What’s keeping me busy these days

I have had a full and gratifying month this October and haven’t been as free to contribute thoughtfully to my own blog. I have posted a couple of essays to my HASTAC blog, and thought it’d be worth noting here too. Since my last post here, I have written about Twitter and using social media for research purposes and the use of databases for digital humanities (DH) projects. Here is the information from those posts:

Feminist Hulk Goes to (My) School: Exploring the Use of Twitter as a Research Method, published September 23, 2011

Databases & Digital Humanities: Whose Power? Whose Peril? published October 20, 2011

And for those who are wondering what’s keeping me so busy this semester, here are some of the things that are a little more exciting than writing blog posts for The Melody Party:

• Taking full advantage of my position as a HASTAC Scholar
  • Facilitating DH discussion among 9 UI faculty and staff
  • Facilitating DH conversation between professionals in archives and a museum, particularly talking about the Civil War Diaries Transcription project and digital media for teaching and learning (audio recorded!)
  • Planning THATCamp Iowa City for Spring 2012
  • Preparing Pecha-Kucha presentation on THATCamp plans
• B Sides AY 2011–2012 progress
  • Establishing B Sides formally with UI Student Organizations
  • Interviewing and taking on two new associate editors for B Sides
  • Creating copy editor position and adding organizational capacity
  • Launch planning for Spring 2012 practice poster session
• Graduate assistantship duties
  • Developing timeline for project management goals
  • Investigating CMS tools for functionality (Omeka, Drupal, WordPress)
  • Conversations about database design and metadata

Somehow I’ve managed to keep on top of my coursework and get a few runs in on top of all this. My hopes for strength training this semester haven’t come to fruition, however. (Bought a medicine ball a week ago but have yet to try out a workout I found in a magazine.)

All this makes me remember what my friend’s family member told me when I visited her in Germany: “You can sleep when in America!” I’m starting to tell myself this about Thanksgiving and Winter holidays—relaxing is what breaks are for.