So it turns out I didn't write up any notes in a blog draft shortly after this event (from APRIL), possibly because the room in which the conference was held was unfortunately very hot and I had to rush off to avoid getting properly unwell. Then I had to get on a Eurostar quite early the next day, and once I saw my niece and nephews all else fell by the wayside. (Other than my self-reflective essay for teacher training, which took a long time but paid off in the form of a special commendation from the inSTIL programme team!)
First things first: what is the WCC? It self-identifies admirably clearly on its website as an organisation which aims (hah) to achieve the following aims:
- Support women* in classics**
- Promote feminist and gender-informed perspectives in classics
- Raise the profile of the study of women in antiquity and classical reception
- Advance equality and diversity in classics
Basically, anyone is welcome, other than the silly man who complained to a female archaeologist friend that he couldn't join the Women's Digital Archaeology Network because where is the equality in that? You're out. (And if you're that blind to the historical power imbalance along gendered lines, you may want to consider getting the hell out of this type of field.)
I have left in the asterisks in their aims, which lead respectively to a wonderful acknowledgement of the irrelevance of a biological basis for womanhood compared to self-definition and a usefully broad and realistic definition of the field of classics. This is a sign, y'all, of not just how politically correct this organisation wishes to be but, apolitically speaking, how HUMAN it is. I'm particularly proud to have attended the event, to have helped out a little in doing preliminary research for its membership structure, and of course to be a member, given the pivotal role of my 2nd thesis advisor Dr Liz Gloyn's involvement in getting this organisation off the ground. You've got to love people who see something admirable somewhere else in the world - in this case, the Women's Classical Caucus in the US, which impressively has its own Wikipedia page - and think 'we need that here!'. And then actually go and DO IT!
(I'm also particularly proud of Liz's awesomeness with regard to gender-related stuff, given that she's just been slated by the execrable Daily Mail - much as I hate to add to their page views, here is the article - for notifying the students on her Ovid course in advance that there is some nasty stuff in those texts, like domestic abuse and rape. She's written more about this here. In addition to the DM's painting this as nannying when campus-based gendered violence and rape is so prominent yet so not taken seriously, another bad thing about the article is that it ends on a sentence that suggests that if you're going to take a course on classical literature and have zero prior knowledge of it, then OF COURSE your default expectation must be to expect rape and pillaging left, right and centre. There are actually some beautiful texts from antiquity that give you hope for the human race, turds-at-the-DM!)
But! Back to the event. As said, this was an inaugural event so the whole day demonstrated an incredible variety of points of view and ways of expressing them and of engaging with each other. You can access the livetweeting through the hashtag wcclaunch and Liz's Storify here, but here are the main things that really stand out in my mind about it (other than the stifling heat in the room :0)
1. The incredibly personal nature of many of the stories shared. I chose to attend a breakout session on mental health, which I realise may therefore not have contained a representative sample of the general PhD population but nonetheless, given the variety of backgrounds, ages, fields, etc. the prevalence of depression in all its varying forms in academia is astounding. And frightening. The prevalence suggests structural causes (assuming we don't believe that only people prone to mental health issues are attracted to academia in the first place, whether masochistically or not - as I don't) but unfortunately I'm not sure what could be done institutionally to remedy this.
Loneliness was identified as a serious cause, though, and the provision of communal space for working in the presence of the likeminded could be a good way forward, I think. I wonder whether any research has been done as to the prevalence of mental health issues in lab-based and therefore less socially deprived PhD students compared to lonely humanities ones without a fixed base?
The community aspect also fed into physical disability, as one attendant of the group in a wheelchair was effectively barred from her own department as it was on the first floor of a building with no lift. Although people are often helpful and try to make arrangements, she has the added burden of having to plan her access needs in a way that people like me do not, and the sacrifice of spontaneity comes at a social cost, I am sure, not to mention the practical challenge of just making sure you can sit in on any meetings, seminars, etc. required. A few days later I spoke to Mai Musié in charge of Oxford's Classics outreach programme, and she said Oxford have actually conducted an audit to identify every single case where something as little-seeming as a single raised step forms an access barrier. I can't remember the details of how quickly everything will come up to scratch, but it's a start. More people need to do this!
