TECHNE Student Congress (January 2016, Royal Holloway)

Having spent the previous post whining about my battles with poster design and becoming a more visually aware and creative 'exhibitor', I thought I'd also write up some thoughts on the TECHNE student congress I attended during the first week of January. It's a mandatory thing organised by my funder the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the programme can be found here. Although I wasn't entirely convinced whether the programme really bore out the title of 'Digital Humanities' (I think of the sort of things Elton Barker at the Open University works on when I think of DH), it seemed to have a wide appeal. My neighbour at dinner, for example, Dane Watkins, turned out to be studying for his PhD in smart design (!) at Falmouth, which isn't part of the TECHNE consortium of institutions, but he had seen the announcement circulated and came up for it especially. (He's also got a degree in Animation, and teaches drawing, so I suddenly felt a lot more embarrassed about my poster... Nothing but kind comments, though!)

Not much there was relevant to my thesis, but it was more focused towards skills development, and had some relevant guidance on how to be the sort of academic that I might want to be: engaged in the world and with the world, through blogging, Twitter, etc. There was also some excellent stuff on the academy and politics, how to preserve our independence from government, whether to play the Big Publisher game (what alternatives there are, if any, which rely less on free extra work done by academics whilst someone else pockets the profits - I'm not sure there are any that are significantly better...)

In any case, my philosophy on conferences is rapidly changing: 40% of their significance lies in the talks (maybe 50% if you're lucky) but otherwise it's all about the people you meet during the breaks. I'm getting better at it, and it's fun! Some of the people I talked to do the most amazing-sounding projects of a creativity and (to me) 'out-there-ness' that astounds me. For example, Neil Cahoon from Roehampton: how does 'Sound Design for the Contemporary Novel: Applying the Poetics of John Cage to Digital Prose Fiction' sound to you? I'm so glad there are so many people thinking outside the box, because we need 'em. (I still struggle to make the argument for the Humanities in a convincing way in the face of policymakers who want everything quantifiable, but do find the reductio ad absurdum quite helpful: nobody wants to live in a world where no more plays get written and we all stagnate into the future supported by a cultural and intellectual canon which is no longer reinterpreted or added to.)

A word on the accommodation: the host institution for this Congress, Royal Holloway, is my home institution but of course I don't live there. To have the chance to stay over in its most iconic building, Founder's, therefore, was pretty special. I forgot to take a photo of the sunrise over the balustrades and turrets when I walked to breakfast, but here is a shot which nicely illustrates how special it was to stay in one of the bedrooms on the top floor:

It was all marvellously 'Downton servants' quarters'. Including bathroom 20 yards down the hallway, forcing an odd sort of intimacy with fellow congress-goers, passing each other by in their pyjamas on their way to the bathroom. The next ones will be at conference centres in hotels, apparently, so I'm glad I had this chance!

"Try again, fail again, fail better"

So! I promised it would happen, and it has happened. I did yet another poster, and promised I'd say some more about it. Here it is:

The things I want to say about it are:

1. I don't like it.

2. I don't like it, firstly because I didn't have enough time to do it the way I wanted it to. This is partly because the call for posters came so late (mid-December) that it was a tall order to get something ready in time - a sentiment most people seemed to agree with as there were very few submissions in the end. But within that limited time available I also did not spend long enough planning the actual execution. Lesson learned: unlike with text when, once you have your plan or your bullet points, writing them up into real prose doesn't actually take very long, visuals require much more effort and input to take them from plan to execution.

2. How did this lack of time influence the downward spiral of this poster's design? I had in mind a vast expense of whiteness with very little text, in which my black and white hand-drawn cartoons would stand out really starkly. I was quite taken with this idea of a clean, modern, two-tone thing which would massively stand out in whatever crowd of posters would end up surrounding mine. But it turns out that when you scan cartoons drawn on white paper the background is almost grey. I think I may be able to fiddle with scanner settings and do this better, but I didn't have time then and it wasn't the only problem. Anyway, I decided that as B&W was off I'd switch to colour. At that point I panicked a little and went for a blue background and a colour scheme based on my university logo which is blue and orange. But the result looks really pedestrian and unprofessional. Wrong blue! Not enough time.

