Chinese New Year in Sydney

Another cool thing about our time in Sydney was that it was Chinese New Year, and it is supposed to be the second biggest celebration outside of China because there are so many Chinese residents. The parade was cancelled due to construction on George Street, but they had 12 blow-up lanterns around downtown representing the zodiac signs, so we were able to make it to all of those. The Mahjongg ox was so cool! And they lit up the Town Hall, Opera House, Harbor Bridge, and Circular Quay in red.

The University of Sydney had a big campus and several buildings with nice architecture. You have to wonder what people are going to think of all our 'modern' glass buildings that seem to look the same. The library staff were not very helpful, but I still managed to check out several science fiction magazines from the early days of the genre which was really exciting. Going back to the source is definitely worth the effort because you get to see what people were actually reading and holding. Digital just can't replicate that.

 

Digital Humanities Conference

My Digital Humanities conference at the University of Western Sydney went well and I met a lot of people and learned a lot. The chance to participate in the new scholars pre-conference was a great opportunity and gave me access to a lot of the up-and-coming minds I may well work with someday. I learned about all of the anonymous women involved in the early days of computing and punchcards before men took over the field and coding. Apparently, one woman went down to Italy to interview some of these women who worked with famous computer guy Father Roberto Busa and had to use a translator, and the male translator was cutting off the women when they started talking about negative things Busa did. A loss to history, for sure. 

The welcome night ceremony was held at the State Library of New South Wales, and it had a gorgeous reading room.

Things were off to a tumultuous start the first day at the opening ceremony and keynote presentation when there was a continuous string of men on-stage giving all of the introductions as well as the keynote speech. I had finally joined Twitter just before the conference, and it was exciting following along with the backchannel of people tweeting #whereareallthewomen and complaining about the representation of Digital Humanities as a white, male sphere (except for one Aboriginal man who gave the welcome to country speech).

The evening poster session had some quite interesting digital projects, including:

•  DigitalDemocracy.org which creates a searchable database of videotaped California legislative sessions (lots of people think there are transcripts available of these sessions, but there aren’t, making it difficult to know who said what)
• Using Google Ngram Viewer to track word usage in books over time
• Chinese-characters.org which is a study of Chinese characters and their historical evolution using a computer program.

The second day saw one of the conference organizers get on-stage and openly call out the men and ask them to exit the stage so that women could have a voice and participate equally. Then, the keynote speaker after her (Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and VP at Intel) gave an extraordinarily good speech on the history of technology and where we are at with robots today and what kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves. It was so relevant to my study of science fiction and literature, it has now set my expectations for a keynote speech very high! If I could give a speech like that one day, I would be very lucky. She even used one of the same images on her slide that I had in my presentation for my next conference, and I came up afterward to tell her that and she wished me luck. I met a man who looked just like Spock in a lunch session on global data infrastructure in the humanities (sciences are already on their way to having standards and clear articulation of needs). I found interesting presentations in the afternoon on video games in India featuring female characters and using programs to generate more realistic stock video game characters that come from particular universes for game developers to be able to buy off the shelf (Game of Thrones used as the example). I took the river ferry home to get some beautiful nighttime views of Darling Harbor.

The third and final day made me worried about all of the data our devices are sending to the cloud and companies without our knowing or thinking about it. A presentation on ebook data where they were studying how long a reader spent on particular pages of a book and how many chapters they read raised issues of publishers using this data to make decisions about not financing new authors, or limiting creative output to more of the same that readers spend more time on, potentially stifling creativity and new ideas. I’ve heard that Amazon may now be using this kind of data to determine royalties to authors (based on per page, rather than per book). I know some people really like ebooks, but I still prefer the feel of real and ability to notate my books, as well as the anonymity they afford (and ability to lend out). Another presentation examined GoodReads reviews and found a lot of errors in plot summaries, with people mentioning characters or events that never happened in books as if they were true (example: Bilbo described as slaying the dragon in The Hobbit).

