I really should not go check work emails before writing the blog, or it leads to severe late-blogging.

While I was away, a ton of mails (a small ton, anyways) came over the MEDTC-list. For example, this link that leads to a list of dissertations since 1994, with quite a few textile-related titles among it. I'm not going to re-post all the interesting bits from the list - if you did not join it in 2009 when I first wrote about it, or when you found out about it, you can join now by going to this old post, reading up on it and doing what you need to do.

There's the (annual) international conference „Experimental Archaeology in Europe 2011“ that will take place from 13.-16.10.2011 in Schleswig/Germany. It is organised by EXAR and the Archaeological Service and Museum of Schleswig-Holstein in castle Gottorf near Schleswig. Though termed "international", the conference is almost purely in German language. If you do not mind that, though, there will be a presentation about the Hallstatt textile reproduction that I was also involved in, and two other textile-focused papers. Unfortunately, I will miss the conference due to a date clash. If you think about going, you can find more info on the website www.exar.org.


And on the other side of Earth (more or less), there's a roundtable discussion about experimental archaeology:


Teaching Experimental Archaeology in an Academic Setting: A Roundtable Discussion

Increasingly, many archaeologists acknowledge the value of experimental archaeology and incorporate an experimental component into their research designs.   Simultaneously, numerous anthropology departments throughout the world are expose their students to the field by adding experimental archaeology courses to their departmental offerings or at least by including experimental components to more traditional archaeology classes.  The professors offering these courses come from various backgrounds and approach the material in very different ways.  Accordingly, we all have a great deal to offer one another.

In an effort to encourage dialogue between the instructors of these courses, a roundtable discussion focused on teaching experimental archaeology in an academic setting has been organized and is planned to take place during this year's Reconstructive and Experimental Archaeology Conference (REARC).  This conference will take place between October 14 and 16 at the Schiele Museum located in Gastonia, North Carolina (see: www.rearc.us).  If you: 1) currently teach or are planning on teaching an experimental archaeology course, 2) currently teach or are planning on teaching a course that includes an experimental archaeology component, or 3) are interested in how experimental archaeology is taught in an academic setting, please consider participating in this roundtable.  In addition to a lively discussion, I would like to also assemble a packet of hard copy and digital materials such as syllabi, reading lists, class activities, etc. that can be shared amongst the participants and interested conference attendees.  Please consider sharing these materials whether or not you plan on attending the conference.  If you are planning on participating in any capacity please respond to Bill Schindler (Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein.) by September 15, 2011.


More of the backlog, but with a more textile nature, tomorrow.

This blog post was prompted by a praise of Powerpoint over at the Naked Philologist - and rather than crowding the comments there, I'm doing my own blog post. With a great amount of "never ever" in it.

Having studied archaeology, I am totally used to papers with visual aides - and I had the transition time from photo/picture slides to Powerpoint during my time at university, so I know what you can do with slides, and I know how much better you can do with Powerpoint.

I rely heavily on Powerpoint, and I don't do a paper or a lecture without it. I need the visual stuff for my audience - you just can't talk about archaeology things without showing picture documentation of trenches and finds and architecture - and I also like to sneak in some visual jokes (one of my favourites is the lady beating her husband with a distaff). But totally apart from that, I speak without a fully written paper text and often even without any notes for my papers, and I mostly rely on the Powerpoint slides in front of me, on the computer, to keep track of what I want to say and what comes next. That is why I have slides with keywords or key phrases, original texts (plus citation for the text and translation), photos and drawings and reconstructions and pictures all mixed together into one paper. Take away my powerpoint... and I will not know what to say when, since you have just taken away all my memory aids and all my visual aids and all the other stuff I wanted to show.

I've also been known to bring along stuff like spindles, garments, cloth, deer antlers or whatever else is connected to my paper - either to brandish it or to demonstrate a process or, if the audience is small enough, to have it handed round for a proper feel of the thing. (The latter can be dangerous, though - since handling something and passing it on can be greatly distracting. I thus prefer nowadays to offer handling of the item(s) in question after the actual speaking part.)

