Social Life of Information

Summer vacation conjures memories of camping, lazy days in the sunshine, and the crisp fresh air of Northern Michigan. Well, not so much this year. I wish I could make a trek out to Michigan’s West Coast for camping with friends and I get a little choked up every time I fly over Lake Michigan, but I’m making my travels in the other direction this summer with two trips to the UK.

I just returned from Manchester, where I attended the 4th International Conference on eSocial Science. It was a great conference; I have lots of ideas and learned of many new resources, and Manchester was an interesting place to visit for a few days. I was impressed by the big English breakfasts, and although my sightseeing was quite limited, I had fun and even remembered to take a few photos. As always, I wish I could have taken Everett along with me, but he only gets so much paid time off, and traveling is now part of my job…

Next month I’m going over to Oxford for just one day, to participate in an invited workshop on profiling communities, hosted by OSS Watch, an organization that serves as an advisory for open source software use in higher education in the UK. I’m giving a talk on the use of eScience workflow analysis tools to research communication dynamics in FLOSS projects. It seems absurd to spend so little time on the ground for all the time in the air, but at least I’ll gain some glancing familiarity with Oxford for the trip in September.

The school year will start in late August, so these two trips will comprise most of my summer travel. I already have another 2 or 3 trips lined up for the fall semester, but that’s hardly vacation time. In the meantime, we’re trying to do a little regional tourism as well. Since we don’t commute for work, fuel costs don’t hurt us so badly and we can make the occasional expenditure for gas to go on a day trip.

Last weekend, we went down to Corning to see the Corning Museum of Glass. It was pretty neat, a combination of part art museum devoted to a medium (glass, of course) and part science museum devoted to the description of the science of production and use of glass. I liked the display on optics but wish they’d used more technical terminology - not that most people are that interested in optics, but it was really useful for me to look at cross-sections of lenses. On our return from the CMOG, we stopped at the famous Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca and had fried tofu with chick pea salsa and polenta-stuffed peppers for dinner, with a ginger peach parfait for dessert. For the 4 hours we spent driving throughout the day, the weather was absolutely perfect, and we enjoyed watching the rolling low mountains of the Finger Lakes region slide by the car windows.