So very cultured!

Hello all!

I have been quite busy the past few days! Besides classes, I decided to meet up with one of the guys from Maia's floorball team to follow up on an opportunity. He and some friends are starting their own company and need someone to do usability tests for them. I was apprehensive at first because I didn't want to do a lot of work for free, but having met with them now, I am totally on board. He wants really small tests with five to ten people, just a few minutes at a time, and everything is totally within my comfort zone. Accessibility, usability, technical capabilities of a website, etc are low hanging fruit, so I am more than happy to carry out tests like that every month or so. Now I can say that I was a Usability Consultant / Advisor / Something for their company, hooray. I walked to their offices in St. John's Wood, a very posh part of town about ten minutes away from Swiss Cottage. It's interesting because my tube line runs through that station, but I have never considered how far they physically are from each other. Like most things in London, they are surprisingly close. This gives me hope that during the summer I will not need to buy a travelcard. I think I could walk to campus given about 30 - 40 minutes!

Yesterday night there was a Decoding Digital Humanities event at a pub across the street from the British Museum. I showed up expecting the usual crowd of UCL people, but was pleasantly surprised to find that some folks from the British Library, King's College, and Goldsmith's had showed up as well. Several people identified themselves as digital musicologists, which is quite rare, so I was excited. I chatted with them about my potential dissertation topic and got some good names and emails from them of people I could contact (yay). We were talking about whether social sciences should be included under the umbrella of digital humanities, and whether divisions between humanities will exist in the future or if the cooperative multi-discipline approach that is currently causing people to define themselves as digital humanists is a phase. After a few drinks, those who have recently had paper woes were a bit more inflammatory in their conversation topics ("Why do we need publishers?! What do they do for us anyway? Peer review can be done without them, rar!").

Today, I went to databases and ended up being the only digital humanities student that showed up! It's because almost nothing we are learning in the lectures is helpful to us, as we are not taking the test at the end (we are doing a project instead). So learning about the background relational algebra going on is not particularly pertinent to us. I can't blame them for not showing up -- I was bold enough to skip Monday morning, and I did not miss a thing! After all my classes, I met up with Serene in the main library. I had only been in the science library before, and was very impressed with the actual UCL library. It is a classic looking library with bookshelves built into the walls, statues / busts every few meters, and interesting looking ceilings and frescos. Serene found some books and then we headed to Piccadilly Circus to meet up with a friend of hers who got free tickets to see The Importance of Being Earnest at the Haymarket Theatre. The show was alright, although the version we saw at Fort Robinson is still probably my favorite. We had second row seats, which was a bit distracting, actually, because the actors ate constantly during the show and we could see bits of sandwich and crackers flying from their mouths while they Pontificated Pointed consonants Perfectly. The theatre was really cool! It turns out that the Haymarket Theatre is one of the oldest ones in London. It was really nice of her friend to invite Serene and me along!

Dad might be interested to know that I have theoretically designed the Minimoog synthesizer, now I just have to figure out how to write the code to make it do what I want! The Minimoog was famously used by ELP ("Oooh what a lucky man, he was" awheee awheeee dee doodledoodledoodledoodle waah) and a lot of prog rock bands in the 1970s. The technical bit is that there are a number of oscillators (which should be able to generate specific types of waveforms) that pass through filters that modify the sound, and then reach amplifiers. On paper it is really not difficult to figure out how it works, although it has taken me a few days of reading through articles, watching demos, and studying cryptic analog signal maps to get a mental grip on the problem. The real trick for me is the computer language syntax that will allow me to make it, because I am struggling with this particular language quite a bit!

I just had an email discussion with one of the lecturers here about changing to the MSc track, and I do believe that I will graduate with an MSc rather than an MA at this rate! I don't really know how that will affect my career opportunities, but I am of the opinion that it can't hurt! Who would've thunk I would end up with a science degree?