2. The presentation of the survey results contained the slight revelation for me (well, I had probably not bothered to give it much thought, let me put it that way) that many of the issues identified weren't applicable to women alone, though for some issues it seemed to be the case that women were disproportionately affected. You can read the committee members' full analysis of the findings here.
From my own perspective, the two main issues directly affecting me negatively in my position - and which are by no means gender-specific! - which fall within the campaign goals of the WCC to improve the lot of women in classics are both ones which boil down to the prevalence of two very specific cases of impossible and contradictory expectations which are held of PhD students:
a) There is a mismatch between the general consensus that PhDs now realistically take four, rather than three, years to complete, and my funder's standard grant of three years' money. Those of us without either trust funds or baby-boomer parents who are both able and willing to help, are seriously hindered by this. There is agreement that it virtually can't be done, yet we are still expected to do it. And not only does this cause psychological anguish, it literally gets us in our pockets. Work while we finish off? Sure, but it's going to slow us down, and in a political climate obsessed with statistics and value for money for the taxpayer, extentions are not granted as enthusiastically as they once were.
b) The mismatch between the academic job market's requirement for you to have publications to your name when you come to apply for posts and on the one hand the impossible time pressure you have to complete your PhD, nevermind have extra time to crack out publications not related to your thesis. This is further exacerbated by college regulations, in some cases including mine, which prohibit PhD researchers from publishing or even submitting to publishers work from their thesis prior to finishing. So anyone who finishes is in the unenviable position of having at least a 9-month period ahead of them, during which they will be looking for work (for which publications are essential) but who are unlikely to have any publications to their name.
Alongside the WCC, another organisation which has identified some of these issues (though not the ones I suffer from specifically) and offers institutions suggestions to mitigate their impact on current students and recent graduates in particular, is Hortensii.
We need people who heed these concerns so very badly. Please add your voice, as it can only make their advocacy and clout with employers and funders stronger.
Monday 26 September 2016
Tuesday 23 August 2016
Gateway to the Gods: an ancient temple site at Marcham (Oxfordshire)
So I absolutely haven't blogged for way too long. But when I logged in just now hoping to recap the 9th Celtic Conference in Classics (Dublin, June 2016, hashtag #celtclass) for you, I saw that I had some other ideas lined up and other events to write up. I should probably tackle those first, before I forget.
The first of the ideas was to belatedly (so belatedly it's virtually POSTHUMOUSLY) put down some thoughts on visiting the 'Gateway to the Gods' exhibition on the archaeological digs held from 2001 to 2011 at the Roman temple complex in Marcham near me in Abingdon. On this map go down from Frilford centre, along the A338 until you hit the river Ock. In the top right corner of the cross formed by the road meeting the river is the temple complex:
The exhibition was held across several rooms of the attractively rustic and yet well-run Vale & Downlands Museum in the South Oxfordshire town of Wantage - allegedly the birthplace of King Alfred. There's certainly a statue of him, and a pub named after him, too. I didn't know it was on but we were in Wantage that day anyway for the fantastic second hand book shop, and saw the poster:
The exhibition was quite modest in its scope and setup, which is why six months later I can no longer give you the sorts of details that I would have liked to. However!
The site is apparently was one of the biggest sites of Roman (or was it? probably mixed!) worship in the whole of Roman Britain! That's definitely not nothing. It seems to be a stroke of good luck that much of it is underneath fields (read: the site largely hasn't got modern buildings on them) so digs have been taking place regularly for many years. I find it very interesting how a site's importance in antiquity is no guarantee whatsoever for its importance or continued use or similar use into the present day.
Marcham is known worldwide as the host village (actually, its subvillage of Frilford, but y'know) to local farm shop and petting zoo Millets Farm as well as The Place Where My Parents Put Petrol Into Their Diesel Car In 2007. Incredible what's beneath our feet much of the time, unbeknownst to us.
Anyone who wants to know more can in fact order a small 20-page informational booklet for £2 by emailing trendlesproject@gmail.com. In fact, my copy arrived two days after emailing them, including a small note on how to get payment to them. Very trusting! Some of the recaps which follow here have definitely benefited from refreshing my memory on the basis of the booklet.