However, Powerpoint can also go grossly wrong. So the things I would recommend for anyone thinking about using it are:
- Make sure your font is easy to read - something like Trebuchet, or Arial. Use only one font (two if you want to differentiate between original texts and modern language), and don't write too much on one slide. Never go below 20 pt font size. Never ever. Split the slide up into two slides instead.
- Powerpoint has those fancy phase-in and phase-out gadget buttons for your pics/items/slides. These I find utterly distracting - especially if they are used randomly. I prefer my pics to just appear and disappear without bells and whistles, and I have added a custom button to my Powerpoint that does exactly that to my item. Since I use several things on single slides, I use that button a lot.
Using only a simple appearance has the added benefit that if you really want to emphasise a picture, once in a very long while, a special appearance move will do that for you.
- Blinky text? Never ever. Really. Only distracts the eye of the viewer - and you don't want that Same goes for anything else that moves - just don't. (Videos are an exception to this, of course. Since they are watched, and then they are over and still again.)
- Go for good contrast between your text and the background. Don't use a background that has too much going on or any high contrast; if you want to use a pic as background, tweak its gamma, brightness and contrast until it is only a slightly coloured backdrop for your black text.
- Keep in mind that another computer and another beamer may skew your colours; yellow is especially hard to see on some beamers. Go for rather dark, clear colours if you need to show graphs or drawings; always make the lines thicker than you think they should be for easy reading, which translates to something between much thicker than necessary and ridiculously thick if viewed on your normal screen.
- Never use automatic slide change or appearance of items. Never ever. You might end up with a different programme version on the computer that your paper runs on, and that might dance to a different rhythm - letting all your slides rush by while you watch helplessly from the sidelines. I have seen a stack of pictures following each other much too fast quite a few times - and there was nothing the presenter could do to remedy this. Have each thing appear on its own, on your command, and you are safe from this.

Oh, and a final one not related to Powerpoint: If you are, say, an archaeologist and you are testing your lecture on, say, a group of physicists... do not be surprised if nobody gets your jokes. Sense of humour differs between academic disciplines, and a joke that will crack up a literary historian may leave an art historian dumbfounded. It took me a good while to find out that I wasn't as unfunny as the test audience made me feel, but they just did not get the jokes. So nowadays, I just hope that the actual audience has a sense of humour that is compatible with mine and add whatever funnies I feel would be nice and appropriate.

Via the MEDTC list, I have received this info about a conference:

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF ANGLO-SAXONISTS
http://conferencing.uwex.edu/conferences/isas2011/conference.cfm
Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination
Madison, WI
31 July – 5 August 2011
PROGRAM
http://conferencing.uwex.edu/conferences/isas2011/documents/ISASProgramJuly11.pdf


The programme seems to have a light smattering of textile-related topics.



And for those of you more into experimental archaeology, there is a conference in York next January, with the call for papers still open until August 15. The conference is Friday Jan 6 (and judging from the website, Saturday Jan 7 as well), and you can find a little more info plus the contact addresses on their website. I'm thinking about going, but haven't decided yet.

Is "blogospherically" even a word? No, I didn't think so. Anyways, since I'm no native speaker (writer?), I think I get to make up a word or two now and then.

Leeds not only lured me with the promise of lots of papers, many new faces to meet, delicious English food (apart from the soft drinks) and not one, but two book fairs; it also lured me with the prospect of meeting, face-to-face, some fellow bloggers of medieval and medieval-ish stuff.

Long before the blogger meetup on Tuesday, though, I met Jonathan Jarrett, who - thanks to the picture he posted - was really easy to recognise. Even for me with my bad memory for faces. Jonathan (who posts at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe) is every bit as friendly, bubbly and enthusiastic as his blog posts make him sound. In contrast to this my blog, he does not whine about bureaucracy and shares weird gratuitous links, but mostly blogs about seriously academic stuff - with pictures, and footnotes, and citations of papers.

