Conference blogging
This week I’ve been attending the CLIR Scholarly Communication Institute here at UVA and having a blast. Among the highlights: a presentation on the amazing Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library; another on the history of the Roman de la Rose project at Johns Hopkins; and a talk by Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress during which a lightning bolt struck and I suddenly started having ideas about how to reconfigure my dissertation topic into something rather different but very much connected with what everyone was talking about at this gathering. (More on this anon, I think.) Oh, and some really, really good food. I haven’t been this well fed in months.
Now my brain is reeling a bit from four days’ worth of uploading. You know how the title character of William Gibson‘s Johnny Mnemonic has cybernetic memory implants in his brain so that he can courier information back and forth?* That’s kind of how my head felt after a while. (Note to self: the next time you go to a conference or convention or similar, do not continue drinking coffee late into the afternoon just because there’s a coffee urn right there, because then you won’t be able to sleep at night and will find it much harder to concentrate the next day, coffee or no.) But it’s a good kind of brain-reeling.
Best of all was being among people who believe in democratic access to information, who are deeply and articulately concerned with making sure that knowledge doesn’t stagnate in tiny, isolated pools of specialization, and who want scholarly work to reach outward and over (in the words of one of the speakers) rather than simply upward to the tenure-gatekeepers. I rarely heard this kind of public engagement — or this kind of collaborative effort with people from other disciplines — when I was in graduate school. Watching the digital-library presentations, I thought "This is exactly what I want to be doing."
And now I get to actually do it. Honestly, I still can’t believe my luck.
* I’m thinking of the short story, not the movie adaptation, which was not one of Keanu Reeves’ greatest moments, alas, and not one of the great moments in book-to-movie adaptation history either.
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