I then realised on top of that that I did not have the skills to draw, in Microsoft PowerPoint, the 'family tree' style linkages between cartoons that I wanted, possibly with a superscription for each arrow/link of one word or very concise sentence to indicate what kind of hierarchy or link we were talking about. (Something like 'why this matters' or 'to put this in context'). Nor had I allowed myself the time to look up how to do what I wanted. So I also ended up putting in more text than I wanted to.

What I think could have saved this all was to follow, after scanning the drawings, the procedure outlined on the blog I linked to in my last post. Something to do with using Inkscape to make the drawings into line-only entities separate from their background - does that make them vectors in the jargon? (Apologies, I am not a graphic person.) That wasy I could have imported them onto the white background and everything would have looked different. Not sure I have the heart/time to make yet a third version of this research strand in poster form, but the Inkscaping is a skill I really want to master.

3. My own view of this poster was a lot more negative than that of the audience looking at it at the conference.

I've never drawn so much traffic before, with a good number of people stopping to chat about both content and execution. And the intended laughs materialised too! Everyone seems agreed on the challenge of distilling ideas into very small visual or textual bites. The general sense was that having both my posters up next to one another gave people a really good insight into this strand of my research, but most people weren't sure that having just the cartoons poster alone would have given them as much, so that probably does count as a part-failure. But scholarly discussion was fostered, so not a complete one! Many more people than I expected related to the theme of abusive governments and subjects categorised by government and then treated in a certain way. People are still being labelled today according to processes against which they have very limited power to protest: refugee versus migrant was one that came up the most. Also of interest were the power structures and mechanisms which attempt to combat or, on the contrary, cement this powerlessness. In my case, Roman citizenship was one way of making sure you had some legal footing and clout to appeal to violations of your rights, though even there (my argument goes) all that goes out the window when faced with a state which doesn't want to honour these defences and elides status differences through sheer application of force. In the same way, access to modern technologies nowadays can be both liberating (think of the role of Twitter in the Arab Spring) or controlling and repressive (think of CCTV).

Thanks to Heather Isaksen for the inspiration in her own right, and for introducing me to the work of Hugleikur Dagsson.

Arts & Humanities research posters

So I told you all in the previous blog that I'd been inspired to start thinking about my next poster more visually, right? It seems like the time has come to put this into action, because shortly after my last blog post an email came round advertising the TECHNE Student Congress on Digital Humanities at the beginning of January, with a specific call for posters. The plan which will now be translated into a real product is to re-do my poster from the November conference via the medium of stick men cartoons. I don't yet have anything new written that I'd like to present in poster form, and in any case thought it would be an interesting experiment to give myself the chance to 'do it differently' (as one so often says after a particular event or presentation). It's all part of the learning. My inspiration comes from various quarters, but honourable mentions must go to Heather Isaksen who is an excellent lampoonist herself but on top of that got me into the work of Hugleikur Dagsson whose books often cause me to erupt into rib-aching laughter.

This was the version I presented at the end of November:

I was pleased with its content and felt I had successfully managed to isolate one strand of research in the chapter I've just finished, but deliberately kept the visuals unchallenging because in my first ever poster, at the bottom of this post, I tried to spend a lot of attention on both style and content and ended up doing both rather badly. Baby steps, I say. Now here's the storyboard which I drew hurriedly during the November conference and have added a little to since then (apologies for my lack of image editing abilities which means I wasn't able to rotate the image - it doesn't seem to be a simple HTML code but requires CSS or something):

As you can see it's roughly the same poster as version 2, but more visually appealing I hope, more humorous and more creative. Hopefully if I keep going down this route I may one day win a poster prize, as there always seems to be a competition near these things. Until I did some further research today I thought I would either draw the cartoons by hand or use MyPaint, or Microsoft Paint when I go home for Christmas and can use my parents' desktop, but I've found some great advice online here which suggests drawing by hand, scanning and then using Inkscape. It all sounds quite doable, but of course I am time-limited so I may have to stick to PowerPoint - we'll see.

