8:22 local time. I’m starting my work day by going to my office (see map).
Do digital humanists, who are employed as lecturers, have an regular office at the University of Cologne? No!
There is a constant lack of working space here. Colleagues of mine (from the DigHum chair), working in a large research project on long term preservation of digital data have two offices for seven researchers - about 30 square meters altogether, 4m2 for every single member of staff.
Just by chance I have an office on the same hall. I am “hosted” by an institute for medieval philosophy. They are housing me in their visiting scholars office (a garret). I help them with some of their digital projects and mainly the development of new funding proposals (most recent: proposal for a “Digital Averroes Research Environment”). 
They are interested in my Ph.D. work and collaborate with a semi virtual institute I have established with some of my scholar pals. So I support them with some of my work and they support me with their office space. A win-win-situation.
In the office - now
March 13th, 2009 at 12:23 pm MDTa typical day?
March 18th, 2009 at 9:21 am MDTWednesday, march 18. Is this a typical work day?
Yes and no.
Yes: I do the same things every day. I work on everything every day. Keep up with incoming mail, pursue various smaller projects, coach students, work on my Ph.D. thesis, develop new projects, organize upcoming events, edit a collection of essays, etc. …
No: I have a part time job. In theory I get paid for teaching, workload 20h per week (four regular courses). The remaining time should be dedicated to my children - my partner is working part time too. In reality I work about 50h per week, in fact, I take every time frame I can get - which means every hour (or quarter of an hour) my kids (or the housekeeping) are not explicitly (and loud enough) crying for me. Days are structured very differently. Monday is my main “fathers day” where I have to care for the offspring all the time, so spare time to work is restricted to the after-lunch nap of my daughter and the evening (> 20:00). On Tuesday I have some time to work when both kids are in kindergarten and at the day mother respectively (overlap of three hours) and again in the afternooon when my partner returns from work. Wednesday and Friday are my regular long working days. Usually Thursday too, when the grandparents of my kids come over to care for them.
workflow orchestration
March 18th, 2009 at 9:44 am MDTYes, I have to admit: my e-mail system is the backbone of my whole working life. Most of the time I’m simply trying to keep up with the incoming mails. The mail system sets my agenda. This has the fatal effect that I always privilege the smaller and usually less important tasks over the bigger and more important ones. “Ah, I could get rid of this small mail request quite quickly, so I should do it immediately” - to call this strategy an “interrupt driven workflow” would be a euphemism. It doesn’t leave time for the major tasks which then could be interrupted. Every day I tell myself “when you turn on the computer, please start with the most important things and DON’T check your mail”. And then I turn on the computer and check my mail and the day is over.
Sometimes I send an e-mail to myself. Because ALL of my tasks are in my mail system. And then I (!) am the one who is interrupting my work - maybe with an important task to be set on the actual agenda. And hopefully done immediately.
Yes, I have tested other tools for workflow- and time-management. But the mails are coming in anyway so why should I duplicate them by translating them into organized and scheduled “action items”?
Next task: check e-mails; write a reminder to colleagues and friends on behalf of the “Day of DH” - to interrupt THEIR workflow.
Yes, I should migrate to a more professional system. With all of my mails (in this system: 35.000 (15.716 outgoing) from 8,5 years, ca. 350 folders).
teaching
March 18th, 2009 at 11:08 am MDT
Officially we have semester break right now. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have any teaching duties in these days. I had two “Blockseminare” (teaching en bloc, 5 days 9:00-17:00) in the past couple weeks and the (now virtualized) coaching is going on. Last term I taught courses on XML/XSLT and data and metadata formats in the humanities and cultural heritage sector. There are still some participants who have to turn in “homework” (XSLT programming; result example) from those courses and I have to assign credit points and grades to them.
The more recent “Blockseminare” dealt with “networks, internet technologies, php, and mysql”. Students are now working on individual course projects where they write a php/mysql-based digital presentation of a printed book containing historical sources (”pimp my book”, as I call it). Of course in the course of programming there are problems and questions coming up for which they write mails to me. I encourage them even to contact me via skype (chat or voice) since we can get rid of concrete code bugs even faster this way.
