Sunny Sunday morning. The temperature is finally dropping below 80. And the leaves are changing. I still can’t get used to autumn in the south … No outdoors for me, though. The lists and stacks and deadlines just grow and loom. It’s not enough that there are seventy-five wiki entries waiting for me to grade them; a thirty-five page article accepted by ROMARD needs to be edited and resubmitted in ten days (thanks for reminding me – have to contact the Newberry and request permission to use their title page from A Game at Chess in the article). There’s the job search, the imageMAT GUI design, DHSI (colloquium and course), writing the ISE and REED proposals, getting the RSA panel in order, general Brittain Fellow things, most immediately the enhancements to TECHStyle. But in the words of the Mountain Goats, “I will make it through this year if it kills me.” So many good things. So little time. And time is short.
This week was consumed by group-writing an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant application. What a great experience. Ten of us collaborated on the application, pushing Google Docs to its limit (and wishing for a much more powerful feature set). It was intense and nerve-wracking, and there were times when I wanted to get back to my *other* work, but I think we are on the right track. The concept, in a nutshell, is to develop a new approach to mapping to allow instructors to incorporate map-like visualizations of non-GIS information into their lesson plans and student assignments. I’ll write more about it over on TECHStyle when I have a bit more objectivity.
Oh, and if you’re reading this and are so inclined: the CFP for the DHSI Colloquium has been published. So now I’ll excuse myself and go see to that getting disseminated.