The exhibition largely consisted of plans and even an animated reconstruction of what the site would have looked like, and these visualisations displayed next to plans made it awesome and very vivid. I can't post photos from the booklet without permission, but the book's publicly available cover image is an artist's impression of the main religious building to be found there:
As you all know, I do not relate to the past primarily through objects, and much prefer text for learning about & feeling close to antiquity (see my talk for the TECHNE 'Object in Focus' workshop on not being a visual person). But I found these really fun. Other buildings on the site included an amphitheatre. I cherish the fond but misplaced hope that in 50 years' time when I'm old we may be hosting local theatrical productions in a restored version on site! (Aim high, right?)
My main beef with viewing objects and archaeology is that it requires oodles of imagination of a kind which I don't think I have. Buried remains are not what we might imagine if we're not experts: often it's about deducing what used to be there from a shape or a trace material. For example, a square hole filled in with material different to the surrounding material, which indicates the existence of a posthole which supported a beam which would have supported some sort of built structure. Especially in the wet climes of our part of the world, materials such as the wooden posts themselves have long rotted away.
(This is why people get very excited when under exceptional circumstances (basically, anaerobic e.g. sealed off from the corrupting influence of air and all it carries, like oxygen) we do discover British organic finds, like two months ago in London. This one was particularly exciting for me personally, as one of the names attested on one of the wooden tablets was that of Julius Classicus, one of the ringleaders of the Batavian rebellion against Rome of AD69 - the Roman historian Tacitus' treatment of this revolt makes up about half of my thesis. More information on Julius Classicus can be found here, though don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia, as Classicus isn't as easily classified into Gaul or German as all that. Tacitus' representation, our only source on the rebellion and most of its protagonists, has a fluidity of identity as one of its defining features of this area and its people. The Vindolanda tablets from Hadrian's Wall are another good example.)
In that sense, the reconstructions were testimony to archaeologists' amazing skill at reading big things into little things. I'm sure it's something many people respond to incredibly enthusiastically, and when done well I can almost see what they're getting at (ha ha).
Unfortunately, however, the sorts of archaeological finds that are most easily displayable from such sites are things like coins and potsherds. Coins I find fascinating, especially if they're not random finds but found in hoards (e.g. in a container of some sorts, which was buried for reasons we will probably never know, but never recovered for reasons we will also never know but probably involve death or similarly awful things rather than forgetfulness or not caring), but again more because of the stories - here we are, words again! - behind them than as objects to look at. A report on the Roman coin finds of Marcham can be found here.
Potsherds and arrowheads and cup handles and things, however, I am not keen on, even though I'm aware that in the right hands these things can tell us massive amounts about how people lived, what they ate, where the stuff they used was made, etc. There was a bit of that in the exhibition, but I basically read the labels and then move on. The booklet, however, has close-up photographs of some of the more unusual or pretty objects founds and does a great job at explaining (in my beloved words!) why these deserve our attention. The Roman brooch with its Roman-style imagery which is nonetheless made by a native process, for example, or the slipper-shaped brooch which may mean that Mercury or a native or Romano-British hybrid god with a similar function was one of the deities worshipped there. Good stuff!
I know nothing about visitor numbers or how the exhibition was received (and the internet is proving remarkably elusive in this regard), but I hope they'll do another one in ten years or so, as I didn't get the impression archaeologists feel they've exhausted the site.
The final room in the exhibition was dedicated (of course) to dressing up as a Roman, so here's the obligatory photo of me in a sheet:
The first of the ideas was to belatedly (so belatedly it's virtually POSTHUMOUSLY) put down some thoughts on visiting the 'Gateway to the Gods' exhibition on the archaeological digs held from 2001 to 2011 at the Roman temple complex in Marcham near me in Abingdon. On this map go down from Frilford centre, along the A338 until you hit the river Ock. In the top right corner of the cross formed by the road meeting the river is the temple complex:
The exhibition was held across several rooms of the attractively rustic and yet well-run Vale & Downlands Museum in the South Oxfordshire town of Wantage - allegedly the birthplace of King Alfred. There's certainly a statue of him, and a pub named after him, too. I didn't know it was on but we were in Wantage that day anyway for the fantastic second hand book shop, and saw the poster:
The exhibition was quite modest in its scope and setup, which is why six months later I can no longer give you the sorts of details that I would have liked to. However!
