Keep up at the back

I promised myself when I started this division of labour between OUCS and ADONIS that I’d try to keep track on what I was doing better. Regular bloggage I said to myself, that’s the answer. And myself replied, as I do, of course I will.

Err. So here’s a quick update covering the last month, following Lilette’s annual departure to Mauritius to visit her mum on 14 Oct. The very next day, I packed my bag, locked up the house, and set off for Paris. Being tired of hotels, I rented a tiny flat at an exorbitant cost in the rue du Temple for a week, and started learning how to be a Parisian. I also attended a succession of meetings…

Fri 16 Oct

First to the Ecole Normale Superieure for LexiPraxi2009, annual conference of the Association des Informaticiens de Langue Francaise, which this year is devoted to feature structures, no less, and has therefore invited me to talk about the TEI and its recommendations on the subject. The day began with an odd session in which most of the speakers (me, Laurent Romary, Eric de la Clergerie, Sadik Bessou, and Kais Haddar) sat around a table with the organiser (Jean Michel Borde, Henri Hudrisier, Stephanie Delmotte) and nattered about what we were going to say while feasting on dates and biscuits brought from Algeria by Sadik. Then we adjourned for an excellent lunch, where we were joined with a distinguished gent called Xavier North, who opened the formal proceedings with a nice talk about neologisms and the web. The event took place in a room I vaguely remember from previous events at the ENS, blessed with exceedingly comfortable fauteuils, but I managed to stay awake, for my own talk at least.

Ile aux Cerfs Restaurant, passage du Prado

Le weekend

Next morning was Saturday so I stayed in bed as long as possible, though sadly not as long as I might have since I had a domestic problem to resolve, involving shower pipes. Finding the replacement turned out to be easy because Merlin Vert, France’s answer to B&Q, had just opened a super new department store in rue Rambuteau, just round the corner. After some hesitation, my aching feet insisted that I take the plunge and investigate the modalities of the velolibs de paris, with whose aid I was able to discover an interesting market and a Mauritian restaurant,before peddling triumphantly back to my flat for a healthy dinner and bed. The deal is that you can pick up abike from any one of the little parking places throughout the city, and don’t pay anything beyond your weekly fee if you return it to another such parking place within 30 mins (or a euro if you take an hour). The only thing that can go wrong is if there’s no free place at your destination, or no functioning bike at your point de depart, but neither of those has happened to me yet. And then there’s the Paris traffic system of course.

19-20 Oct

Cycling across Paris to the DARIAH meeting proved a somewhat terrifying experience since the nearside lane of your typical Parisian boulevard is reserved for the exclusive use of buses, taxis, and delivery vehicles. Oh, and bikes, if there’s room, which there usually isn’t. Still, I made it, much envigorated and not actually killed, to the Espace Haussmann within 30 minutes for a two day meeting of the DARIAH project.

With my Adonis hat on I had a lot of fun meeting people I haven’t seen for years, asking questions, and poking my nose into matters already decided ages ago by the inner circle management Board. DARIAH is a massive EU funded plot^h^h^hroject to create a new digital infrastructure for the Humanities, which (now that I’m in it) seems to have combined more or less everyone who is anyone in Digital Humanities. It has work groups and work packages and partners and is considering also institutionalising things called Competency Centres within, as legal framework, something called an ERIC. All good infrastructural stuff. And it’s also a way of maintaining the place of some existing organizations (DANS, CERCH, ADONIS, TextGrid…) at the centre of things. The eating

Lunch at the Art Nouveau Restaurant

was at least as good as the meeting, featuring notably a delightful Art Nouveau restaurant for lunch (see also Peter Doorn’s nice photos)

21 Oct

TGE Adonis Team Meeting, rue Lhomond.

22 Oct
Up early for the train to Orleans for a seminar on TEI for manuscripts hosted by Richard Walter; I gave another talk (much less well prepared) and was updated on some of the activities of the IRHT. I met Patrick Peccate en route which is why we missed the connecting train. But an interesting day all the same: I saw a tool being developed for the TELMA plateforme which looks like a comparatively sensible version of the ENRICH “MTool” and had an enjoyable argument with someone about their TEI-like encoding of a cartulary.

23 Oct

Alexandr, Wioletta, Alexandra

By bike (again) to the IPHST, near the Marche St Germain to consult with Wioletta Miskiewicz and her students working on the the digital archive of Twardowski and his circle. I learn that there are some mss in Lithuania which are known only by descriptions made of them early in this century before the secret police decided to hide them away. I try to persuade them that Dublin Core may be a bit restricted for full ms descriptions, and help Alexandra come to terms with Oxygen. Oh, and quelle surprise, another excellent lunch, this time with Jacques Dubucs, who is in excellent humour.

24 Oct to 9 Nov
Nearly two weeks at OUCS, working on CUD report, preparing next P5 release, getting used to living in an empty house.

Interrupted by a couple of days (5-6 Nov) in Madrid for the ENRICH final conference, where I had to give yet another talk, but otherwise did very little except (a) enjoy the company of other ENRICH partners, now much more relaxed as they realise that it’s too late to change anything (b) enjoy Madrid, a splendid city I now know I want to know better and (c) buy myself a new beret.

10 – 16 Nov
My first visit across the Atlantic for several years… in two steps. United put me into business class, which was nice, for the flight to Chicago. Then I got slightly lost at OHare, but eventually tracked down the PACE bus to Evanston where Martin Mueller welcomed me to his home for fine wine, excellent steak and conversation, and a really good night’s sleep. The following day, I took a leisurely train ride to Ann Arbor. It’s Amtrak — what’s the rush? And so to the Bell Tower Inn at the University of Michigan, much nicer than I remember it being, for the annual TEI Members Meeting And Conference. That really deserves a report of its own, which I haven’t time to provide now, though the archived twitter feed is probably as good as anything else to demonstrate that this was actually a whole lot of fun. The hjourney home, however, after a full day’s Board meeting, was just too, too long.

