weekend of digital humanities

I seem to have fallen back into a bad old insomnia habit. Damn.

Mostly, I suspect, this is because my mind is spinning like crazy thanks to all the intellectual excitement of this past weekend. I went down to London on Thursday to give a tech talk (the one I've been dining out on in Copenhagen and Paris) to London.pm, and stuck around until today for a workshop about Arabic prosopography.

No, I'm not turning into an Arabist. I am, however, being paid this year to work on the Prosopography of the Byzantine World project, adding information from the relevant Armenian sources. I was invited to the workshop as a way of meeting people in the field whom I should know. In advance of this, I also went on Thursday to meet the professor who made the arrangements for me to work on the project. It was kind of like an ex post facto interview. By the end of it, I realized the extent to which she's working me into her plans for all sorts of digital-humanities projects that need to be done. She's adamant that I should worry foremost about finishing my thesis, because it's only after that's done that I will be free to be co-opted into all these other schemes. I seem to have acquired another grownup figure who will be regularly checking on me to see that I'm progressing on my thesis. Hmm.

And the other thing I realized by the end of the hour is that the work that needs to be done is actually interesting. Ever since I went back to history, various people have suggested that I might find a niche in humanities computing. I've always reacted warily to this idea, because I always had the impression that, while computing can do a great deal for history, the technology involved would not be interesting enough to keep my attention. Now I've begun to see that I just wasn't imaginative enough. (I mean, hey, my collation project is a direct counter-example. It's fun to write, the geeks like to hear about it and seem to find it interesting, and the humanities people border on treating me like some sort of manuscript Messiah. It can all go to a girl's head.)

So I went to this workshop, which was allegedly about Arabic prosopography but was really all about large-dataset history projects online and how communication and standards are so much better than working in isolation. Since I was there as a technologist and not an Arabist, and I have full confidence in my abilities there, I was a lot less reticent than I usually am in scholarly settings, and got into some really interesting discussions about things like collaboration models and approaches to semantic markup of historical texts. I really ought to write down some notes about it before I forget.

In between the conference sessions, I also got to hang out with d_ilmari, have a nice fry-up for breakfast, and lounge around in the grass on Primrose Hill enjoying the rare bit of sunshine. It was a beautiful weekend that almost made me kind of miss living in London.

After the conference I went with a fellow technologist to Paddington, where we got into a debate about the relative merits of Perl, Lisp, and XSLT and ended up missing our train because we both lost track of time. Oops. Then I came home, knell made me tea, and I realized what my thesis-writing schedule between now and the end of December has to be. I have my work cut out for me. No wonder I'm not sleeping.