countdown

I'm aiming to have my almost-final draft ready on Monday. Today is Tuesday. No more 'about two months' or 'three weeks from next' or any other such lovely, comforting indications of time. Next Monday. That's the plan.

Back to it!

first draft!!!

Yes, you heard it here first! First draft, that is! First full draft of the whole stinkin' thing, complete! And revisions on several chapters already underway.

I see a light at the end of the tunnel... and the light is wearing a FLOPPY HAT!

back from Dalmatia

Actually, I've been back for over a week, but I've had my head down in an attempt to power through the last bits of this thesis. And a CHI submission. And a paper review. And two paper proposals. I haven't even got my holiday photos off my phone yet. But the blog must go on.

I spent two weeks cycling on four islands off the coast of Croatia: Brac, Hvar, Korcula, and Lastovo. My wonderful funding body came along, of course, as well as Stephen, who helped me build Collect Yourselves!, and his partner Miki, who fed and humoured us while we worked. We were joined by Stephen's friend Lana, who lives on Brac and acted as our tour guide for the two weeks. Some observations:

• Lana's accent made me think of Boris and Natasha cartoons every single day.
• If you can't eat potatoes or swiss chard, you'd better get creative with what constitutes a vegetable.
• Roads on these islands are steep as HELL. Not only did we have to get off and push, but at some points I could only even push my bike an inch or two at a time. These were well-laden touring bikes, not carbon-fibre racers, but still!
• In Croatian and Serbian, 'macadam' refers to a gravel road. And not just any gravel, but gigantic chunks of jagged rock interspersed with skid-inducing pebbles. Know this before you agree to ride your skinny-wheeled Dawes on a 'macadam' road (says Stephen). Much pushing was done.
• The water is almost as clear and warm as in the Caribbean, which I was completely not expecting.
• Tie-dye sarong-style wraps are great for changing into your bikini in public. 
• They're also great for covering your arms while you sit at your computer back in the chill morning air of Old Blighty.
• If you can get yourself up to Pupnat, the ride to Vela Luka is unbelievable!
• If you can get yourself up to the summit of Brac, the ride down to Bol is even more unbelievable!
• Campsites with their own beaches. Genius!
• We enjoyed the very best campsite bathrooms we've ever used, near Supetar on Brac.
• We also enjoyed my favourite place to camp ever, anywhere, in an olive grove on Lastovo.
• If the weather is crap, do not get on a boat!

DRHA 2014

Yesterday I gave a presentation on behalf of myself and my collaborator, Licia Calvi, at DRHA 2014 (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts). The title was 'Engaging museum audiences in a performance way', and there will be a paper out probably early next year.

The presentation was part of a good panel, mostly focusing on archives - very helpful context for my own thinking on personal digital archives - and chaired by Professor Susan Broadhurst.  Our presentation was the first one in the first session, simultaneously unnerving and blissful, because now I can enjoy the rest of the conference without having to worry about preparations!

That said, I'm at home this morning and in Guildford this afternoon, but I'll be back at the conference tomorrow and Wednesday.

I've already met some really interesting people and we received some great feedback - thanks to everyone who came up to chat yesterday!

OK, back to work for me...

the tail end

I last posted a few weeks ago, apparently. I can't tell. It's been sunny, it's been rainy. I can't tell. I have been sitting at our little fold-up table in the only room of our flat that isn't either a (tiny) bedroom or a (tiny) bathroom, staring at my two screens, working on a draft of my thesis, since approximately eight minutes to noon on the first of April, 638 BCE.

I'm currently hammering away at the second-to-last chapter. You know that old fallacy, or geometric proof, or whatever it was, about never being able to leave the room you're in? You walk halfway to the door, and then halfway again, and halfway again, and you never leave the room. Consequently, every time you make an effort, you realise you've only covered half the distance you intended to, and each attempt leads to only half the result.

That has NO BEARING ON MY LIFE WHATSOEVER. That is, if you happen to be reading this because you're one of my two examiners, checking up on my progress before passing judgement on the product of EVERY WAKING AND SLEEPING MOMENT OF THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF MY LIFE.

Otherwise, yeah, that's what it feels like to be me right now. So to liven things up, I thought I would share my very favourite photo of my entire PhD experience. It's a still from one of the videos of one of my testing sessions. Don't worry - no anonymities were harmed in the making of this photo. If you can make out anything identifiable in those thumbnails, you deserve a PhD in cryptanalysis at the expense of my ethics agreements.

What is it, you ask? It's my system, the one my PhD is based on, projected onto my butt. Yeah, that's what it feels like to be me right now.

