Busy, body.

As my compatriots stop to consider the implications of today’s horrible anniversary, I largely tune out the world until the evening in order to get through the day.

It’s been a turbulent week or so, complete with sickness, homecoming and post-BM depression. One piece of radically good news is that I have a job. Hooray, it’s an interesting and novel research fellowship! Working with Prof. David Kertzer should be fun; he seems to always have a million projects going, and I get to learn things like strategies for preparing a book for publication. Also, importantly, I do not have to worry about whence this semester’s bread originates.

I am slowly ridding my living space of distractions: they finally disconnected cable modem service today, and my file folders have been cleaned out, purged of two-thirds of all the paper in them. For the next several weeks, I’ll be digitizing the rest of my Roland materials, and the rest of the semester will see theme and imagery markup for the corpus. This allows me to ignore for the moment the frightening prospect of having to come up with an interface for the project: this is by far my weakest knowledge base. We’ll worry about this next semester: I’ve given up trying to learn anything computer-related only in theory. Learn by doing.

Unless it’s Perl, for which O’Reilly has already graciously provided exercises.

My household is slowly starting to feel like mine, again. Cooking is a sublime pleasure; I am discovering better ways to cook for one, which has always been difficult in the past. I am also eating significantly less than before I’d left for the summer: a week in the desert after two and a half months’ worth of sunny California fruits and vegetables, followed by several days’ drive, seems to have finally knocked my body out of the habit of eating when it’s not hungry. This is both pleasing and centering.

Speaking of centering, I cannot recommend The Yoga Deck highly enough, for those interested in such things.

We seem to be getting a humanities computing seminar off the ground here at Brown. Invited talks will be open to the public, I’m presuming; so stay tuned for announcements. I think the first talk is mid- or late October; when it gets confirmed, I’ll post details. The list of speakers is pretty impressive.

Finally, I’ve been thinking about ways of advertising the course I’m teaching next semester (Codex to Code: an Introduction to Humanities Computing) to the community at large. It’s a University Course, unaffiliated with any specific academic department (although co-sponsored for approval by Italian Studies and Modern Culture and Media). Nobody has to take it to fulfill a major, but then, Brown’s undergraduate careers are largely unstructured anyway. It’s never been taught before, so it seems important for the word to get out. I’ll probably send out sets of flyers to instructors teaching related courses this semester, and perhaps drop in on some class sessions taught by people I know. Posting ads in key campus locations also seems potentially useful, but I’ve no clue as to its real value. Other ideas, anyone?