The site is apparently was one of the biggest sites of Roman (or was it? probably mixed!) worship in the whole of Roman Britain! That's definitely not nothing. It seems to be a stroke of good luck that much of it is underneath fields (read: the site largely hasn't got modern buildings on them) so digs have been taking place regularly for many years. I find it very interesting how a site's importance in antiquity is no guarantee whatsoever for its importance or continued use or similar use into the present day.
Marcham is known worldwide as the host village (actually, its subvillage of Frilford, but y'know) to local farm shop and petting zoo Millets Farm as well as The Place Where My Parents Put Petrol Into Their Diesel Car In 2007. Incredible what's beneath our feet much of the time, unbeknownst to us.
Anyone who wants to know more can in fact order a small 20-page informational booklet for £2 by emailing trendlesproject@gmail.com. In fact, my copy arrived two days after emailing them, including a small note on how to get payment to them. Very trusting! Some of the recaps which follow here have definitely benefited from refreshing my memory on the basis of the booklet.
The exhibition largely consisted of plans and even an animated reconstruction of what the site would have looked like, and these visualisations displayed next to plans made it awesome and very vivid. I can't post photos from the booklet without permission, but the book's publicly available cover image is an artist's impression of the main religious building to be found there:
As you all know, I do not relate to the past primarily through objects, and much prefer text for learning about & feeling close to antiquity (see my talk for the TECHNE 'Object in Focus' workshop on not being a visual person). But I found these really fun. Other buildings on the site included an amphitheatre. I cherish the fond but misplaced hope that in 50 years' time when I'm old we may be hosting local theatrical productions in a restored version on site! (Aim high, right?)
My main beef with viewing objects and archaeology is that it requires oodles of imagination of a kind which I don't think I have. Buried remains are not what we might imagine if we're not experts: often it's about deducing what used to be there from a shape or a trace material. For example, a square hole filled in with material different to the surrounding material, which indicates the existence of a posthole which supported a beam which would have supported some sort of built structure. Especially in the wet climes of our part of the world, materials such as the wooden posts themselves have long rotted away.
(This is why people get very excited when under exceptional circumstances (basically, anaerobic e.g. sealed off from the corrupting influence of air and all it carries, like oxygen) we do discover British organic finds, like two months ago in London. This one was particularly exciting for me personally, as one of the names attested on one of the wooden tablets was that of Julius Classicus, one of the ringleaders of the Batavian rebellion against Rome of AD69 - the Roman historian Tacitus' treatment of this revolt makes up about half of my thesis. More information on Julius Classicus can be found here, though don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia, as Classicus isn't as easily classified into Gaul or German as all that. Tacitus' representation, our only source on the rebellion and most of its protagonists, has a fluidity of identity as one of its defining features of this area and its people. The Vindolanda tablets from Hadrian's Wall are another good example.)
In that sense, the reconstructions were testimony to archaeologists' amazing skill at reading big things into little things. I'm sure it's something many people respond to incredibly enthusiastically, and when done well I can almost see what they're getting at (ha ha).
Unfortunately, however, the sorts of archaeological finds that are most easily displayable from such sites are things like coins and potsherds. Coins I find fascinating, especially if they're not random finds but found in hoards (e.g. in a container of some sorts, which was buried for reasons we will probably never know, but never recovered for reasons we will also never know but probably involve death or similarly awful things rather than forgetfulness or not caring), but again more because of the stories - here we are, words again! - behind them than as objects to look at. A report on the Roman coin finds of Marcham can be found here.