Except for the fact that I still totally love doing this research! I remind myself of that every time I look up and see the door twice as far away as I expected it to be. A friend of mine recently said that she was going to have the worst case of empty nest syndrome in the history of humanity when her kids - currently only 15 and 10 - leave home. I think I'm going to have empty mental nest syndrome once my thesis flies away to its perch in the university library. Sigh.

another conference!

I had the great fortune to meet Licia Calvi at CHI in Paris last year. We've been looking for a way to work together ever since, and thanks to her initiative and persistence, we've found one.

We'll be presenting together at the DRHA conference this year. It's a great joint effort - we're analysing approaches to engagement in museum spaces, looking at how different types of performative interactions with digital technology can create a sense of place.

So if you're at DRHA this year, held at the University of Greenwich between 31 August and 3 September, come by and say hi!

And if you have invented a time machine that will give me the extra hours to do this presentation justice while writing up the last three chapters of my thesis in six weeks, punctuated by working for RE-DrAW... and fantasising about the kick-butt CHI paper I still want to write... and going away on a long-planned holiday right when all these things will be coming to a head in September... please let me know...

a research post!

Then I got another offer that was too good to refuse: the chance to apply for a part-time research post working with my ever-stupendous supervisor, David Frohlich. Here's my LinkedIn update:

I am a part-time Research Fellow for RE-DrAW, Research and Development for the Digital Arts in Wales. RE-DrAW is an academic consortium, led by Professor Hamish Fyfe at the University of South Wales, which supports the work of the Digital Research and Development Fund for the Arts in Wales.

With Professor David Frohlich, I am helping to mentor a project helping visually impaired people access theatre and arts spaces. The technology is being developed by a partnership between UCAN Productions, a Cardiff-based organisation supporting visually impaired young people in the creative arts, and Calvium, an app development company based in Bristol, England.

A good time is being had by all! The folks at UCAN and Calvium are brilliant to work with, and I'm getting to do user research on - gasp - a different project from my own PhD! You can see what we've been up to at their blog. I must stress that this is not my project - I'm just mentoring them so that their (brilliant) work is publishable in an academic context. But it's a fantastic project to be involved with.

And it gives me something to do with all my free time, HA! Did I mention I'm trying to finish my entire thesis by the end of August? Which brings me to my next topic...

recalibrate!

I might have planned to work only on my thesis, but that doesn't include previous commitments to other projects - like Recalibrate! It went off without a hitch on 5 June 2014 at ARC in Stockton-on-Tees. What an amazing experience!

ARC very kindly let us use the studio space for the entire work week leading up to the Thursday evening performance. Claire and I had a fantastic time getting a feel for how the performance would come together in the actual space, with all our projections working for real (and not just in our imaginations). We pared the piece down still further, and I got the privilege of being the first to see Margaret's Anatomy in full. (This is the short one-woman show that Claire wrote as a companion to Recalibrate.) We did the two as a double bill.

We had an appreciative and very respectable audience - in terms of size, if nothing else - and even got some press coverage. We'll be doing it again at the Ivy Centre, University of Surrey, on 17 December 2014. So put it in your diary, snag some tickets, and come see us! If you're Up North, we're hoping to do at least one performance in Newcastle, as well. Wander over to Facebook if you want to see photos and links.

back in the whirlwind

If I really wanted to earn my digital stripes, I would figure out how to back-date blog posts and make it look like I have my act together enough to make regular updates. Last I said anything, it was the middle of winter and I was on medical leave. Well, I came off of medical leave on schedule - April 1 - and since then have been struggling to find the time to say anything sensible about what I've been up to. So I'll divide things up as if I'd been posting in a sensible order, at sensible intervals, all along.

As of April 1, 2014, my only academic goal was to finish my thesis. I'd already been derailed by a few months by my insane conference schedule in 2013, and then I got derailed by a few more months. The clear path forward was to take a machete to my life and, well, create a clear path forward. No conferences, no papers, no exciting side projects. Just me and my thesis, and for the first time in years, a commitment to taking off at least one day per weekend, if not both days. Gasp! Yes, it's true, I'm trying to combine writing a thesis in record time with having a life.

I'll wait a while until you stop laughing.

Then I'll wait for you to say, 'Yeah, right, she's going to turn into a monk and do nothing but write her thesis. I'll believe that when I see it.'

Then I'll wait for you to feel smugly amused, because you know you're right...

happy solstice

Hello to the world out there (all eight of you, or whatever). For anyone who doesn't know, I've been on medical leave since shortly after my last blog post, and will remain on leave until 1 April.