This is “interrupt driven workflow” at its extreme. But I want to avoid situations where a student are blocked by a bug he or she cannot find for hours and which I would SEE in 10 seconds. So the order is “send me an e-mail or contact me via skype when you haven’t solved the problem after 30minutes”. We all have no time to waste.
The last skype-request was yesterday in the evening. Students were looking for a solution to a XSLT-grouping problem. “Use xsl-for-each-group() with the translate() function!” - extremely good and ambitious students (in their first term!), I’m curious whether they made it. This morning only minor problems from other students via e-mail: “phpmyadmin is not responding” - “well, turn on the apache” - sigh.
XML quick reference
March 18th, 2009 at 12:37 pm MDT
Posting there - blogging here. As a spin-off of my teaching activities I have developed a XML-Quick-Reference for beginners, including DTD, XPath, and XSLT. We (the members of our virtual institute) will use this mainly as a handout for our university courses and summer schools (upcoming: spring school on digital scholarly editing), but maybe it’s helpful beyond these occasions too. The professionally printed leaflet may be ordered by e-mail. There is a digital version for download and print too.
Sorry, it’s all in German!
Ph.D. thesis
March 18th, 2009 at 3:40 pm MDTGraduated with an M.A. in 1997. Working in the digital humanities for ten years now. But still no Ph.D.? Hum, yes, well, just because I have been working on too many projects all the time. (Hi Edward …)
In the meantime: changed jobs about half a dozen times, moved four times, had two children, have been off on parental leave twice.
But now it’s definitely time to bring it all to an end. That monster with the working title “Digital Scholarly Editions” (Digitale Editionsformen - Über den Umgang mit der Überlieferung unter den Bedingungen einer digitalen Welt) is nearly finished. The text is written. I don’t dare to count the pages, lying to myself by using a single-spaced small font size. Footnotes number 2969; three major parts in the work, 14 parts on the second level, 44 chapters on third level, chapters on the fourth level not counted yet.
Yesterday I wrote the preface to the bibliography (12 lists, ca. 2000 entries). Today I sorted and structured my notes for the general preliminary remarks. I’ll try to write this tomorrow, so that I can start writing the general introduction to the question on critical editing on Friday. Maybe I will start with something like this: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And God spoke. And man wrote. And another man copied the writing. And something went wrong. What was it exactly, that God had said? …”
In the beginning of the work it were the last days of xerox world. It then changed to webdown. From the hardcopy collection to the mirror archive.
editing papers
March 18th, 2009 at 8:42 pm MDTThe “Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing” (IDE) will publish a printed volume of essays on “Codicology and Paleography in the Digital Age” in June - followed by a conference on the same topic. To our surprise the call for papers has resulted in nearly 30 proposals for contributions. Most articles have already come in so we are in the process of proofreading them now. Every contributor has a contact person and two readers in the editorial team. On my list for today are …
- Daniele Fusi: Image manipulating in the Cadmus-digital corpora editing system
- Mark Stansbury: The Computer and the Classification of Script
skype telko
March 18th, 2009 at 8:55 pm MDTFinished my university office workday at 17:15, went home, cared for my kids, put them to bed, and will now (20:20) go on with my work at home.
Next task is a skype telephone conference (Telefonkonferenz = Telko) on the organization of our institute’s spring school on “Methods and Technologies in Scholarly Digital Editing“.
Participants:
- Bernhard Assmann, Cologne
- Franz Fischer, Dublin
- Christiane Fritze, Berlin
- Me
- Torsten Schassan, Wolfenbüttel
- Georg Vogeler, Munich
I like these phone conferences. It’s so much more efficient than discussing things via e-mail. You just need to have a clear agenda, a strict moderator and somebody who takes notes in the chat for the minutes - which is then ready immediately thereafter. Fine thing.
21:51 - telko is over, I’m going to iron out the wrinkles in the protocol and send it out to the others.
22:00 - protocol sent, two more student requests for help answered, I’ll finish my work day NOW (”Feierabend”), have one beer and then go to bed, the little one’s day usually starts between 5:00 and 6:00 (”mama, papa, want to go down, drink milk”) …