Potsherds and arrowheads and cup handles and things, however, I am not keen on, even though I'm aware that in the right hands these things can tell us massive amounts about how people lived, what they ate, where the stuff they used was made, etc. There was a bit of that in the exhibition, but I basically read the labels and then move on. The booklet, however, has close-up photographs of some of the more unusual or pretty objects founds and does a great job at explaining (in my beloved words!) why these deserve our attention. The Roman brooch with its Roman-style imagery which is nonetheless made by a native process, for example, or the slipper-shaped brooch which may mean that Mercury or a native or Romano-British hybrid god with a similar function was one of the deities worshipped there. Good stuff!
I know nothing about visitor numbers or how the exhibition was received (and the internet is proving remarkably elusive in this regard), but I hope they'll do another one in ten years or so, as I didn't get the impression archaeologists feel they've exhausted the site.
The final room in the exhibition was dedicated (of course) to dressing up as a Roman, so here's the obligatory photo of me in a sheet:
Friday 5 February 2016
TECHNE Student Congress (January 2016, Royal Holloway)
Having spent the previous post whining about my battles with poster design and becoming a more visually aware and creative 'exhibitor', I thought I'd also write up some thoughts on the TECHNE student congress I attended during the first week of January. It's a mandatory thing organised by my funder the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the programme can be found here. Although I wasn't entirely convinced whether the programme really bore out the title of 'Digital Humanities' (I think of the sort of things Elton Barker at the Open University works on when I think of DH), it seemed to have a wide appeal. My neighbour at dinner, for example, Dane Watkins, turned out to be studying for his PhD in smart design (!) at Falmouth, which isn't part of the TECHNE consortium of institutions, but he had seen the announcement circulated and came up for it especially. (He's also got a degree in Animation, and teaches drawing, so I suddenly felt a lot more embarrassed about my poster... Nothing but kind comments, though!)
Not much there was relevant to my thesis, but it was more focused towards skills development, and had some relevant guidance on how to be the sort of academic that I might want to be: engaged in the world and with the world, through blogging, Twitter, etc. There was also some excellent stuff on the academy and politics, how to preserve our independence from government, whether to play the Big Publisher game (what alternatives there are, if any, which rely less on free extra work done by academics whilst someone else pockets the profits - I'm not sure there are any that are significantly better...)
In any case, my philosophy on conferences is rapidly changing: 40% of their significance lies in the talks (maybe 50% if you're lucky) but otherwise it's all about the people you meet during the breaks. I'm getting better at it, and it's fun! Some of the people I talked to do the most amazing-sounding projects of a creativity and (to me) 'out-there-ness' that astounds me. For example, Neil Cahoon from Roehampton: how does 'Sound Design for the Contemporary Novel: Applying the Poetics of John Cage to Digital Prose Fiction' sound to you? I'm so glad there are so many people thinking outside the box, because we need 'em. (I still struggle to make the argument for the Humanities in a convincing way in the face of policymakers who want everything quantifiable, but do find the reductio ad absurdum quite helpful: nobody wants to live in a world where no more plays get written and we all stagnate into the future supported by a cultural and intellectual canon which is no longer reinterpreted or added to.)
A word on the accommodation: the host institution for this Congress, Royal Holloway, is my home institution but of course I don't live there. To have the chance to stay over in its most iconic building, Founder's, therefore, was pretty special. I forgot to take a photo of the sunrise over the balustrades and turrets when I walked to breakfast, but here is a shot which nicely illustrates how special it was to stay in one of the bedrooms on the top floor:
It was all marvellously 'Downton servants' quarters'. Including bathroom 20 yards down the hallway, forcing an odd sort of intimacy with fellow congress-goers, passing each other by in their pyjamas on their way to the bathroom. The next ones will be at conference centres in hotels, apparently, so I'm glad I had this chance!
Not much there was relevant to my thesis, but it was more focused towards skills development, and had some relevant guidance on how to be the sort of academic that I might want to be: engaged in the world and with the world, through blogging, Twitter, etc. There was also some excellent stuff on the academy and politics, how to preserve our independence from government, whether to play the Big Publisher game (what alternatives there are, if any, which rely less on free extra work done by academics whilst someone else pockets the profits - I'm not sure there are any that are significantly better...)