Another awesome repository of information for all things research poster is a man called Colin Purrington's blog here. There's still not that much out there for the humanities specifically, and what there is seems to conform to the rules of boring loudly disparaged by these two whizzy science-based blogs, and I subscribe, at least in theory, to the idea that it's not because we may be more text-based or whatever that we need be boring and ignore the principles of good design. I probably did do that, in my first poster:

But I like to think I can learn from the experience! If this next one comes out looking nice, I may be able to use it for the next @ObjectFocus event in April which will look specifically at cartoons. Although I seem to remember it'll largely be about the materiality of this medium which has been overlooked, not their print content. But who knows. And so Christmas is starting to look a little less relaxing!

How to 'read' seeing...

I've decided to start blogging again. I'm especially interested in blogging about things with a visual or spatial interest, as I don't feel I engage with either of those things naturally or easily (or most of the time, willingly!). I'm one of those people who don't generally see where they're going or what they pass on the way to where they're going. I'd like to challenge myself more in this regard, and to test my thesis advisor's theory that I am more visually or materially oriented than I realise. It's certainly been an interesting and thought-provoking week in this regard.

On Saturday 21/11/15, I went to a postgraduate classics conference in Cardiff to present a paper, where two papers by others stood out. First, Jill Mitchell from Trinity St David's paper recreating a 4th century journey from Rome to Bovillae, taken by Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, through her own photographs of the (modern remnants of) landmarks and buildings he would have encountered on his way. She proposed this as a way of getting closer to the ancient experience. The second paper was given by David Colwill from the University of Cardiff, about their history department's outreach initiative into local primary schools, by means of objects.

On Wednesday 25/11/15, I went to a TECHNE-funded all-day workshop called 'The Object in Focus' where I had been asked by said thesis advisor to be a panel respondent on a panel entitled 'Object as Image and Image as Object: Early Photography in Focus'. I referenced these two papers from Cardiff in particular and explained that for me the visual has never been a way 'in' to the past, not even as a child. I then spent some time both describing this 'condition' (as that's sometimes how it feels!) and trying to get to the roots of why I may feel this way - whether there is something inherent in the textual versus the visual approach to the past which accounts for my marked preference for one or the other. Or whether it's just personal, and I happen to be more extreme than other people in this regard. I'm not sure there was a consensus on the why, but I think everyone, including myself, felt it was important to go outside of one's comfort zone as an academic sometimes. The full text of my talk will be posted on the Image as Object blog soon. I also came across some other wonderful visual resources relating to antiquity which I will save for a different blog.

Lastly, on Friday 27/11/15 I went to a second TECHNE-funded event with a much wider brief, where TECHNE-funded doctoral students of all Arts & Humanities disciplines of this particular consortium's institutions 'presented' their research in a variety of media (from standard-style papers to poetry to film to dance to interactive exhibitions). I did a poster. I had done one earlier this year for a different event at my institution, Royal Holloway (University of London) and found the thought process that goes into expressing text in a visually appealing manner quite interesting, so I wanted to do another one. I shall reserve a discussion of both of them and how they came about and what I find difficult and all of that at some later date. I also found myself rather more receptive to things which previously would have alienated me in their 'otherness', such as interactive installations or sculpture. The work of Richard Carter in particular on patterns as human-made ways of breaking the world down into comprehensible bits yet things which come about through digital technology as an intermediate stage with its own 'agency' (he mentioned computer glitches as an example) rather blew my mind - especially the art he then produced in order to demonstrate his personal engagement with the human-digital nexus in which we're all embroiled these days. I'm probably massively misrepresenting his work, but seriously, check him out. Agency is something I'm going to be exploring in chapter one of the thesis, specifically the agency of Tacitus' written landscapes in northwestern Europe, and it was surprising how many people either talked about this or were interested in it when I brought it up (a sculptor/photographer PhD-student emailed after the Wednesday workshop to ask about this, which was pleasing). Other themes which kept coming up were identity and space/the spatial, which can mean they're either hot at the moment or on some level perennial concerns in academia, or maybe both at the same time. In any case, it gave me much more of a connection to this motley crew of performers, dancers, installateurs, musicians, etc. than I could ever have imagined.

All this combined left my brain percolating like nobody's business, and I'm sure it will be a while before the full effects make themselves felt. I can already feel another poster brewing, however, and this time I hope to do something radically different to the two I have so far, and hope to make the visual far outweigh the textual. More later - perhaps I will blog about it as a work in progress...?

Meanwhile, here's a pretty photo of the Barbican I took - the unusual environs of the conference attracted even my attention, it seemed: