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.
We treated ourselves to the
restaurant we had passed by on our first day that had a huge line -- Pancakes
on the Rocks. The menu had a ton of different pancake combinations. D got the
jaffa orange chocolate pancakes and I got the chocolate berry pancakes. They
weren't the most amazing things ever -- his didn't have orange flavoring inside
but just some orange slices on the top -- but they were the most actually
chocolate pancakes I've ever had. They also like putting ice cream or cream
instead of whipped cream in Australia and New Zealand, and while ice cream
always seems like a good idea, it wasn’t very good ice cream and so just ended
up being quite heavy to accompany the rest of the sugary meal. As an
appetizer, we ordered “pizza crust” which was the strangest tasting bread we’ve
had. Basically bread with spices but no cheese so it seemed like it was missing
something. 
