another year older and deeper in debt

Deeper in debt to this blog only, thankfully nothing financial. My birthday came and went last week, reminding me that the last time I posted here, I was a whole year younger than I am now!

June found me in Stockholm for a week at the International Federation of Theatre Research conference, part of the Intermediality in Theatre and Performance Working Group. I took part in Barcelona back in 2013, when I was working on my thesis, a pure (or purist) pursuit of the amalgamation of performance studies and HCI. Three years later, I came to Stockholm as a researcher in a Computer Science department, working on an EPSRC project (and if that means nothing to you, read Extremely Prejudicial against Silly Research Cons, a.k.a. most arts research). I felt a bit of trepidation at the outset... but then the project was very well received, and I got a vast amount out of discussions around it. Really, this group could hardly be any more friendly and helpful.

Besides that - lots of meetings, workshops, bid-writing sessions, a small side project, two or three CHI papers in the works, and about a squillion hours spent on Part 2 of The Rough Mile (almost done, almost!), plus a nearly three-week visit from various family members - that's been about it for my June and July.

There was also a short-lived attempt to get a PED discussion going on LinkedIn, thwarted by the fact that said social network sent me no notification whatsoever when people responded to my post! I only noticed that I'd had some replies several weeks after the fact when I looked at my profile for another reason. Mostly, I'm embarrassed, but partly I'd like to have a wee word with their UI people. Seriously? I need to physically return to the page every time I wonder whether there's been a reply to a conversation I started? At this point, it's been a couple of weeks since I first realised I'd missed the conversation, and I've forgotten to post to the conversation that I hadn't seen the replies, because there's no function for engaging with me as a (very absent-minded) contributor. Clearly I've missed a trick here, and perhaps LinkedIn has, too. In any case, I'll try again to make contact with the outside world, and to maintain the conversation here.