I agreed to give a brief statement on my experience attending the pre-conference and ended up having to speak on-stage in front of dozens of people at one of the annual meetings of an organization that helped sponsor it. It was my first time on that big a stage in front of a microphone so I wrote everything out the night before and just read my statement. It went okay and I didn’t mess up so that was good! Definitely need more practice on the public speaking front.

I made the mistake of reading my student evaluations for my tutoring during the middle of the day and there was one disgruntled student who did not appreciate being challenged to think critically about the world and wrote a long paragraph on how worthless some of the sessions were. It was hard to read, but I will have to face this (and worse) in the future if I end up teaching, and it really shows that there is work to do even in students who you’d think would be more open-minded. Plus, I know it’s not my fault that they didn’t do the reading and weren’t prepared. However, the rest of the few received were positive and nice to read.

A Book A Day

Last week I had several instances of reading a book in a day, which was quite satisfactory. To procrastinate on working on my project proposal (wherein I have to outline everything I'm going to write about and provide a background to the topic), I started reading Ursula Le Guin's The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1989) and continued the whole day until I finished it. Admittedly, I have not held her in very high esteem after I was let down by her classic The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). It just wasn't the groundbreaking feminist science fiction novel I was expecting, and her use of the male pronoun always bothered me. This book was a collection of 1970s essays as well prologues to her books, with her going back and providing commentary on them from her 1989 perspective. It gave me some good insight into her perspective on both the science fiction field as a whole, and her works as a part of it. I liked a lot of what she had to say about the genre, and she admitted that she later realized what a big deal it was that she used male pronouns and regretted it. So, I am looking forward to rereading that novel (checked it out of the library today) as well as her other ones from the 60s and 70s. They will undoubtedly be important novels to compare to Dune, and I'm hoping I will like them.

The next day, I read H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895). Nice, quick science fiction with a tolerable frame narrative. Normally you forget the narrator is telling a story by the time you return to them, but this book is short enough that you don't.

The following day, I started with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845). It is supposed to be the closest to science fiction of his short stories. It was certainly an interesting premise (check it out for free from Project Gutenberg -- love stuff out of copyright!). Then I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), where three young men stumble upon a land populated only by women and girls. I found several similarities to Dune and marveled that she was writing this so far ahead of the "official" start of science fiction, especially with all of the attention to women's issues. It was great to see the men floundering when they were trying to explain how great their civilization was but kept having to avoid or explain away problems like poverty, crime, and diseases. Unfortunately, most of Gilman's critiques about society and gender still ring true today.

So I'm steadily working through my science fiction classics list. I moved it to a spreadsheet so I could sort it by year, and am trying to read in chronological order when possible to see the genre's evolution. Most of the books are available at either the university library or city library system, although some I might have to break down and buy elsewhere. It's difficult not to accumulate a sizable book collection here, especially working in academia, but I keep in mind the trip back home and how much paper weighs.

We watched Pixar's WALL-E movie and I was able to enjoy some of the references to 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have found that watching movies at different stages in life can render a new response and perspective on them. Maybe it's having more life experiences to compare them with. Just something I've noticed when rewatching movies that I haven't seen in a long time.

We've gone to the first two of the Lazy Sundays free concerts in the park to try to get out and enjoy the summer weather and some live music. Yesterday on our way there I picked up my first found money! A 10-cent piece on the sidewalk. Since they got rid of the penny and nickel, I guess people hold onto their change more carefully.

We took our car in today to get it tuned up ahead of our roadtrip down south. Oil change, new air filter, and new tires (spelled tyres here) since the old ones were almost bald and not very safe to drive on. Also got a wheel alignment and the tech commented on how off it was (it took them an extra half hour to fix). It's probably the first time it's been aligned in a long while. No word back on the check engine light problem, but otherwise it is ready to go. With gas dropping to 1.79/liter ($6.78/gallon) and the weather in the 70s, it's a good time for a summer vacation.