Words’ End

Last week I gave a talk at the second annual conference on distance ed put on by the BU Faculty Advisory Board on, You Guessed It, Distance Education.

It was a great time! I was heartened to see so many people thinking so creatively about classroom technology. Distance ed may not equate to using technology (networked or not) in the classroom, but there’s a lot of crossover, so I was asked to reprise a talk I’d given few months ago through the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching.

I’ve taken recent thinking about slide presentations to heart, so looking at my slides wouldn’t yield anything particularly coherent: there’s little text on them. So I’ve inserted the slides here instead of putting them on SlideShare; click on a slide to see it full-size.  Alas, I haven’t figured out yet how to open the full-size images in the same page, with a gallery-like overlay (is there a WordPress plugin for this?), so—apologies—they’re set to open in a new window.

This gets long; here’s hoping the LiveJournal crosspost can deal with the more tag. If it can’t, sorry, LJLand—I don’t do this often… (more…)

Life’s been chugging along, and the best I can do sometimes is keep up. In the now-venerable tradition of good-thing, bad-thing, here’s my week and a half, give or take.

• ++ Birthday! I had one. I went out to dinner with mom and Vlad, and later had a party. It was well attended by lovely people; Mark supplied lights and gorgeous swathes of cloth to drape around things; the food was appreciated; much merriment was had.
• - Then last Monday I started feeling sick.
• - Then last Tuesday I came in sick to cover library supervision in the evening (until 9pm), and proceeded to lie on the table floor for most of the time I was in, unable even to watch stupid TV online, much less work.
• — Then Wednesday I discovered that what I had was strep throat! I don’t remember whether I’d ever had it before; certainly not since I got to the States almost twenty (!!) years ago.
• + Yet I recognized it for what it must be, went to get myself checked out (thanks for the encouragement, mom), and got
• +++ penicillin, which is a wonder of (semi-)modern medicine, even though it’s kicking my butt by greatly diminishing my baseline energy level. But hey, it’s only for ten days.
• - Meanwhile, I missed my weekly playdate/kid-sitting night with four year old Natalie. SO looking forward to seeing her today.
• ++ On Saturday, I had fantastic dinner with my family, all of them—even brother Zhenya, sisinlaw Jo Ann and nephew Tesher came up for this—as a first, early celebration of my mom’s 70th birthday (coming up in May). I do so like hanging out with them, particularly when it involves food and then sleeping in my own bed.
• + The last two nights, I had excellent dates, with conversations and food and laughing that left me feeling hale and whole.
• + Yesterday, I finally finished up the saga of having had to have a tooth extracted a year and a half ago, then get an implant, then get a crown for the implant. Dentistry has been the bain of my didn’t-grow-up-with-fluoride-in-my-water body, and I’m glad this one’s over.
• ++ Also yesterday, I acquired a physical therapist and a therapy schedule to finally fix a year-and-a-half-old shoulder injury. I like the therapist, and I like that he’s two T stops away from the building where I work. Major win.
• + I’ve been productive and happy at work (except for that miserable evening with the strep throat). We submitted an NEH grant proposal; I’ve been talking to faculty about teaching with technology; we have several IT and digital library projects going; and as terrifying as it is to essentially be my own boss most days, I’m also learning new stuff at a pace I can feel. Mostly learning about managing time and expectations. Valuable stuff.
• - Work is also exhausting and often frustrating. Yesterday I shut down my computer after reviewing and commenting on four long library policy documents, and literally couldn’t think for a while, just let myself be on autopilot going home.
• + Good thing cooking perks me right up.
• - I’ve also been chronically under-sleeping again, mostly by making bad time-management choices in favor of being with good people.
• + Good thing I got plenty of sleep while sick with strep throat!
• + On a different note, I’m participating in a Tufts study on how people manage their personal finances (or at least that’s what they claim the study is about). This got me thinking more deeply about my own personal finances, and once again coming to a conclusion that I can manage them well even if the jam-tomorrow enticements that just keep coming from my ex never materialize, and I have to pay his share of our mutual debts too. I wouldn’t be happy doing it, but not having any choice, find it more pleasant to be sanguine about it. Of course I have a rant about that, but that’s not the point: the point is, this isn’t driving me crazy anymore.
• +This past weekend, I saw a bunch of old friends and acquaintances from my days of hanging out on the interactive fiction MUD.  I also got to see a screening of the excellent documentary Get Lamp, by Jason Scott of textfiles fame, which (both Get Lamp and textfiles) I’m highly recommending if you’re into that sort of thing.
• ++ My house and my life are full of people so good in so many ways, it makes me dizzy sometimes.

And these are just the highlights. Life’s full, and mostly good.

He even has his own URL now: rolandht.org.

If you’re just tuning in, that’s my dissertation over there.

At work, that is. No sign of slowing down any time soon. Some are challenging, others less so, all of them are a lot to keep track of. (Thank you, project management software, for help with this.)

Scanning by others, scanning by me, institutional repository, faculty computers, dean’s computer, budgeting, classroom tech retrofitting, major website overhaul, planning for student services starting up in the fall. I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff. Oh, and I’ll be on vacation and off the grid for ten days in August, coming back on orientation day.

This couldn’t be happening at a better time, is strangely invigorating, makes me want to work on the weekends. There, I’ve got my groove back.

*dives deep*

I’m at Digital Humanities 2009, my home conference, the place that actually feels like home. The people are fantastic, the energy is high but not crazy, and the entertainment is made of awesome. Tonight, about 300 of us (literally) went to a crab shack.

I’ve been blogging the conference–or at least, the sessions I’ve managed to attend. The posts are here; if you’ve been wondering why exactly I’m in love with my somewhat obscure (and yet pervasive and important to all of us, whether we know it or not) profession, this is a good way to find out what excites me about digital humanities.

