Back at last, having been away for some time: an eyebrow-raising absence, requiring some explanation. The first part of this Time Away was spent writing a paper for the forthcoming iPRES 2008 conference, which is being held at the British Library on 29 and 30 September 2008: a series that was originally conceived by the Chinese Academy of Science and Electronic Information for Libraries. The key organiser of the 2008 conference is Dr Adam Farquhar who also directs the pan-European PLANETS project led by the British Library.
The writing in my paper was shaped and finished on a series of dining tables in places across western Europe. I am indebted to those family members who let me occupy this central place in their homes. As many readers know, sometimes writing can be a lonely activity, and when the composing of a paper has started to involve mainly a shuffling of paragraphs, a checking of layout and styles and the catching of wayward punctuation, it can be a relief to be surrounded by the sounds and activities of life, watching children at play for instance: even if the background noise - as in bows and arrows, excited squealing (or is it howling?) and airborne toys - would sometimes require the music in my ears to be turned up to a compensating range of decibels. The paper is entitled "Adapting existing technologies for digitally archiving personal lives. Digital forensics, ancestral computing, and evolutionary perspectives and tools".
The last eating table I occupied was in a garden under the dappled sunlight of Wisteria leaves, in Freising, Bavaria, widely known in Germany as a place where religion and canonical activity flourished in medieval times and where the oldest brewery exists: Weihenstephan. Standing on the two principal hills respectively, the cathedral and brewery are not unrelated, as it was the Benedictine monks who established the brewery at their monastery, also known for its scriptorium and manuscripts.
This was just before my wife and I and our children set off for the Alps. I pondered the likely prevalence of Alpine internet cafés, but I (we) thought better of it, and decided to send the paper to the organisers of iPRES 2008 a week or so before the deadline. The moment I pressed the mouse to Send the email with its precious attachment and we saw that the Outbox had done its duty, we were like Beijing Olympics athletes springing from the blocks. Within a quarter of an hour we were in the car heading south, drinking tea poured from the thermos flask, the sun of the afternoon already looking feeble and clouds ominously dark, and the children tearful on parting from the dog with which they had played incessantly (dog and children would be reunited a couple of weeks later in another place). The holidays had begun.
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