Moff to Newcastle

I’m off to Newcastle-upon-Tyne today for their Postgraduate Forum conference. I went last year and was slightly shocked to discover that I was the only person giving a talk who didn’t have some sort of Newcastle connection. I’m hoping this year that there’s a bit more enthusiasm from outside. The reason I’m returning is that I enjoyed last year’s event hugely. It’s a very friendly department. As a bonus there were no bad talks. The conference is held between the History, Classics and Archaeology sections of the School at Newcastle, so I expected at least one talk that I’d have to struggle through – but no. Amazingly I enjoyed a history of the Conservative party, because the guy giving the talk knew what he was talking about, but also knew that it was up to him to show why the topic was interesting. At many conferences I’ve been to it’s seemed the speaker expects the audience to make the effort.

I’m taking my modified laptop up again. It’s not that PowerPoint is bad as such. It’s no worse than the alternatives. It’s that I haven’t found any slideware that handles animations as I’d like. My version of PowerPoint accepts Shockwave animations, thanks to the Swiff Point Player. It means I can have sunrises, eclipses etc, but I still need a computer with the appropriate ActiveX controls. Native support of Flash and other multimedia in PowerPoint 2006 would make life so much better.

The talk was due to be a classical version of Dolphins, but I think I’ll make it a generic version instead to cater for the historians. After gauging the feedback I’ll see about writing it up for either this log or somewhere open access as the accessible version of Dolphins I promised. I may find out today if PG Forum will be publishing my PowerPoint thoughts “Style Obscures Content” today too.

I’ll be disappointed, but not surprised if there are few external students at the conference again this year. It’s almost as if people are scared to go north of Cambridge for fear that they’ll drop off the edge of the world. I get dozens of notices for Classical events in the UK, but nearly all of them are at either London, Oxford or Cambridge. That’s not a huge surprise, they’re the biggest departments. It’s the fact that National associations and societies also hold their events on weekday evenings in London that irks me. London is the most convenient place to hold a national event or site a national project – so long as you live in London. From Leicester it’s two hours by car and then another hour or so working out how to get from wherever you park the car to get to whatever institute is holding the event. In comparison three hours to get into Newcastle isn’t any worse and has the added bonus that when you arrive you’re in Newcastle rather than London. —–