The day starts with George Breslauer, Provost of UC Berkeley, talking to us. Three questions – 1. Impact of new technology – technology can make research more efficient, but how to do this as smart as possible? By the time you implement a new system in the university, you only have 12-18 months before the next cutting edge – whether technology has the capacity to transform the humanistic disciplines? 2. Where will shared technologies work best, and where will individual campuses need to invest? 3. How does Bamboo create a collaborative cultural model to sustain this effort? Making collaboration work depends on non-self-evident cultural factors.
We were broken up into tables of eight people for the morning to discuss scholarly practices. I was at a table with fascinating folks – Ted Warburton from UC Santa Cruz, a dancer who uses 3D motion capture to create new art; Niek Veldhuis from Berkeley, who researches ancient Sumerian from cuneiform clay tablets; Katherine Harris from San Jose State, whose research area is 19th century literary annuals; Sharon Goetz, a medievalist who manages digital publications at Berkeley’s Mark Twain Project; Tom Laughner, Director of Educational Technology Services at Smith College; Angela Thalis from UC Santa Cruz; and Michael Ashley, an archaeologist who is the program manager for Berkeley’s Media Vault.
The conversation was wide-ranging and captivating, covering how people do their research, how they connect to others in their field, through to publication and professional development. I thought the organizers posed two really good questions to get things flowing: On a really good day, what activities do you do; and in a really good term, what things do you accomplish?
In the afternoon we combined two tables to try to cluster and categorize the practices we identified in the morning. I found that less compelling, perhaps because we lost some of the fascinating details, perhaps because it was harder to have an involving conversation with sixteen people; or perhaps because I just got tired.
It will be interesting to see where this conversation evolves, both through the rest of this meeting and in the following meetings in Chicago, Princeton, and Paris.
Oren Sreebny 