17-21 Nov

Nearly a week at OUCS, featuring SMG, MLPS IT Committee, UST (chaired by Sebastian) …
And now it’s the 22nd off we go to paris again, this time to a merely expensive flat in rue Mouffetard. Watch this space.

Transports en commun

How to get from Belfast to Marseilles

0915 Hand in keys and summon a taxi
0935 Taxi (£5) arrives EuropaCentre Bus Station, having negotiated Belfast morning traffic
0945 Double decker Ulsterbus no 33 sets off for airport through Belfast morning traffic
1020 Join shortish check in queue for flight EI58
1030 p roceed through the usual formalities in search of coffee
1040 enjoy coffee and work on talk a bit
1115 proceed to gate and find a plug so as to continue working.
1135 all boarded and off we go. Continue to work as much as inflight regulations permit
1415 (French time) land at CDG
1430 air bridge finally produced, and we disembark and join queue to show passports
1440 join small mob of fractious infants waiting for bags to be delivered
1505 pick up bag, rush to bus stop and get on Roissybus to Opera in (false) belief it would leave before the Airfrance bus to GdL
1532 Roissybus negotiates Paris late afternoon traffic, changes driver
1600 Roissybus arrives Opera; dash to Auber RER D
1602 RER train leaves for GdL
1610 RER Train arrives Gare du Lyon. Hot, and hotfoot upstairs, arriving at Platform A with precisely 2 minutes to spare before
1616 TGV 6119 takes off. Phew.
1930 arrive Marseille, after a relaxing time working on my talk… wander hopefully out of Gare St Charles into adjacent University campus, where there is a large crowd of people enjoying une piquenique alfresco. Goodness me, c’est un universite d’ete! and a nice cheese sandwich too.

60 minute cycles

In the dying days of the famous British summer I set myself a weekend goal, not too strenuous, of cycling in more or less the same direction for an hour to see where I get to. Each week in a different direction.

The first weekend, the direction was North, along the canal tow path, a route I know well. Saturday afternoon and everyone’s out enjoying the sun, so a lot of polite banter as I bounce along, wondering why exactly the ground under my wheels is so corrugated, and when will I remember to buy a bicycle bell, though maybe people respond better to a polite “excuse me” or a jocular “tingaling” than they do to your actual mechanical tintinabulation. This is a route  which has not changed a great deal in the twenty or so years I have known it, though maybe there are more boats and a better maintained path than I remember from the early sixties. The chicken farm that used to be the first sign you were leaving suburban North Oxford is now a new housing development, and when the tow path is diverted tidily away from some ongoing maintenance work under the ring road it is within a distinctly 21st century  wire mesh fence. But the numbered bridges are just the same as they always have been, the hedgerows don’t look significantly different, and — my word this really is a bit bumpy.

That’s because the tow path has ceased to be a part of the Sustrans National Cycle Route 5 North, which went off at a tangent at the last bridge, and has now reverted to being just a tow path, at the whim of the villages it passes through. Kidlington likes its tow path, but Thrupp, where I finally stop for a rest as my hour is up, doesn’t give a toss. No matter, the sun is shining brightly, and the Jolly Boatmen is still open, offering quite drinkable cold white wine. (Which it certainly wouldn’t have done in the early sixties). An overland return route seems attractive: straight down the Oxford road into Kidlington, past the no-longer existent railway station, and the Dog Field, and on to Garden City, if memory serves. The road seems a bit longer, and the houses a bit smaller, but then I have not cycled down here since I was about 14 so that’s unsurprising. The Oxford House newsagent, where I used to buy penny toffees on my way to school (and that, dear reader, is why I am now increasingly toothless) is still there, but almost everything else along this street has changed. The Dog Field, which was once a real field, with clumps of dog roses in it, and a rather seedy looking pub called the Dog is now a maze of small streets of suburban houses, and a rather seedy looking eating house called the Dogwood.

I find myself in Laburnam Crescent, where once my best friend Dave lived. I wonder what’s become of him. I remember him explaining to me of why winkle pickers were the thing to wear. After we moved away from Kidlington to live in Bristol, I remember he came to visit me and reproached the city with being too proud of its own name, on the buses, on the buildings, even the cigarettes were called Bristol.

23 Stratfield Rd, in 1960 or so

I find myself again in Stratfield Road, where once I used to live. That’s our house.

23 Stratfield rd, today

That’s the window I once jumped out of experimentally. But the tree my dad planted is gone, and the house itself seems to be dwarfed by the car parked in front of it. It’s not my house any more, of course not. I cycle on up the road, somehow knowing the rather convoluted route necessary to get to Oxford from here,  without knowing how I know it. I lived here between 1960 and 1962 when these houses were all new. My mum used to have a white vase which a company called Taylor Woodrow who built these houses gave us when we moved in. I remember walking down this road with my dad trying to sell lottery tickets to support the local Labour party. I remember taking trick photos of my sister against this fence which, good heavens, is still there and really in quite good nick.

Ah well, onwards and upwards, over the railway bridge, past the grain silo which my parents used to call the Ministry of Fear because it has no windows, past the Golf Course and five mile drive, and, well, since this is turning out to be a trip down Memory Lane, a brief diversion to see what no 12 Harefields looks like these days.

12 Harefields, in 1974 (Belinda is in the pram)

12 Harefields, today

Unlike children, houses don’t grow up: no 12 Harefields just looks a bit more battered than I remember it being in 1974 when Lilette and I rented it. But the trees are bigger.

