my software toolkit
09 Dec 2009I have put up a page on the Mac software I use. Linux details might come later.
I have put up a page on the Mac software I use. Linux details might come later.
Following LCA2010, I’m staying in Wellington for a couple of days for DrupalSouth. I’m planning to speak on the use of Drupal in the Founders and Survivors project, as a kind of appendix to my LCA presentation.
The press release follows. NZ$67.50 is bananas for Australians!
DrupalSouth Wellington 2010 is the New Zealand Drupal event. It will be NZ’s largest ever gathering of Drupal developers, designers, contributers and business folk. DrupalSouth Wellington will be on Saturday and Sunday 23-24 January – just after Linux.conf.au Wellington.
DrupalSouth features some great speakers and attendees from NZ and abroad, including
* Angela Byron (webchick); Drupal 7 core committer, Drupal community nurturer, and co-author of Using Drupal
* Emma Jane Hogbin (emmajane); co-author of Front End Drupal, uber-documenter, Drupal evangelist/speaker and community all-rounder
* Liz Henry (lizhenry), BlogHer.com developer -- the largest community for women bloggers, built on Drupal since 2006
Registration costs just $67.50 NZD including GST ($60 for non-NZ businesses) and includes lunch, coffee and tea on both days – not to mention access to a great line up of speakers and sessions on awesome topics. The full schedule is coming soon! Register here.
Such a low price for such a high-quality event has only been made possible thanks to our generous sponsors, including;
* Xplain Technology Hosting; Web hosting optimized for Drupal
* Sparks Interactive; Straight talking, successful work, simple equation.
* .nz; .nz is our home
* Em Space; Em Space is a web agency in Melbourne, Australia. We build Drupal websites for enterprise, government and not-for-profit
* Catalyst IT; Specialists in Open Source Technologies
* Egressive; Building superior computing solutions powered by Linux and Drupal
* Open Query; Exceptional Services for MySQL and MariaDB at a Fixed Budget
* Fuzion; Campaign, Connect, Communicate.
DrupalSouth Wellington will be at the upstairs function room at Mac’s Brewery Bar & Restaurant, on Wellington City’s waterfront, and just a few hundred metres from Linux.conf.au at the Wellington Convention Centre.
DrupalSouth Wellington will be the second event of its kind. The first was DrupalSouth Christchurch November 2008.
After that long-ish post, here’s a short one (more than 140 characters, though).
I’m going to linux.conf.au in Wellington in January, and speaking about the Founders and Survivors project and humanities computing. I presented a few talks on this topic at mini-conferences at LCA 2009, and was invited to consider submitting to the main conference in 2010.
I have a summary of LCA2010 plans and also some very tentative travel plans. This will be my first time in New Zealand. I had ambitions for a Grand Tour of New Zealand but time and resources are limited, so I will probably stay in Wellington until the end of the conference, then spend a couple of days in Christchurch. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
I haven’t been blogging as much as I used to. I have been posting frequently on identi.ca and Twitter (a public arena) and on Facebook (semi-public) but haven’t been writing longer, detailed posts. I still write a lot, privately and for assessment, but I think the depth and quality of my public online presence has declined. It’s not for want of ideas or interesting life changes, but micro-blogging and social networking seem to have swallowed up the time that I used to put into blogging. I don’t think this is good, especially as I am now trying to develop a more visible professional identity online.
This latest attempt at an online ‘home’ uses GitHub Pages. I use GitHub to host some of my code (both public and private) and watch other developers’ projects – it’s ‘a social network for geeks’. Their Pages system, using the Jekyll site generator, requires some technical proficiency and means that I keep a copy of all my content, but it takes care of some of the routine details of generating a blog. GitHub and identi.ca are two of the fast-moving online communities of geeks now – I asked for help with adding an Atom feed to this site and got a useful answer within minutes.
Herewith a brief update, for the benefit of the disparate groups of people who follow me online, and perhaps for my own memory. (And my next (non-significant) birthday is approaching scarily fast, so it seems a good time for taking stock.)
I’m still working at the Centre for Health and Society at the University of Melbourne, and these days spend most of my time on the Founders and Survivors project. This is a huge, ambitious project to transcribe and digitise archival data on every convict who was transported to Van Diemen’s Land, and link this with information on their descendants – particularly those who served in the First World War – to identify connections across generations in health, wellbeing and resilience. It involves collaborations between academics across a range of disciplines and genealogists and amateur historians. My role has largely been developing the public website in Drupal and finding ways to connect the data that volunteers submit on their convict ancestors with our archival data.
I am thinking more these days about the field of ‘digital humanities’ or ‘humanities computing’ (even the name of the field is still in flux). This is an active field in the USA, UK, and Europe, but in Australia there doesn’t seem to be same level of awareness or activity. There are various projects based in Australia that apply emerging computer technology to problems in the humanities, but the professional networking and scholarly identity hasn’t taken off yet. I sometimes have the feeling of being on a kind of frontier; it’s exciting, and at the same time there is some anxiety about not knowing where this will lead me.
At the same time, I am continuing my studies in theology, and hope to complete an honours programme in systematic theology and church history over the next two years. (Yes, it’s a master’s degree with honours, yes, that is odd.) It’s not enough to ride the digital humanities train – having a contribution to make in terms of historical methodology; if I am to continue in academia, I need a field (time and place) to focus on, at least at this junior stage. I have some ideas in gestation in the area of 19th and 20th century Australian history and hope to identify a viable question for a minor thesis.