I haven’t been writing as much here as perhaps I ought. One of my goals for the year is to improve my facility with writing, and it would stand to reason that blogging would be a means to that end. Lately, I’ve been writing more for my classes and the occasional conference abstract. Much is going on, at least in my head. March has been a month of catching up, working ahead, and generally trying to manage my life like a reasonable person. It’s been a week since spring break ended; I did nothing more remarkable over break than taking the first weekend off to relax a bit, and spending every evening watching films with my husband. These mundane rewards are pleasurable enough that it’s hard to kick myself back into high gear for the rest of the semester.
I’ll be kicking it, though. It’s now less than two weeks until we depart for Florence for CHI 2008. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends in the Human-Computer Interaction community, and spending the frantic week enjoying being the photographer once again. It’s interesting to observe how the role has formalized over the last few years, as I’m coming up on my third go-round as the CHI staff photographer. I expect it will be another fun and exhausting conference, but I dread the consequences of taking 10 days out for travel. After that, the rest of the semester will be devoted to catching up and wrapping up. So will end a semester in which I have yet to feel that I have caught my stride, due to all the interruptions from travel. I’m not complaining, just observing, as I wouldn’t trade the opportunities for anything.
Speaking of opportunities, my fingers are crossed on a submission for the eResearch conference at the Oxford Internet Institute in September, and the eSocial Science conference submission that we should be hearing about any time now. The two papers that were submitted to the Fourth International Conference on Open Source Systems were both accepted, and the one for which I’m first author received very complimentary reviews. I’ll be going to Milan in the fall to present one (or possibly both) of them, so that should make an auspicious start to the next school year.
Before that, however, I still have to survive this semester and the intervening summer. This semester still has five papers, three presentations, and a handful of smaller writing assignments remaining. Fortunately, the writing has been interesting for me, and I’m working on trying a handful of different writing strategies to improve my flexibility, process, and product. Somehow, it all works out.