities between Mary Wollstonecraft (18th century) and Marieke Bax # top woman humanist canon. "I do not like acidic women"
where I assume "acidic" is a Google-ism for "sour". Marieke Bax is a glass-ceiling-breaking diversity champion.

So @1759MaryWol1797 introduced herself to @JosephineKrikke, and we took it from there. I present our conversation in descending (chronological) order, for the reading ease of those less used to Twitter. It didn't take her long to invite me onto the programme, to be interviewed by a philosopher-journalist called Leon Heuts.





And that interview has now just taken place. Embedding these exchanges on my blog is courtesy Bettween, "the ultimate Twitter conversation tracker". It is still in beta, and sometimes I notice -- for example, the conversations can be restricted by day but not by time within the day, so I can't cut out irrelevant bits at beginning or end. And, oddly, Bettween has (in the Blogger preview at least) landed one tweet out of order, and there's no way to delete it. [N.B. these are not static screenshots -- you can scroll down within the conversation.]





So, roll on the autumn! I'm looking forward to seeing what Human TV makes of Mary, and indeed all the other philosophers.
Photo of Leon Heuts and, behind him, the head of the TV programme. Photo by Josephine Krikke.

3 comments:

  1. I received this by email; apparently she tried to post here:
    Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with HUMAN tv. Josephine Krikke

    My pleasure!

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  2. Great work..I was reminded of something I wanted to ask you before: Do you know of any past documentaries produced concerning Mary that you could recommend?

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  3. Now, that is what I call an excellent question, as in, I never bothered to ask, but of course I should have. The short answer is no, I do not know of documentaries, in English. My second answer would be, clearly I need to write a post about this dearth.

    If anyone else wants to jump in on this topic, please enlighten us!

    ReplyDelete