So busy. Last week was a wonderfully fun and inspiring intensive summer class, Collaborative Creativity in New Media, with ten US and ten Norwegian students as well as wonderful faculty: Rob Wittig, Joellyn Rock, Sandy Baldwin and Rod Coover as well as Scott and me from here. The students made wonderful projects in just six intensive days, based on characters from the character generator Scott set up, a mysterious letter from Archibald Baker III, lots of explorations and photos and sounds and collages and writing and more. The projects will be available online once we and the students have had more time to finalise things, and we’re planning to repeat the course next year as well.
Today my fingers ache from typing fast as I translate the catalogue for a new exhibition on electronic literature that Scott has put together at the university library, with a little help from me and a lot from the library. The poster, made by Pedro Vasquez at the library, is wonderful.
Tomorrow I’m meeting my team from the Digital Methods Winter School in Amsterdam (Anne Helmond, Erik Borra, David Berry and Jean-Christophe Plantin), to discuss our progress finishing the paper we started in the data sprint in January, visualising the fields of digital humanities and electronic literature using book recommendation data from Amazons in different countries. So hopefully I’ll have got some more work done on the paper before 14:00 tomorrow.
And on Monday we’re hosting another seminar and workshop here, that should be fantastic: Visualising Electronic Literature. The first day consists of public presentations in Bergen Public Library, and Tuesday and Wednesday will be a hands-on workshop where we’re going to be teaching participants how to use Gephi to analyse data from the Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, and we’ll do a data sprint of our own to get some projects started. It should be really good fun, but oh my, how to have the time for it all!
On top of this, of course our three and five year olds have been acting up from all the late nights and babysitting and barely seeing their parents. Yesterday I spent lots of time with them, and they’ve been so much happier. I wish wish wish the days had a lot more than 24 hours, because how on earth am I going to get everything done and hang out with the kids?
The good thing? I’m on sabbatical so I’m NOT at orientation meetings like the rest of my department. And sometimes we get to bring the kids along, like on the summer course excursion to Fløyen last Saturday, where our kids played with a visiting post.doc’s son.
