Conference/Convention

I'm not much of a numbers guy but I appreciated the first round of presenters at the 2012 Colloquium on Digital Humanities which took place this weekend at the University of Chicago. The theme was 'big data'.

Here Diane Cline (U. Cincy) is giving a talk on "The Social Network of Alexander the Great" and a major part of her presentation were lines of connections, shown on a graph, between Alexander the Great, people who he knew, people who knew him, people who knew the people who knew him, etc. -- all charted out as a series of spiraling lines and nodes.

Great and rousing session at the Drupal4Lib BoF. We had a too-and-fro which was both extremely fun and informative. This consisted of talking shop, of talking approaches to problems and of plans that people had for the future. Drupal4Lib IG Chair and Co-chair Nina McHale and Chris Evjy were there to tell us about their activities. Ilana Kingsley (UAF) kindly volunteered to serve as chair of the IG for the coming year.

Thanks to everyone who came. It was a great opportunity to meet people directly who we otherwise only know online. Hope to see you all next year in Chicago!

I was at the 2010 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) -- this year hosted by Northwestern and for that reason in Evanston.

I saw a couple of great presentations including one by Benjamin Pauley from ECSU. He started out by discussing how unreliable biographic information is coming from Google.

Well, that's nothing new, I said to myself -- so what's he going to do about it?

I was at the ILA Conference for a short sweep through the exhibits on Wednesday. The two chief attractions (at least for me) were 1) Free pass for the exhibits and 2) Free lunchtime buffet (pictured above).

The annual UIC Urban Forum took place today. Mayor Daley spoke at the opener and then took part in one of the panel discussions later on. Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel also was there -- participating in a lively discussion along with Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Motorola CEO Greg Brown and moderator Judy Woodruff.

So what am I doing on a Sunday morning? Why shooting video at the annual convention of the International Reading Association at McCormick Place, of course! Partnership READ, a joint UIC-CPS program to improve literacy in the Chicago Public Schools is doing a whole series of presentations throughout the day and I got volunteered to videotape at least three sessions.

Here's something fun that I did for Prof. Taffy Raphael from the College of Education at UIC.

The idea was to present a series of (fake) Google searches that ultimately would reveal the winner of an award that Taffy would be announcing at the annual meeting of the National Research Conference in Albuquerque.

Since I had content of all kinds related to the winner (photos, video, bibliography, etc.), I just appropriated whatever corresponding Google interface there was. For example, for the bibliography I used something that looked like a combination of Google Books and Google Scholar; for the video I used something that looked like Google Video. I even managed to work in a Google Map or two.

Judging by the tittering in the audience during the presentation, it seems to have been a success.

Wow, the big Drupal Convention for North America is coming to Chicago in 2011. Here's the announcement from the Drupalcon North American Regional Organizing Group:

...the [Drupal Association] Board has preemptively made a decision on the location and team for the 2011 North American Drupalcon, tapping Chicago for Drupalcon 2011.

I'm delighted to report that we had a wonderful Drupal4Lib BoF with maybe 25-30 people (agenda here). You know it's a good sign when after the thing is over, you wish it had lasted maybe another half an hour or more!

Round Robin of Participants

Okay, it's official: thanks to the wonderful help of our friends at ALA, we have a meeting room for our Drupal4Lib BoF on Sunday, 7/12.

DATE: Sunday, July 12 (3:30p-5:00p)

LOCATION:
McCormick Place
West Building, Level 1
Conference Center Rm #11b
Chicago, IL.