* *

A week later, and time for a different compass point. Where can I get to in an hour going South along Sustrans Route 5? Not to provoke unnecessary suspense, I  can reveal that the answer is Radley comfortably, and Abingdon if pushed. It is odd to be cycling into town on a Saturday afternoon through the crowds of happy shoppers and tourists who seem curiously unaware that the street they are thronging is actually part of Sustrans Route 5; I am not going shopping, I am going on an expedition. Over the Oxpens bridge, which has a rather fine political slogan “beware pedestrians from the left”,

Sound political advice

and so to Marlborough Road, various devious wiggles round parks, Wytham Street, more wiggles, a stretch of riverside splendour, featuring another  fine slogan,

Another sound political slogan

a stretch of ringroad traffic, and thus to the Hanson way. A beautiful straight flat offroad track skirts Kennington, beside the railway. All praise to the Sustrannies and their assiduous nagging of local authorities, though their taste in iron sculpture is not one I share. Radley seems to consist of a church,  a row of suburban houses, some kind of college, a railway station and a pub with a silly name, next to a rather fine  blackberry bush. Hesitating here for a while,  I decide to press on to Abingdon, since my hour is only just up and the afternoon is still fine. Which was a very good idea, since the route is almost entirely off road, and moderately scenic, carefully skirting the Abingdonian suburban sprawl via gravel pits, woodland, and open fields. This isn’t the real countryside, but it’s close. And then there’s another kind of transition, from semi-rural quiet to semi-urban leisure space, as we cross over a bridge into Abingdon’s answer to Cutteslowe Park. It’s still a fine Saturday afternoon, and families are taking an airing, in groups with roughly equal quantities of children and aged parents. I reckon I just have time for a cup of tea and a bun before returning to Radley to catch the train home. Which I do, though the return trip to Radley was a bit hectic, ten minutes exactly. Bikes on trains! hoorah!

* * *

Week 3 and the route is East. There is no obvious east-west cycle-specific route, but I have a mind to make one up anyway. The plan is to head for Elsfield, via Marston: I leave the house and proceed in an easterly direction as far as the roads permit me, which is to say up to the entrance into the University Parks. Then am forced to skirt the edge of said parks beforfe finally achieving significant easterly orientation across the river. Was this once called Mesopotamia? Not on any map I can now find, but nevertheless there’s a fine cycle route across it, and across the fields to Old Marston. Back lanes take me as far as the ring road, where I get lost in a trailer park for a while, before eventually finding how to get across the ring road and back on the road to Elsfield. Roads, even country ones, differ from cycle ways not only in the fact that you have to share them with cars, I suddenly re-remember, but in that they tend to have more hills and bends. The road on suddenly shakes itself determinedly and assumes a gradient which I am unfit even to consider cycling up, so I push. Never mind, the sun is still shining, and Elsfield has rather pleasant views over the surrounding countryside. It seems to consist of a small number of houses with rather uninventive names like “hilltop cottage”, “red cottage”,  “new cottage”, etc. . I pause to admire someone’s thatched cottage which features live peacocks, and also, at the very top of the hill, the pseudo-tudor glory of Elsfield Manor, where I learn from a commemorative plaque, John Buchan liked to play at being a member of the squirearchy when he retired from being Lord Tweedsmuir. And of course’s Rosie’s cottage, but there’s no-one home.

From the top of the hill the road bears south, and then joins the old road from Islip to Wheatley, known to you and me as the B4027, a mostly hilltop route through some fairly real countryside. I say this because I see mostly farmland on either side of it, and I’m sharing it with serious cyclists wearing sensible helmets and proper clothing as well as the occasional motor car or agricultural vehicle.

Thatched dog

I pause to admire a faintly surreal thatched dog, and am tempted by an overgrown bridleway signposted as 2 miles to Barton, but decide to press on to another of my former homes, in the village of Stanton St John. In 1972 I moved into 4 Freeland Cottages,

Freeland Cottages, Stanton St John

which looks today more or less exactly as it did then, and indeed more or less exactly as it did when (known as Red Cottages) it was photographed in 1897. Other parts of the village have come up in the world: Stanton House, which was boarded up and overgrown in the 70s is now doing very well thank you; Rectory Farm, which was struggling as a farm, has transformed the farmyard itself itself into a modest housing estate, and repurposed one of its pastures as an award-winning (do they really give these things awards?) pick-your-own. And the Star Inn, to and from which I remember many unsteady nocturnal walks, is still there but much gentrified. Other things at that end of the village (the Kings Arms and the village school notably, have been completely transformed into something else entirely, so I beat a hasty retreat to the Rectory Farm PYO, where I enjoy a cup of tea and a bun sitting in the sun, benignly ignoring assorted children released from their motorcars by parents in search of cheap strawberries.

I take the most direct route homeward: along the road past Shepherds Pits (now a rather exclusive looking housing development), down the hill past the Crematorium, struggle up the hill past Barton’s prefabs, most of them now much improved, under the ringroad, and so to the cycle route through Headington which is direct, and downhill, if dull. Nothing to report here: I see this route usually from the window of the X70 to and from Heathrow, which is why I don’t really see it at all. Another good thing about cycling is the ease with which one takes a minor detour, for example to pay my respects to the Oxford shark.

Paris in the in the spring

A “Special Interest Group” of the TEI dealing with l’édition génétique has convened a meeting at ITEM which is not to be missed. And it’s over a month since I was last in Paris. The meeting starts at 2 pm, which implies an early start from St Pancras (0920 to be exact), to make which less of a pain I spend the night before at a carefully selected very cheap hotel (the Wardonia, Argyle Street, right next to a black hole on Google Maps, you can’t miss it). My room was a double cell in the cellar, with its own bathroom, but absolutely no chairs, tables or other furbelows. Bright and early, and appreciating the contrast, I then waltzed into the Eurostar executive lounge for my free wifi, breakfast, etc. and thence, in due course, to Paris. Somewhat harassed staff took too long to bring a proper breakfast for the couple opposite me, so the lady concerned – a plausible impersonation of Maudie Littlehampton – proceeded to complain her way to some sort of discount and a personal apology from the chef du train. I gather that they can’t get the staff these days, not since they laid them all off after that unfortunate Incident in the tunnel last year anyway

No matter. It’s drizzling in Paris, and Yannick isn’t answering his phone. Dump bags at my hotel du jour (les 3 colleges, rue Cujas), check email, grab a chinese steamed bun for lunch, and then proceed to rue d’Ulm, and the Ecole Normale Superieure itself, which is just as Superieure as usual, even in the rain, and even though the assembled stone philosophes and former normaliens are in mourning, presumably for the the current parlous state of the French university system. I track down the meeting eventually, where someone is in full spate on the intricacies of recognizing authorial actions and traces in the manuscripts of Flaubert. I insert myself at the back of the room, next to, good heavens yes, it is Claus Huitfeldt, and there is Dino Buzzetti, and, over there is Hans Walter Gabler, and there are Daniel Ferrer and Aurelie Cresson, and yes, that is definitely Dirk van Hulle, and there are Wolfgang Lukas, Anne Bohnekamp, Fotis Iannidis, Hilde Boe, and hm that must be Jean-Louis Lebrave chairing the session… I apologise for the name dropping, but if a bomb went off in this room, there probably wouldn’t be much critical editing done in Europe for a while. A couple of Americans (John Bryant and Brett Barney) are also in evidence: Elena and Malte and Fotis and Paolo d’Iorio (who is regrettably not here) have evidently done their homework. Lots of interesting stuff gets presented very quickly but raising many tricky theoretical issues; there is well-behaved but energetic discussion. I sit at the back and concentrate. You have texts, possibly, you have documents definitely. You can’t really look at the former and ignore the latter; you can’t look at the latter without seeing the former. And yes, there is a lot in the TEI recommendations for textual editing which needs a fresh look and a good dusting down. In the evening, we dine at le Mauzac – a distinctive joint just off rue Gay-Lussac, offering excellent wine and good fish, where I chat to Susan Schreibman mostly, and learn amongst other slightly surprising facts that she had wanted to become a rabbi in her youth.

Next morning, there is more of the same, this time inside an antique cinema mysteriously located in the basement of a different ENS building. I am down to chair, in place of Laurent, which I dutifully do. As is his wont, Jean-Daniel Fekete demonstrates a rather cool piece of software he’s developed (I have a copy: it’s called Transcripteur and it does what it says on the tin). Emmanuelle Morlock, from the Flaubert project is busily taking notes on everything everyone says; I gather that the point is to assemble aspects of current practice not yet assimilated by the draft proposals of the workgroup. The original plan was to divide into breakout groups to discuss three distinct areas of the proposals, but since most people want to be in all three, and any way we are all getting on so well together, this is abandoned. At lunchtime, I rush off for a very quick business meeting with Yannick, and then return for the final rather crowded (but still amicable) plenary discussion, firmly chaired by Laurent. After protracted farewells, and promises of reports and redactions, I sit around a bit longer to winge about specific details of the draft ODD which Elena’s assistant Moritz has put together and then dash off to meet Yannick again.

Who is deep in discussion with a lady wearing an implausible hat, who has the task of explaining in a report to the publishers of Ile de France just what this XML malarkey is all about and how it might affect them. I obligingly blether a bit, and we then depart for a quick drink, before walking at high speed (discussing all the while whether or not there is such as thing as digital humanities) through the rush hour to the rue de four, for my next gig at something called the IHPST. This is an institute devoted to the study of the history of philosophy, where an energetic lady called Wioletta has organized a little drinkie-do to kick off tomorrow’s seminar, organized as part of a project to digitise the surviving manuscript archive of a Polish philosopher called Kazimierz Twardowski and seductively titled TEI – l’outil d’avenir du chercheur SHS ? (note the question mark). Jean-Daniel and Nicole arrive shortly after Yannick and me; as do Marie-Luce Demonet and Celine Poudat. We are the stars of the occasion, which is as they say nice, and even nicer is the subsequent dinner in an exclusive restaurant overlooking the marché St Germain. I explain why TEI might be interesting to an elderly linguist colleague of Wioletta’s and also to a gentleman I believe to be a Polish cultural attaché, and they both listen politely. Then I stagger back to my hotel somewhat unsteadily, reflecting on (a) what a long day this has been and (b) how different the sixieme arrondissement is from the cinqieme.

Next morning, I give my standard “TEI encoding pour les nuls” talk, emphasizing the “what is text anyway” aspects, and also including for the first time the Petit Comtois example, all of which seems to go down well. The lady with the implausible hat shows up, as do a small number of students, but it’s an intimate little gathering, unsurprisingly on a Saturday morning. Marie-Luce gives a good introduction to the Bibliotheque Virtuelle des Humanistes, including some up to date statistics: I download some sample texts from Epistemon, and explain again to Nicole why the way she’s doing end of line hyphenation is all wrong. Jean-Daniel demonstrates some (different) cool visualisation software and elaborates a little on the theory behind it, which is all new to me. We go to lunch round the corner, in a resto which we seem to be sharing with someone’s wedding party, but none the worse for that. Mmm, fish. Mmm, prunes in liqueur. And so to the closing session, which I had to chair, despite feeling that perhaps a little nap would not be inappropriate. David Chavalarias presented some high powered statistical work on terminology in scientific literature; Celine talked about her corpus of academic writing; Nicole talked about her work with historical archives. And in a final session I learned about Twardowsky, and the vagaries of his manuscripts – he died in Lviv in 1938,  so the archive in which they were deposited has changed its ownership rather more frequently than is strictly necessary. I also learned that Wioletta and three of her students are signed up for my next appearance in Paris, at l’Ecole des Chartes on 3 June, which means I probably have to prepare a different “TEI encoding pour les nuls” talk, drat.

A week in Taiwan

It must be at least ten years since I taught Yet Another TEI Workshop at Academia Sinica in Taipei, as part of the Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative.Buddhist texts in TEI have gone from strength to strength, and this year,  under the aegis of something called the Integrated Buddhist Archives Network, I was invited to speak about the history of the TEI on the occasion of the publication this week of a beautiful new Chinese translation of parts of the TEI which Marcus Bingenheimer and his students have been working on for the last year or so. Later in the same week, I was also invited to give a keynote at a conference on applied language teaching organized by BNC enthusiasts at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. This seemed too good a coincidence to miss, so I took a week off work and zoomed off with Eva Air to Taipei on Easter Sunday…

(If you just want to check out the photos, you can see them properly on my Picasaweb Page)

Time and space being what they are, this meant that I arrived  at Taoyuan airport on Monday evening after a fifteen hour journey via Bangkok. And this photo is not a bad reflection of what it feels like; crumpled after fitful slumbering in steerage class, wondering what happens next.	Crumpled in the carpark
Bihua buys buns	Fortunately, Bihua had the sense to stop during the subsequent hour-long drive to Dharma Drum Mountain to buy me some restorative buns and warm soya milk.

Dharma Drum Mountain College (法鼓佛教研修學院 ) is perched near the top of an eponymous mountain overlooking the Northern sea coast of Taipei; its library contains one of the largest collections of ancient Buddhist texts in Asia. As well as a growing number of students it is also an active monastery, with an international reputation amongst Buddhist scholars.

	At the entrance to the library there is a set of inscribed stone panels each containing the start of the Tripitaka in a different language or writing system – including (bottom left) one on TEI P4
The buildings are appropriately austere but my quarters were comfortable and I slept well with a choice of three bedrooms, and limitless supplies of tea. On Tuesday, I toured the College and its library, and met Marcus and his team. Here’s a nice picture I took later, of him with Bihua (left) and Virginia, the student who actually did the bulk of the translation work.

Photo opportunity	We went for a walk along the beach. Apart from a group of people using the waves of the Pacific as backdrop for some  glamour shots or maybe wedding photos, the beach was deserted.  Later we dined at a slightly surreal seaside restaurant featuring Mexican-Italian cuisine and free wifi.
You think we're awake? Think again.	Fat man in tie makes good The next day, we had to get up infeasibly early for the drive down to Taipei to give my lecture at Academia Sinica.

My lecture was followed by a sequence of presentations about the various digital resources and projects making up the IBAN. These being in Chinese, I was excused from the majority of them. Instead, a friendly British geek called Simon took the time to show me round the Academia Sinica museum (where I learned that the TEI manuscript encoding module really needs something like <stamp> to document the detail of inscriptions added to ancient artefacts by their successive imperial owners) , to transfer me to my new lodgings at the Taiwan Tech and also to introduce me to the complexities of Taipei’s public transport system and climate. We visited the National Imperial Museum and joined several million other people gawping at evidences of Chinese material culture going back several millenia, notably a famous jade cabbage. We chatted about Ubuntu. A splendid day, culminating in a splendid dinner in a vegetarian restaurant somewhere in Taipei, which turned out to be one of the gastronomic highspots of the week. You may think it hard or impossible to make a feast for the senses out of beancurd, soya, rice flour, agar agar and more oriental vegetables than you can think of (mysteriously excluding onions) but you’d be wrong, trust me. I was particularly impressed by the vegetarian sushi and sashimi. The restaurant is called Lian chi ge — the Pavillion at the Lotus Pond — and features some happy fish, who are not about to be eaten there any time soon.

Happy fish at Lianchi ge

I was woken next morning in my 15^th floor room by my personal “hostess” bringing me coffee and a cheesy bun for breakfast to ensure that I was in time to register myself as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the ALLT conference. The hostess concept was a first for me: like each of the six or seven other DVPs, I had been allocated a personal minder, in the shape of a female student from the first year language classes. The minders were all dressed alike, in smart black dresses and heels, and mine was called Kerry.

Another day, another conference

The event itself felt a bit like the Sejong launch I attended in Seoul in November a couple of years back; I was given a nice flower for my button hole,  plonked in the front row of the massive auditorium, and invited to say a few words of self introduction before the proceedings proper got under way, with an invited lecture from Dr Bill Yang. Dr Wang is a very good speaker, who talked wisely and persuasively about Language from an evolutionary perspective, a subject about which I know nothing, but felt that I did after he had finished. I freely confess that I took most of the rest of the first day off, though I did get back in time from my snooze to hear Mike Scott introducing Wordsmith tools and Mariachiarro Russo (whose name remained a major challenge for speakers throughout the conference) from Forli presenting a detailed overview of the organization and practice of that august institution for the training of language interpreters.

Following which, we were bundled into taxis and driven round the corner to a restaurant for the first of several nice dinners, during which Mike Scott impressed everyone by managing to eat a large shrimp with chopsticks. Eventually.
View from the 15th floor	Next day I was up at dawn admiring the view from the 15th floor, and thus in good time for my own presentation, a shortened version of the standard BNC story.
Following which I listened to Robert Johansson, a local and enthusiastic American teacher of English enthusing wildly about his practice in using Blackboard and student blogs to facilitate something called “communal constructivism” (Williams and Burden, 1997). He was followed by Amy Tsui, another excellent speaker, discussing the need for “culturally relevant pedagogy”, after which we DVPs were all shepherded off to have a rather fine lunch with NTUST’s president, featuring a very large fish

Remembering that I was supposed to be on holiday, I stopped taking notes around this point and went back to my room for a guiltless post prandial snooze, from which I was awoken only by torrential (but brief) tropical rain. I did manage to get back in time for the last session of the day, which included a breathtaking overview of Taiwanese activities in corpus/computational linguistics given at breakneck speed by Howard Chen and colleagues. The evening we were left to our own devices, so Mike Scott and I had a very enjoyable time exploring narrow twisty little streets full of vendors of strangely worded tee-shirts, delicious smelling food, and colourful fruit, before finally settling on a Vietnamese restaurant for dinner…

This was such a success that we reprised it the next day, by day light, with some minor modification, taking in a stroll through what Mike clearly felt was uncomfortably like a Brazilian favela, further explorations into Taiwanese sweet beverages, and a Japanese shabu-shabu style lunch buffet. And we even managed to get back to the conference in good time for the closing round table, which in fact was not quite the closing event, since it was followed by an over-long presentation by distinguished Chinese psycho-linguist Ovid Tzeng about recent advances in using NMR scanning techniques to localize areas of linguistic function in the brain. Then our minders collected us once more into taxis and rushed us off to the Howard hotel for just one more splendid buffet dinner, made remarkable not only by the scale and variety of dishes on offer, but also by the fact that it eventually collapsed into an orgy of mutual photograph-taking as the assembled student helpers realised that yes, this event was really finishing and yes they really had acquitted themselves all rather well.

Hostesses Kerry, Lea, and Vera

Alas, my camera battery had died so I could not take any myself; nor can I yet post any of the countless photos of myself mugging along with assorted happy students, though presumably these will soon be appearing on said students’ blogs…

Hostesses galore

These and other photos from this trip are now available at my picasa website

Navel gazing

I’m starting to worry about everything, but in particular just now, next week’s DayofDH. So, I thought I’d address this on two fronts. First I’d keep notes all day of what I was doing when, practice-like. And second, I’d check out my general blog-worthiness to date, with the aid of that neat little wordle thingy. The second was easy, and here it is:

What does this tell us? Adonis looms larger than AHDS and digital information and trains matter a lot. Not a statistically valid sample though, I think we can all agree.

And what have I been doing today? My records show something like this, for the working day from 0900 to 1830 (after that, it’s dinner and tv, and blogging of course)

• staff management (talking to one manager about someone we jointly manage; emailing  staff I manage about meetings held or to be held; listening to or jollying along other staff viva voce etc.) … today a total of  2 hours
• debugging the OULD sticky (aka Linux in a Bun, this is a bootable Ubuntu customization on a USB key which Sebastian is developing and I am testing. It seemed a great idea when we started, but we are both now getting very frustrated by things not quite working out as they should. On the other hand, as am unexpected side effect, it seems I am entitled to a new desktop machine, which duly appeared this morning and contributed to the   implausible total of 3 hours I spent faffing about with machinery today)
• progressing the CUD project (this is a pilot for a single University-wide repository for  personal information; we have a very clever consultant working on merging data from the many data sources around the place, and I have defined a TEI conformant spec for its documentation, which he has apparently taken on board without a second thought, hoorah… today maybe an hour checking that my conversion of his spreadsheet into XML still works)
• clearing the backlog of BNC support tickets (about a dozen of them, mostly needing to be pointed elsewhere,  having been misled by out-dated pages on the website… A frustratingly slow business since our implementation of rt is long overdue for an upgrade — about 45 minutes.
• and of course a steady stream of email throughout the day: I sent 16 messages, and read many many more.  Some of them were quite sensible (e.g. discussing a new funding bid  for which we’re putting together a letter of intent) and most of them were not (e.g. oucs wondering collectively whether “graffiti” could be used as a verb this morning)

Put that together with an hour off for lunch, spent quietly skimming through Academy Zappa: Proceedings of the first international conference of esemplastic zappology, and you can see where the time goes, if nothing else.

Singing for our supper

You’d have thought with one part of the EU’s administration firmly established in Brussels, and the other part firmly ensconced in Luxembourg, that getting from Brussells to Luxembourg (which are 250 km apart) would be a lot easier and quicker than say getting from London to either of them. Sadly, this is not so, or not yet at any rate. Getting from London to Brussels these days is a breeze: eurostar takes less than 2 hours to whisk you from the glamorous former train shed at St Pancras to the cavernous glory of Bruxelles Midi. Getting from there to Luxembourg is OK on paper — there’s an IC train every hour, and you don’t have to book ahead — but the journey is a real flashback to the gory days of steam.

To start with, let’s face facts: no city, no matter how important, needs as many railway stations as Brussels has. I make it five, and the train to Lux stops at each of them, even if they’re only five minutes apart. Then there’s the alarming state of the track — as soon as the train picks up (or, more frequently, relinquishes) speed round a corner (and yes there are corners), your laptop is likely to fly off your knee. Every now and then, your InterCity sits down and sulks. On British trains this would be followed by a reassuring discussion of
what’s going wrong from the train crew; on Belgian trains, the most they will do is advise you not to get out of the train into the field. Being charitably inclined, I suspect that the main reason for this staccato mode of transport is primarily that the track is in a constant state of renewal, which necessitates single-line working every now and then. Maybe the next time I have to go the Euroforum for a project review they’ll have finished. One can but hope. Meanwhile I hack out some more slides about the wonderful things we’ve done in Work Package3, holding tight onto the laptop as we go round the corners.

Depart pour l’Avenir

My train finally crawled into Luxembourg Gare Principale around 9 pm,by which time I was overdue for repairing to the bar of the Hotel Alfa, where Matthew was patiently waiting for me, for dinner, and for a brief discussion of what on earth we were going to say to our Reviewers. The Hotel Alfa has scrubbed up nicely since I was last here (in 1990 or so for some early TEI meetings), without completely losing its thirties decor, antique cash registers, or tasteful murals. Our review of my ten slides goes well, a luxemburger and chips better, and a couple of bottles of excellent luxemburgish riesling best of all.

