I was over to Reading on Wednesday for the wrap up meeting of the VERA project. Its been a great project – three years of helping Archaeologists mess around in the trench with digital pens, wifi, cameras, GPS, etc etc. Hopefully, we can continue doing some work at the Silchester dig over the next few years: its very rare that you get to study users of technology over such a large time scale, and there are some interesting findings from the dig….

… which we need to write up. Its added to the to do list.

You may have heard rumours that UCL is getting its own Centre for Digital Humanities. Well, its true! Claire Warwick is the Director, and I’m the Deputy Director. More about this all soon – we are gearing up to the big launch in the spring.

In the meantime, we are hiring for three positions! Centre Co-ordinator, Teaching Fellow, and Research Assistant. All three are part time positions, which means if people wanted to mix and match to become a full time roll, we would consider that.

More info about the jobs can be found here.

Get in touch if you have any queries!

On Tuesday I participated in an excellent workshop, Understanding Image Based Evidence, as part of the eScience and Ancient Documents project at the University of Oxford. We looked at issues of fidelity of digital images, and how image based evidence is used for reasoning, particularly in papyrology and palaeography.

Couldn’t be there? Well, my PhD student, Alejandro Giacometti, took some pretty good notes…

I love my laptop bag. The kind of thing you pick up quickly in a rush without much thought, that turns out to be a well loved and trusty friend. Its tardis like capabilities never fail to amaze me (laptop and lunch and pair of shoes and 30 student essays and lecture handouts and an umbrella? sure!). I would share with you the brand, but it doesnt discernibly have one. It was cheap, and I’ve never ever seen anyone else with the same one.

Until last week on the train. I put my laptop rucksack up in the rack next to one which was exactly the same.

How tempted was I to do the ole’ spy-who-loves-me switcheroo of the cases?

Then I imagined the work carnage that would ensue, and just went on my merry way, thinking when did I get so unadventurous. Mental note – must put a business card in my laptop bag in case it gets separated from me, in a cold war secret stealing stylie.

My local Sainsburys have stopped stocking “Dr” Gillian McKeith products (or even Ms Gillian McKeith products). Over priced, over promoted, non-medicated muesli be gone!

Result.

I was just wondering where next year’s Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference was going to be next year – sadly I missed the Dublin conference this year as I had a friend’s wedding in the diary so didnt hear the announcement about 2010 – but it surprised me I couldnt find the DRH website anywhere.

One of the things I’ve been working on, behind the scenes, includes grant writing. I’ve been involved with four grants in the past two weeks. Which reminded me, today, of the brilliant work of the artist David Shrigley, who aims to articulate complicated links between things in his cartoons. This is a good map of how my brain feels just now.

Excellent column by David Mitchell over at the Observer regarding the madness of the proposed Research Excellent Framework and how it relates to arts and humanities research:

…this greater emphasis on making academics justify their work in terms that results-obsessed government bodies will understand is worrying.

And that’s where the talk of research of social value comes in. It’s a sop to the arts side. They’re trying to find a way to quantify the usefulness of a greater insight into paintings, books or historical events because they know they’re not of much economic value, other than to get the odd documentary commissioned, but have a vague memory of someone saying at a dinner that they mattered. They’re trying to squeeze them into a plus column in their new spreadsheet of learning. Well, if that’s their only way of according knowledge worth, then they’re the wrong people to be making the decisions.

What separates us from the beasts, apart from fire, laughter, depression and guilt about killing the odd beast, is our curiosity. We’ve advanced as a species because we’ve wanted to find things out, regardless of whether we thought it useful. We looked at the sky and wondered what was going on – that’s why, for better or worse, we’ve got DVD players, ventilators, nuclear weapons, global warming, poetry and cheese string. And it’s for better, by the way.

The Research Excellence Framework is starting to ask what sorts of curiosity our culture can afford, and that scares me even more than the demise of the silly survey because it strikes at the heart of what it means to be civilised, to have instincts other than survival. If academic endeavour had always been vetted in advance for practicality, we wouldn’t have the aeroplane or the iPhone, just a better mammoth trap.

Back 2 Skool today: start of the new academic year. Its amazing how nervous we staff all get – I think the academic year become so entrenched in your psyche (lets face it, we loved school so much we never quite got round to leaving) that the first week of term looms large as an event. Who needs Hogmanay – we’ve got our own academic Janus looking forward and back over lecture notes here.

This years new set of pencils and pencil case, and new leather satchell, comes for me in the form of an iPhone. I have finally succumbed to a combination of necessity (I need to go online and get that piece of info NOW!), fear (how many emails have come in since I checked 2 hours ago?), lust (mmmm, shiny, beeping), jealousy (if they have one then why cant I?), and plain old peer pressure (everyone see when they can make the meeting on their shiny new iPhones! apart from Melissa, who has a filofax… na na na naaa naaa!).

Like I said, we liked the playground so much, we never left. Cover me, I’m going in….