In any case, my philosophy on conferences is rapidly changing: 40% of their significance lies in the talks (maybe 50% if you're lucky) but otherwise it's all about the people you meet during the breaks. I'm getting better at it, and it's fun! Some of the people I talked to do the most amazing-sounding projects of a creativity and (to me) 'out-there-ness' that astounds me. For example, Neil Cahoon from Roehampton: how does 'Sound Design for the Contemporary Novel: Applying the Poetics of John Cage to Digital Prose Fiction' sound to you? I'm so glad there are so many people thinking outside the box, because we need 'em. (I still struggle to make the argument for the Humanities in a convincing way in the face of policymakers who want everything quantifiable, but do find the reductio ad absurdum quite helpful: nobody wants to live in a world where no more plays get written and we all stagnate into the future supported by a cultural and intellectual canon which is no longer reinterpreted or added to.)
A word on the accommodation: the host institution for this Congress, Royal Holloway, is my home institution but of course I don't live there. To have the chance to stay over in its most iconic building, Founder's, therefore, was pretty special. I forgot to take a photo of the sunrise over the balustrades and turrets when I walked to breakfast, but here is a shot which nicely illustrates how special it was to stay in one of the bedrooms on the top floor:
It was all marvellously 'Downton servants' quarters'. Including bathroom 20 yards down the hallway, forcing an odd sort of intimacy with fellow congress-goers, passing each other by in their pyjamas on their way to the bathroom. The next ones will be at conference centres in hotels, apparently, so I'm glad I had this chance!
Thursday 14 January 2016
"Try again, fail again, fail better"
So! I promised it would happen, and it has happened. I did yet another poster, and promised I'd say some more about it. Here it is:
The things I want to say about it are:
1. I don't like it.
2. I don't like it, firstly because I didn't have enough time to do it the way I wanted it to. This is partly because the call for posters came so late (mid-December) that it was a tall order to get something ready in time - a sentiment most people seemed to agree with as there were very few submissions in the end. But within that limited time available I also did not spend long enough planning the actual execution. Lesson learned: unlike with text when, once you have your plan or your bullet points, writing them up into real prose doesn't actually take very long, visuals require much more effort and input to take them from plan to execution.
2. How did this lack of time influence the downward spiral of this poster's design? I had in mind a vast expense of whiteness with very little text, in which my black and white hand-drawn cartoons would stand out really starkly. I was quite taken with this idea of a clean, modern, two-tone thing which would massively stand out in whatever crowd of posters would end up surrounding mine. But it turns out that when you scan cartoons drawn on white paper the background is almost grey. I think I may be able to fiddle with scanner settings and do this better, but I didn't have time then and it wasn't the only problem. Anyway, I decided that as B&W was off I'd switch to colour. At that point I panicked a little and went for a blue background and a colour scheme based on my university logo which is blue and orange. But the result looks really pedestrian and unprofessional. Wrong blue! Not enough time.
I then realised on top of that that I did not have the skills to draw, in Microsoft PowerPoint, the 'family tree' style linkages between cartoons that I wanted, possibly with a superscription for each arrow/link of one word or very concise sentence to indicate what kind of hierarchy or link we were talking about. (Something like 'why this matters' or 'to put this in context'). Nor had I allowed myself the time to look up how to do what I wanted. So I also ended up putting in more text than I wanted to.
What I think could have saved this all was to follow, after scanning the drawings, the procedure outlined on the blog I linked to in my last post. Something to do with using Inkscape to make the drawings into line-only entities separate from their background - does that make them vectors in the jargon? (Apologies, I am not a graphic person.) That wasy I could have imported them onto the white background and everything would have looked different. Not sure I have the heart/time to make yet a third version of this research strand in poster form, but the Inkscaping is a skill I really want to master.
