Are we coming of age?
We just wrapped up our 4.5 minutes presentations session. René van Horik of DANS (http://snipurl.com/uwqvi) kept every speaker strictly to their 270 seconds, using a annoying ‘tjing’ sound producing device. With hilarious consequences of course: people pleading and bargaining for 15 extra seconds.
In the conference room next to the usual suspects (like researchers such as Antal van den Bosch (http://ilk.uvt.nl/~antalb/) and Arjen van Hessen (http://www.vf.utwente.nl/~hessenaj/) we had new faces, but we’re not sure who. They looked like policy makers. Well, if they were I hope we had an interesting talk. The audience seemed to appreciate our message. We lined up with me starting off with a talk about Alfalab en how we hope that will create a common interest between humanities and computational science. Anne stressed the social and usability aspects of such a move. Douwe made the concrete case about microtoponyms. Karina closed our Alfalab-interlude with an overview of eLaborate, the successful transcription and publishing framework for literary editions.
Now at lunch we’re wandering around at the World Trade Center Rotterdam (http://www.wtcrotterdam.nl/index_mac.htm) where the conference is based, and we’re suddenly discovering ourselves as peers amidst the guys from hard core computational science, simulation people, and robotica scientists. During earlier of such mix ups we found ourselves always a bit out of place, to be honest. We were always trying to just catch up with the real players. Now however, we seem to be quite level with what we used to call the ‘tech guys’. Are we indeed realizing an impetus for computational approach in the humanities?
Karina and Joris demonstrating eLaborate/TextLab
Douwe at ICT Delta 2010
Anne at the ICT Delta 2010