Luxembourg is a strange place. It’s a small town that might be anywhere in Europe, except that it isn’t French, or Italian, or German, or Dutch, or Spanish, but a confused mixture of all of them. Most people speak French, German, or a mixture of the two. A notice in the train station says “Attention aux pickpockets.” There is famously a huge Portuguese underclass, restaurants of every conceivable kind, and more banks per square metre than is quite decent. But we’re here to work, not philosophize, so the next morning, we board our bus to the Euroforum with all the other bureaucrats, and seek out our meeting room. Something called the Expert Group on Digital Libraries is meeting, but regrettably that’s not us.

We are here for a mid-term Project review, which means we have to persuade two expert reviewers and our Project Officer that our project has delivered what we said it would so far, hasn’t gone too wildly over budget, and should be be allowed to continue for another year. To avoid any needless suspense, I can tell you now that we passed. Our Czech colleagues (who are after all running the show) displayed lots of reassuring slides, and rather rashly attempted to demonstrate some unrehearsed queries against the new Manuscriptorium database. Matthew delivered my nice slides about our joint Work Package in a magisterial manner, and the reviewers asked some slightly unexpected questions about manuscripts. They politely suggested we might to do more to show why the idea of a cross-European
catalogue of manuscripts is a good thing, which is such a good idea I for one had never thought of addressing it before.

Somewhat surprised by our success, Matthew and Elsa and I then repaired to the bar at the very top of the very posh hotel where Elsa was staying, in order to drink in (a) the view and (b) more excellent Luxembourgeois riesling. I feel compelled to record that this bar featured pink strip lighting underfoot as well as splendid views. You can see some of it to Matthew’s right in the thumbnail.

As a result of all this activity, we realised, the ENRICH project lives on, to fight another day. Perhaps the dream of a pan-European repository, describing in loving detail (and multiple languages)  all sorts of aspects of the treasure trove of digitized manuscript materials squirreled away in collections across the continent, can actually be realised. Perhaps we are on the dawn of a new age comparable to that which set in once people agreed on how to describe the collections of printed books squirrelled away etc. Perhaps the muse of quantitative codicology will shortly  have substantial amounts of data with which to beguile us. Or maybe it’s just the riesling talking.

A day in the life

Some days are just, I suppose, normal. Today for example. I got up, had breakfast, went to the office. Checked out my email (nothing special). From 10 to 11 I chaired what may well be the last meeting of our ill-fated CMS Project Board. Also present were Ratty, Bungo, Oswald and the Duck. [Names changed to protect the innocent]. Ratty had drawn up a plan explaining what he and the other chipmunks were going to do instead of installing a CMS. The Duck and I agreed that this was a sound plan, given the uncertainty of life in general (a  coded reference to the University’s Groupware project). We went through the plan from the end backwards, for no very good reason. Oswald said that he and the other ferrets were very unhappy with having to maintain Axkit 1.0 a moment longer than strictly necessary. Then we spent some time bickering about whether or not the level of idiot-accessibility proposed in the paper was adequate to Bungo’s needs without  insulting everyone else’s intelligence too much. Bungo wanted to know whether the new system meant he and the rest of the cuddly toys still had to produce valid XML documents (yes they do) and whether it would make validating and checking in those documents a bit less of a nuisance (yes it would, provided your document was a mind-numbingly simple one intended for cuddly toy consumption).  Oswald and the Duck and I all felt that Ratty should try harder to cater for the rest of us, eg by not requiring separate red button presses for every component of a less mind-numbingly simple document. That only left a few minutes for discussion of the start of Ratty’s proposal, which is good as this was the most fascist part of all, spelling out clearly that there would be One True Schema, and One Authoring Tool, and if you didn’t like them you were on your own kiddo. And all this was agreed in the twinkling of an eye, aka  a stampede for coffee.

Or so I believe, because I then had to dash back to my office for my next meeting, an interview with Gloriana, our newly appointed chief of cuddly toys. This was fun. I learned that none of the cuddly toys actually recognised the description of their activities which she had been given at interview, for example. She proposed, and I agreed, that Bungo needed to be given more time to work on the Steeple project, and Doris rather less. We agreed that there was a striking need for crash courses in strategic thinking at OUCS. I reminded her that Doris’s remit extended to include the research aspirations of the Independent Republic of Cuddly Toys. We agreed that defining a research strategy needed input from all parts of the forest.

From 12 till one, I had a rather less interesting interview with the Weasel. The purpose of this was to see whether we could cook up a plausible reason to persuade the Hemulen that she should continue to provide him with an office and the means to pursue assorted wild geese without requiring him to manage a couple of existing e-science projects. Or at the very least to see if we could jointly agree on a strategy aimed towards that end, whether or not it would persuade her. I am not going to try to explain how we squared this particular circle but I can reveal that it involved fairy gold, and that I hope to get my hands on some of it.  We shall see, on Friday, possibly, when we are due to meet up with the H.

This was cut short by a phone call from Taiwan inviting me to come and do something splendid and honorary next April, hoorah. As Ratty is also going to Taiwan around that time, I hauled him into the conversation, but it transpires his gig is a month earlier than mine. Mine however is a double header: I get to preside over a TEI launch and also, in a different corner, burble about the BNC. Ratty and I then had an agreeable half hour gossiping about various outbreaks of madness around the building and beyond, e.g. the story about academia.edu which is about to break, all I now know (after yesterday’s discussions with the Walrus) about the CUD project, further TEI politics, etc.

By now it’s five to two and time for a hasty lunch. I grab a sandwich and a bun from Maison Blanc, and wander into a somewhat dispirited meeting of the Oxford Corpora special interest group down in our basement, chaired by the weasel. Nothing happening here, but it gives me a chance to eat my sandwich.  Yes we should order the ANC. No the library still hasn’t done anything about putting BNC XML into Oxlip. Ah well. I head back to my office, and get button-holed by Jimbo who wants to discuss his woprkplan for the next stage of the Enrich project. We do this in a highly unsatisfactory and cursory manner as I proceed hastily to my 3.30 engagement… peacefully sitting on the Help Desk, being very nice to people. You’ve lost your password again? No problem we can fix that for you sir. Laptop not connecting to the network? Let’s have a look madam. Wanna buy some site licensed software? Here, let me guide you through the unbelievably crass idiocy of our Online Shop. It’s the high spot of my week.