Here's to more sunshine!

the whirlwind whirls on

That trip to Gateshead and Stockton was *amazing*. Claire and I ran through our show, Recalibrate, for ARC Stockton's chief exec, Annabel Turpin. What a lovely human being! Sharp, perceptive, and quick in her responses - and such a kind, calm, patient audience! I swear, I think we felt more relaxed with Annabel there than on our own. She gave us some great advice to think about, and then started talking schedules.

Joy!!!

So be on the lookout for Recalibrate at ARC Stockton sometime in the spring, hopefully May-ish.

Of course it goes without saying that a few days working with Claire are always good for the soul. It should also go without saying that I was just across the river from the epicentre of all things festive. Sadly for my liver, we crossed the river... (Wow, is that a country song in the making, or what?) Which leads me to the moral of this blog post:

Never party with Geordies!

Or rather, party with them only when you can spare the inevitable damage to mind and body. I woke up very, very late the next morning, and found my toothbrush on the landing.

Can I just point out how remarkably unlike me that is? Ahem... But boy howdy, did I have a good time.

Then it was off to Barcelona for this year's conference of the International Federation of Theatre Researchers, where I found a fantastic home-away-from-home among the members of the Intermediality working group. Wow. Wow wow wow. I wasn't sure what to expect, and I was blown away by the depth and breadth of engagement with intermedial performance. So, so, so much to learn! But I also felt like I made a contribution. Best of all possible worlds.

Thus ends Jocelyn's Conference Tour 2013. But it's not over til the fat lady sings, and I'm off to Edinburgh in a week and a half to see shows at - and perform at - the Edinburgh Fringe! But that should get its own post.

it was that good

I figure the only way to make up for my embarrassing silence over the past two and a half months is to say that THAT was how amazing CHI was, and Story4, and DS8, and I/O, and every other thing I've been dashing off to see or participate in. Now I'm off to Gateshead and Stockton to work some more on Recalibrate. Details to follow, I swear!

a techy thing I learned today

Here's a word to those of you who might be embarking on a similar task to mine, and might be similarly clueless as to the inner workings of the localhost (which kinda sounds like the breeding ground for some Alien-inspired, inhuman, possibly undead parasite, coming to catastrophic maturity up in the attic, just a few feet away from your slumbering head...)

If you inherit your Funding Body's old laptop, and migrate the contents of your old one to the new one, you will turn on said new one with a gasp of joy! There is every last bit and byte of your old life, miraculously and painlessly appearing on the screen of a faster, bigger, cleaner machine!

Then, when you discover that Mountain Lion requires you to reconfigure your Apache server and all your associated PHP-y, SQL-y things, you sigh in annoyance. But never fear - the same guy who wrote the foolproof explanation of how to set it all up in Lion has also written a Mountain-Lion-specific version.

And it works! Like a dream! Until you try to run your own stuff on localhost, and it tells you it can't connect to your database.

Now, run with me here: you have migrated the entire contents of your old machine to the new one, yes? You've got all your browser history, all your preferences, even a full trash can.

What you don't have is any of your databases. You need to recreate them before you can do anything.

Do not ask me how long I struggled with this before figuring it out... and do not ask how I figured it out, because actually it was the Funding Body who had the idea - which I initially poo-poohed, before giving it a try.

(You can read between the lines of this post to guess why I haven't yet written about my fantastic experience at the Performing Documents conference in Bristol last weekend...)

boing boing boing

Spring, it has sprung, or so they say. Right now things are all about forward movement--sussing out possibilities for after the PhD (what a glorious phrase!), visiting cities and countries I've never seen, trying out new skills.

It all makes me feel very, very springy. It makes me want to hurry the daffodils into full bloom. Right now, the vanguard is looking floppy and straggly, mostly likely due to southern England's return to damp and cold. (Note to readers who don't know me well: this about sums up my understanding of all plant life.) It makes me want to leap off the train and snuggle a frolicking lamb. (And then eat it.) Apparently, it also makes me want to ramble like a big weirdo to anyone who will listen...

Next stop: Luxembourg! My lovely funding body and I will be at the airport this time tomorrow, on our way to a long weekend in Luxembourg and nearby bits of France. I'm trying to convince myself that Luxembourg will show itself off at its most charming in the sleet, wind and rain that are forecast for the weekend. I'm sure that no matter what, though, the weather will be more than offset by the charms of our host, Carine. So excited to feel out my fantasy of living in France, even just for a few days!