3. My own view of this poster was a lot more negative than that of the audience looking at it at the conference.
I've never drawn so much traffic before, with a good number of people stopping to chat about both content and execution. And the intended laughs materialised too! Everyone seems agreed on the challenge of distilling ideas into very small visual or textual bites. The general sense was that having both my posters up next to one another gave people a really good insight into this strand of my research, but most people weren't sure that having just the cartoons poster alone would have given them as much, so that probably does count as a part-failure. But scholarly discussion was fostered, so not a complete one! Many more people than I expected related to the theme of abusive governments and subjects categorised by government and then treated in a certain way. People are still being labelled today according to processes against which they have very limited power to protest: refugee versus migrant was one that came up the most. Also of interest were the power structures and mechanisms which attempt to combat or, on the contrary, cement this powerlessness. In my case, Roman citizenship was one way of making sure you had some legal footing and clout to appeal to violations of your rights, though even there (my argument goes) all that goes out the window when faced with a state which doesn't want to honour these defences and elides status differences through sheer application of force. In the same way, access to modern technologies nowadays can be both liberating (think of the role of Twitter in the Arab Spring) or controlling and repressive (think of CCTV).
Thanks to Heather Isaksen for the inspiration in her own right, and for introducing me to the work of Hugleikur Dagsson.
The things I want to say about it are:
1. I don't like it.
2. I don't like it, firstly because I didn't have enough time to do it the way I wanted it to. This is partly because the call for posters came so late (mid-December) that it was a tall order to get something ready in time - a sentiment most people seemed to agree with as there were very few submissions in the end. But within that limited time available I also did not spend long enough planning the actual execution. Lesson learned: unlike with text when, once you have your plan or your bullet points, writing them up into real prose doesn't actually take very long, visuals require much more effort and input to take them from plan to execution.
2. How did this lack of time influence the downward spiral of this poster's design? I had in mind a vast expense of whiteness with very little text, in which my black and white hand-drawn cartoons would stand out really starkly. I was quite taken with this idea of a clean, modern, two-tone thing which would massively stand out in whatever crowd of posters would end up surrounding mine. But it turns out that when you scan cartoons drawn on white paper the background is almost grey. I think I may be able to fiddle with scanner settings and do this better, but I didn't have time then and it wasn't the only problem. Anyway, I decided that as B&W was off I'd switch to colour. At that point I panicked a little and went for a blue background and a colour scheme based on my university logo which is blue and orange. But the result looks really pedestrian and unprofessional. Wrong blue! Not enough time.
I then realised on top of that that I did not have the skills to draw, in Microsoft PowerPoint, the 'family tree' style linkages between cartoons that I wanted, possibly with a superscription for each arrow/link of one word or very concise sentence to indicate what kind of hierarchy or link we were talking about. (Something like 'why this matters' or 'to put this in context'). Nor had I allowed myself the time to look up how to do what I wanted. So I also ended up putting in more text than I wanted to.
What I think could have saved this all was to follow, after scanning the drawings, the procedure outlined on the blog I linked to in my last post. Something to do with using Inkscape to make the drawings into line-only entities separate from their background - does that make them vectors in the jargon? (Apologies, I am not a graphic person.) That wasy I could have imported them onto the white background and everything would have looked different. Not sure I have the heart/time to make yet a third version of this research strand in poster form, but the Inkscaping is a skill I really want to master.
3. My own view of this poster was a lot more negative than that of the audience looking at it at the conference.
I've never drawn so much traffic before, with a good number of people stopping to chat about both content and execution. And the intended laughs materialised too! Everyone seems agreed on the challenge of distilling ideas into very small visual or textual bites. The general sense was that having both my posters up next to one another gave people a really good insight into this strand of my research, but most people weren't sure that having just the cartoons poster alone would have given them as much, so that probably does count as a part-failure. But scholarly discussion was fostered, so not a complete one! Many more people than I expected related to the theme of abusive governments and subjects categorised by government and then treated in a certain way. People are still being labelled today according to processes against which they have very limited power to protest: refugee versus migrant was one that came up the most. Also of interest were the power structures and mechanisms which attempt to combat or, on the contrary, cement this powerlessness. In my case, Roman citizenship was one way of making sure you had some legal footing and clout to appeal to violations of your rights, though even there (my argument goes) all that goes out the window when faced with a state which doesn't want to honour these defences and elides status differences through sheer application of force. In the same way, access to modern technologies nowadays can be both liberating (think of the role of Twitter in the Arab Spring) or controlling and repressive (think of CCTV).
Thanks to Heather Isaksen for the inspiration in her own right, and for introducing me to the work of Hugleikur Dagsson.
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