Five pm rolls around, and I get to catch up on more email, fill in some outstanding forms, sign off some invoices and expense claims, and check on my committments for tomorrow before heading home for a nice dinner at 7.After which, a spot of telly, and this report. A full life, eh.

“They order these things better in France”

Yesterday I found myself once more in Paris for a meeting of the Conseil Scientifique (sounds impressive, means something like Academic Advisory Committee) of the TGE Adonis which, if you don’t know it, is the major French infrastructural agency for provision and management of digital resources in the humanities and social sciences (SHS), one of the small number of such “tres grand equipements” funded by the CNRS. Business of the day, not too strenuous, a review of the minutes of the last meeting, reports on recent and planned TGE activities, and an opportunity for us to make annoying comments about how things really ought to be done, without too much responsibility attached (ADONIS also has a proper steering committee, which meets next week). More significantly, perhaps, a chance to get an interesting glimpse of how this bit of the French academic community is reacting to the same digital agenda as the rest of us.

The CS has about ten members, most of them senior academics or librarians with considerable depth of experience of things digital and webby: see the (slightly out of date) list . My favourite is Francoise Genova, who runs the AstronomicalObservatory at Strasbourg, (one of the best illustrations of what the  web and judicious application of standards can do to transform the way a discipline operates), but they’re all pretty cool. This meeting welcomed a new member, Alexandre Moatti, a historian of science and maths with a distinguished track record in digital library activity.

As far as I understand things, one of the chief challenges for ADONIS has been to establish a niche for itself from which to exert significant influence amongst the rather crowded world of acronymically-named infrastructural entities in France. It seems to be succeeding: for example, NUMES which is a joint project with ABES (the major French academic OPAC) to prepare a catalogue of digitization projects, is now set to kick off next year, having been the subject of some uncertainty for the last two. A similar project for the social  sciences is also underway, via the existing QUETELET portal The ADONIS team (Yannick Maignien and Benoit Habert) is fortunate in possessing immeasurable amounts of diplomacy and doggedness, as well as enormous amounts of  expertise and experience: they need them. Sometimes things go wrong:
an attempt to set up an “observatory” on the take-up and application of digital resources (policies on which vary enormously across institutions), has apparently been blocked by inter-ministerial rivalries; but often they go right, as witness the setting up of a pilor project on archiving of spoken data on the OAIS model, to be carried out by ADONIS and the CRDO  jointly with the BNF (Bibliotheque Nationale de France), and the DAF (Direction des Archives de France).

This year, ADONIS organised a summer school to promote communication amongst all the projects it had initially funded which seems to have been a reasonably successful community-building event (there is a full
report on the ADONIS website). One of the ideas proposed was to set up a quasi-autonomous “user group” of some kind, which seemed an interesting way of balancing the lack of any more formal way of assessing user-need in the community. It does however beg the question of how representative of the wider SHS community such a self-selecting group can hope to be.  This led to a discussion of the relationship with the existing “centres de ressources numeriques” (Digital Resource Centres) . There are five of these,  pecialised for the most part by type of materials held: CRDO for spoken data (donnees orales); CNRTL for texts and linguistic data; TELMA for manuscripts and archives; M2IAS for geographical data; and C2SNV for visual data. The interesting point about these is that they are all attached to (at least one) specific institution, have a significant history of expertise, and are (largely) financially independent. From a UK perspective, they thus look rather like former AHDS centres, but without any AHDS Executive, or any top-down funding. By providing a model for long term archiving, and also for exchange of information about best practice (another topic which emerged at the summer school concerned recommendations for tools), it seems that ADONIS provides something to complement the specialist activities of the Centres in a useful way.

ADONIS has also been working as a marriage broker, it appears: the world of online journals is a nightmare one for French librarians, dominated by the competing claims of at least two different cataloguing systems (CLEO and CAIRNS). ADONIS has now successfully brokered an agreement between these two to make their respective online catalogues mutually linked, so that a search in one can find links (based on DOIs) to the other. Even more amazingly (to me), it appears that someone (at INIST?) is working on using TEI as a bridge format between some of the various XML formats currently in use in institutional repositories for e-theses etc. Hoorah!

Also like the late-lamented AHDS, ADONIS is charged with providing something called a “metaportal”; it has sensibly contracted implementation of this out to a private company (Atos Consulting) and the CS was therefore treated to some slides showing the likely architecture and content of the portal. I whinged on about how their model didn’t include any provision for archiving (fine, that is being done elsewhere) or for migration of project to service (this did seem to be something they had not thought about).

ADONIS will issue a call for new projects next year; the intention is to finance a smaller number of larger projects than last year, typically consortia running two-year projects. I suggested that it would be useful to hold some kind of town meeting to help the community develop such consortia in advance of the bidding process, a suggestion which seemed to go down well.

After the meeting proper, Yannick asked me to recommend some relevant UK contacts; I pointed him to arts-humanities.net, described the emerging Network of Centres, and also gave him some names of people in JISC to pursue.

Ripples in the pond

As a distraction from writing up my own notes, I’m starting to look for other people’s blog entries about the conference. Found a few so far…

One from Melissa Terras at http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/ (she sounds a bit underwhelmed)

Another from those nice people at Intute at http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/blog/2008/09/18/thrill-seeking/

In case you were wondering what that strange noise during the coffee breaks was…
http://thingdom.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/digital-resources-in-arts-and-humanities-conference-cambridge-2008/

And a little twitter from Sue Thomas at http://twitter.com/suethomas/statuses/921766116