The following weekend might involve four days of cycle camping with our friends Stephen and Miki. Then again, the way the weather is looking, it might not. Two years out of four, our Easter weekend cycle camping efforts have ended in sleet and snow and beating a hasty retreat--or not hasty enough, since both times we toughed it out for a night in the tent before slinking home on the train.

Then I'll have another meeting of the minds with my fantastic collaborator Claire Murphy-Morgan, fresh from a week's run of her show Editor at The Albany theatre in London. Onward ho, Recalibrate!

Then I'll be giving a paper at the Performing Documents conference in Bristol--which will involve me introducing myself shamelessly to just about fabulous person I've read about over the past two and a half years. Very exciting! I'm already having nightmares about being fed lots of parsley and poppy seeds and looking like a freak when I speak to them. (By 'having nightmares' I mean 'it just occured to me', but I'm sure I could conjure up a nightmare on the topic.)

And then, at last, I'll have a free weekend...

February HA HA HA

Oh, more comedy and yet more comedy! I was worried about posting only once a month - back in November!

/wipes tear from eye/

Did someone mention that I'm in my final year? Or perhaps that I'm finally in my final year, as I've decided to officially push back my deadline for a first full draft from 1 October 2013 to Christmas 2013. Why, you ask?

The answer is: the Spence World Tour 2013! Well, to be honest, it's more of a European tour with my friend Eli's wedding in New York thrown in for good measure. For those of you who don't know Eli, which I assume is most of you, his wedding is the surest sign yet of the impending apocalypse. But only in the best possible way! I refer purely to the chances of snowballs in hell, not to hell per se. We love Lisa!!!

My second and third Bright Club performances have come and gone. They were fantastic! I don't think I could have had a better time. If you search YouTube for 'Jocelyn Spence Bright Club' you'll find the first two. Not sure of the fate of the third one.

My piece with the fabulous Claire Murphy-Morgan, Recalibrate, is coming along super promisingly, and right according to schedule. This has the terrifying side effect that we're close to being ready to show it to people. Guess that means I'd better finish typing up the latest changes, and then, like, memorise it or something... Actual dates and places TBA.

Before that happens, I'll be giving a paper at the Performing Documents conference in Bristol in mid-April.

Then at the end of April it's off to Paris for CHI, where I'll be part of the fantastic-sounding Crafting Interactive Systems workshop, and then giving an alt.chi paper on Performative Experience Design.

Then in May it's Prague to give a paper at the 4th Global Conference on Storytelling, followed by a weekend in Berlin to check out some of the action at the Month of Performance Art. Not performing, sadly, but watching avidly.

Then in July it's Barcelona to give a paper at the IFTR conference. Never been to it - can't wait to see what it's like.

And between New York and Bristol, Ian and I will be spending a long weekend in France and Luxembourg with my lovely friend Carine!

Somewhere in there, I'm supposed to be doing a thesis. MORE COMEDY HIJINKS. I mean, seriously, when is this supposed to happen??? More to the point, I'm at the stage of needing to test my application. Yes, my foray into web design which started just in October/November is now over, and not unsuccessfully. So now I need guinea pigs! Anyone who's interested in finding out more, please ping me!

So that's why I've been incommunicado - deadlines upon deadlines upon deadlines. Now, not so much in the way of deadlines, more in the way of slogging. Therefore, I anticipate more in the way of procrastinatory blog-writing in the near future!

comedy and more comedy

At least it hasn't been a month this time...

So Bright Club went smashingly well! At least, that's the phenomenological viewpoint - I don't know if anyone in the audience enjoyed it. I think they did, and I know I had a fantastic time. And now I'm doing two more - once at the Christmas Special, and once for the Surrey postgrad conference.

But if you want to hear something really extra super funny, how's this: I'm now trying to become a web developer. I went and designed what ended up being essentially a website/app sorta thing. And unfortunately, in combination with that, I've bought into the whole idea that a proper build, or even a partial prototype, is better than pure Wizard of Oz. (Translation: making something that works even a little bit is better than totally faking it.) So now I'm trying to learn HTML5, PHP, MySQL, and associated bits of coding loveliness so that I can build my own prototype to test.

This would be on top of the actual writing of the thesis, and the execution and analysis of my first study, and the papers I'm writing or proposing, and the class I'm teaching, and the fabulous performance project I'm doing with Claire.

And loads of other important things, too (you know who you are). (Actually, you might not realise it, but I just ascribed the power of literacy to my cello.)

So if there are any bored web developers out there who know the canvas element like the back of their hands, drop me a line!

Foggy advances! Bright Club!