Oh, and hey, I was lightning-interviewed! Now I have had 1m4s of my 15m of fame.

Today is the international Day of Digital Humanities, in which over a hundred of us (I think…) are blogging what we do on this particular date. It’s not going to cover everything I do evar, but it’s a decent cross-section. If you’re interested, take a look here.

Since intersession ended on January 5th, I have not had a single full school-night’s sleep. Catching up on the weekends is useful but still not healthy.

Thursday was one mad dash after another at work right up until about 6:30pm, and culminated in drinking wine at a reception in our library, chatting with coworkers, then cleaning up and getting a ride home, arriving around 7:45. And immediately turning around to drive the car I time-share to its home, take the bus back, and collapse.

Friday was one mad dash af… well, you know. Ran around almost non-stop 8-6 with a two-hour break for a dental appointment (three cheers for my dentist, again), came home and had a fantastic dinner with this gorgeous babe who is funny and fascinating and has good taste in movies. I showed her An Ordinary Miracle.

Now it’s almost 2am. Not setting an alarm. Still, I’d like to figure out how to live life as fully as I want, and still get anything approximating enough sleep most nights. I feel my immune system wearing down.

Yesterday I woke up grumpy. I had my reasons, but mostly it boils down to, I’ve been getting abysmal amounts of sleep this week – five to six hours a night. No good reason for it.

Moaned about, got out of bed like an hour late, went to work and stayed there for ten hours, in part because the first half of the day I was mostly useless. (Enh. It happens. It’s SAD season, and I do what I can, and somehow work-blogging after hours feels different, calmer, with nobody around.) And near the end of the business day I found out I’d made some people unhappy, and had to deal with that, and it wasn’t a big deal—in fact, the conversation with a third party was helpful and reassuring—but it’s never a good feeling to know you’ve screwed up. On the other hand, learning experience, and a mild one as such things go.

So by the time I left work at 8pm I was tired. And… not exactly grumpy, just feeling off. But then.

Then I came home, and there was a circus band rehearsing in my living room. Went upstairs, and housemate Coraline was hanging out in the kitchen with her friend Carolyn. I threw my stuff down and—having had no dinner—declared I needed scotch, and to make a casserole. Why? I dunno. I guess I’d had a fantastic casserole at Molly’s the day before, and I’ve had random foodstuffs hanging around the cupboards for forever, AND I’d never made casserole before.

Yeah, really.

So we broke out the bottle of 12-year-old scotch that I’d taken to Burning Man and we’d never gotten around to opening (there was other alcohol around, but it’s not tempting to drink a lot of dehydrating liquid in that climate). And I made a casserole of frozen artichoke hearts, frozen peas, frozen corn, frozen mixed mushrooms (thank you, bulk food ordering, I have a mushroom invasion in my freezer), chick peas, canned tuna, multi-colored potatoes, cream and two kinds of cheese. And I’m probably forgetting other stuff.

All the while, people around me chatted and sipped tasty alcohol and giggled a lot. And later I ate and felt more human, and around 10:45pm Coraline (ok, Johanna) and Eric and I went out against all better judgment, because spectacularly under-advertised Midnight Madness was going on in Davis Square. We gawked at antique bobbles and boutique-y clothes, but mostly we dropped by Dave’s Fresh Pasta, sampled tasty foods, and brought home mozzarella made that evening by a neighbor of theirs (or something).

Oh. my. gods. Homemade mozzarella with crushed pink peppercorns and a drizzle of truffled olive oil. Yeah, I’d say that, combined with hanging out with my awesome housemates, was a win even though it meant that once again I got too little sleep.

Boy, if that was a bad day, bring them on, you know? Speaking of days, I should probly go face mine. The sun’s rising, a warm shower awaits, and today I get to take tasty casserole to work for lunch. Oh, and tonight I get to see both of my favorite small girls (can’t call them toddlers anymore, as they’re skipping and giggling on either side of three years old), and go to the Museum of Science with one of them and her dad. WOE. Woe is me in this sad season.

Today I’m thankful for good people in my life, and for all the weird bipolar days that, in the end, let me know that things are going to be ok.

I have a faculty member here at work who wants to transfer the production of her center’s newsletter from an outside source to in-house. She’s sent me an example, and it’s a reasonably complex layout – definitely not something that should be done in Word – and she wants to keep the layout more or less the same.

We are strongly recommending that people here not use MS Publisher, for various reasons. Do you have a favorite desktop publishing application for Windows XP? Inexpensive is a huge bonus.

(Now, if only she were a Mac user… but no.)

Did you know today is Open Access Day? Wikipedia’s summary of what open access means is a good one: “free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals.”

Why support open access? Won’t the people who need these resources already be associated with colleges or universities, and so have access to them? Well, first off, no; currently access to many important resources costs more than many institutions can afford. But consider also the full range of uses for open-access materials. Educators at all levels can use it to keep up to speed with their fields, and better teach children of all ages. (“Won’t somebody think of the children?!” actually applies here.) People who are dealing with diseases they know little about, whether it’s them or their relatives who are sick, can use scientific articles to educate themselves and get a better perspective on what’s going on with their bodies. Researchers can get their work done faster and ultimately more cheaply – less need for interlibrary loan! – which again increases equality in access to the knowledge we are so quickly amassing, regardless of a scholar’s or institution’s economic status.

Open access does nothing to address the problem of the digital divide; people without internet access still don’t get the benefit of this knowledge. But it’s a step. And when internet spreads further, like telephony, these resources will be waiting for people dealing with epidemics, people who need cheap renewable energy, people who can improve their own lives using knowledge we already have, without waiting for the Peace Corps to get to them.

Support open access. Talk to librarians about it. Talk to your scientist friends about it. Talk to anyone who’ll listen.