Text and Context Post-Mortem

I put forward an abstract for this because I wanted to show the Faculty of Arts that I do appreciate the work they do. I thought I’d needed to do this as I’d rather forcefully given my opinion about the forthcoming Festival of Postgraduate Research. I thought I was able to offer a paper because I was told it was an interdisciplinary conference. With hindsight I should have asked which disciplines it was inter. It turned out to be a very English Literature based conference. My grasp of English Literature goes as far as alliteration. It’s on my exam certificate ‘E’ for English. So it could have gone very badly.

It actually went amazingly well. The world of Literature is a closed book to me so it was a bit of step into the unknown. I thought that with them dealing with text on a daily basis they’d have thought through electronic publishing a bit more than I have. This doesn’t seem to be the case, which is a bit of a disappointment. However the reaction was impressive.

There are definitely plans to publish the proceedings of the conference. The original plan was to publish them in some English journal whose name I’ve forgotten. That’s not going to happen. Instead Gavin Cole, the organiser, and Prof Stannard the Dean of Arts at Leicester are looking at getting the proceedings out in an Open Access format. The conference was AHRC funded so depositing PDF files with the AHDS, and perhaps making a POD hardcopy available is feasible. I think when you consider that this was a very different sort of paper to the others and that the option to publish OA was new to them, this was a far more positive response than I could have hoped for.

I’ll be honest I lack the skills to be able to tell you if the other papers were any good or not, but hopefully you’ll be able to judge for yourself sometime in the future.

I only had any worries when I looked at the notice boards in DMU. Obviously they do things differently there.

How do you buy a gallon of hair conditioner?

Update: I really ought to keep up with EMN where there’s a note that the Wellcome Foundation will be insisting on free access to their work. Time to sort out my livemarks again. —–