Good lord, this once-a-month thing is getting ridiculous! Maybe the phases of the moon are dictating my posts.

Since last month, two things have happened. One is incredibly important, utterly critical for my research and my thesis. The other is totally separate and probably, ultimately, close to irrelevant. But what am I supposed to say?

Big news! Stop press! I've thought a lot about my design, and realised that a few refinements will provide a huge amount of clarity on the intentions and implications of my work, though I suspect much remains to be done!!!!

That one sentence there should be a quick-fire cure for insomnia. Plus, I'm talking about my (current) perceptions of my own work, compared to my (previous) perceptions of that work, and the implications that I'm imagining it might all have to the theory that I've got swimming around (amorphously) in my head. Nothing is concrete. Nothing is confirmed. It could all be a mental fog.

On the other hand, the probably irrelevant thing is so sexy! Big news! Stop press! Day after tomorrow, I'm performing stand-up comedy at Bright Club Guildford! See, it's got a link and everything, though rather scandalously not updated: http://brightclub.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/bright-club-guildford/ And guess who else is on the bill? Jim Al-Khalili! Truly, I am touched by BBC greatness.

Now that's not a cure for insomnia. It's concrete. It's confirmed. There's no mental fog involved, except perhaps mine in trying to get ready for it. Which one would you fixate on?

long live the deadline

Those crossed fingers worked a treat! We had an amazing weekend, made loads of progress, and got even *more* excited about this project, if that was possible.

And it has a name: Recalibrate.

Cool, huh? Stay tuned! Coming relatively soon-ish to a venue of some sort possibly near you!

As soon as I got back from Dent, I threw myself into a paper whose deadline was yesterday. I'm actually pretty pleased with what I came up with, so fingers crossed that the reviewers feel the same.

But here's the thing: I'm part of the Digital World Research Centre, right? I learned BASIC when I was 10. I've built websites. I've been an information architect, working with developers all day. So why, WHY, does all the terrifying and impossible technological crap in the world rain down on my head? When I worked at the new media agency in Shoreditch, the IT guy (who at first certainly thought I was a moron) finally came to see with his own eyes that in my hands, computers do things that they simply should not be able to do. In a bad, bad, bad way.

I could write a few hundred words, easily, just describing the facts of all the terrifying and impossible things that have gone wrong with my computer in the past two weeks, up to and including the complete refusal by Microsoft Word to stay open for more than three seconds without crashing. Bit of a problem, that, when you're trying to submit a paper.

And why is it that the fantabulous Sente, which just about does your dishes while you mind-meld your reference list into the correct format, has decided to put some of my references in this kind of format [1] and others in [2006], when they're the same type of material in the same paper? And why does printing to PDF sometimes split my document and sometimes not, when the only difference between the two is that I changed a typo, from 'Alan' to 'Allan'?

If I had more money than sense, I would buy a brand new computer and set it up from scratch with all new software.

Actually, given the amount of sense I have, the above condition might hold true anyhow...

Dent

This will be more like a tweet than a post, but I'm off to Dent for a long weekend of writing and planning and general mayhem with the lovely and talented Claire Morgan. Fingers crossed there will be all kinds of good stuff coming out Sunday night!

no time like the present

As in, no time. I have no time to be writing this blog post. Why? Because I decided I wanted to write another paper. This clearly indicates that I am rampagingly insane.

It also indicates that I'm on the verge of swooping through my entire 2nd year of my PhD on the same surge that I started with two years ago. Everyone who's done a PhD says that halfway through, you're guaranteed to lose the will to live as the long, hard slog approaches its solstice - the longest time yet endured, coupled with the longest time yet to go. Instead, I'm all fired up to do another chunk of writing! That's on top of nailing down my design, preparing for my first study, putting together the class I'm co-teaching this fall, and co-creating a performance.

I guess it also means I'm ambitious. I've always preferred to think of myself as utterly uninterested in ambition, or in competition, for that matter. I still stay away from competition whenever possible - nobody needs to see me get red of tooth and claw, least of all me - but I suppose I have to admit that I'd like to be taken seriously and play with the big boys, and girls, in the big pond, with the big fish, and all those things that have got People Of A Certain Age humming a certain Peter Gabriel tune right now.

Come on, sing it with me! I'll be a big noise, with all the big boys, so many... papers... I will publish...

So why am I blogging about this? First of all, because I needed to take a break. Second, I wanted Peter to get a little spike in his downloads today. Third, I wonder if I'm the only one who's in month #24 of a full-time PhD and still giddily happy about it, even if a bit stressed out. Anyone else?