The next blogger I met was Magistra (et Mater) from the similarly named blog. And then... many more on Tuesday: Another Damned Medievalist, highlyeccentric who blogs at The Naked Philologist, zcat (zcat abroad), Gillian Polack (who is not only a medievalist, but also a novelist, and whose books I now have to procure from somewhere so I can read them) who has her blog over on LJ, and finally a last person whose name/blog I jotted down as "cursor mundi" but was not yet able to locate. (Hints would be much appreciated!)

I had a wonderful time meeting all those folks, and Leeds has thus added to my blog reading list and, in some cases, has added to the interest I already had in these blogs. And it really does make a difference if you have met somebody in person - the blog posts suddenly get an extra level added on by knowing how the writer looks and speaks. So the bloger sie of me? Thoroughly happy that I got to Leeds, and that I had the opportunity to meet all these fellow bloggers. See you on the InterBloggoTubez!

I am being good and post about more Leeds things today, as promised, even if I just laughed so hard I had to wipe off tears afterwards and am sorely tempted to blog that link instead. (Gratuitous links one of the next days.)

So... things that I learned (again) about attending a conference:
If you are going to a conference in another country that caters mostly to another field of studies and where you don't know anybody, give a paper. Really. It will help a lot in getting people to find out that they are interested in you academically, and it will set you up with a core of people (who are hopefully doing things that will mesh well with yours) that are speaking in, attending, or moderating your panel. If there are panel clumps (small thematic streaks with more than one panel), you might end up in something like a small conference inside the big conference, which is nice since you get the good bits of a small conference (know a bunch of people fast) and a big one (being able to venture off to hear about something completely different and meet new people doing things that are exciting in a completely different field).
These things are especially true if you are not coming with colleagues from your university or institution, but by yourself.

I technically know all that, but I didn't give a paper. That may have been stupid or not - but I decided to come to Leeds way, way later than the Call-for-Papers deadline (which is almost a year before the conference), and I had not counted on most attendees giving a paper. I quickly found out, though, that not giving a paper was certainly sort of not-normal-for-Leeds, since most people I've talked to asked me about when and on what topic my paper was/would be. Someone told me later that almost everybody coming to Leeds would give a paper.

This also explains the huge number of panels and papers at the conference. I had taken a look at the programme on the website before I booked, and I was absolutely clear on the fact that it would be a classical medievalists' conference, with only little archaeology papers in it. I have been to classic medievalist conferences before, so I knew more or less what I was getting into.
There were, however, quite a few papers with keywords (to me) like cloth, clothing, textile and so on in that programme. To my slight disappointment, I found out during the conference that these keywords did not necessarily mean the paper would really mention these things. I am not going to go into detail about single papers, but quite a few left me slightly to seriously disappointed. Which leads me to my personal evaluation of Leeds, academically.

A conference that is really really large is not a guarantee that everything you hear will be really really good. That's nothing new - that was also clear to me beforehand. (I'd even say that a large conference is the guarantee that there will be at least one paper where you get the feeling that you could have spent your time elsewhere and not regret that.)

For me, conferences are a means to several ends: To present your research, methods, results, new questions or whatever it is that you think is necessary to get out to your colleagues; to hear about what others think important to tell you; and to meet new people and get new contacts. (They might also be a means to get gorged on delicious free food, drunk on free wine and beer and totally overcaffeinated with tea and coffee, but that is usually not the main reason why you go to a conference.)
Meeting new people is made easier by the papers, since their other reason of existence is to tell the audience who to meet and keep in contact with. The sessions or panels, if you want to put it in the extreme, are the bits between the coffee breaks (where the really interesting stuff takes place) to tell you who you should stalk in the next coffee break. That means that the coffee breaks have to be long enough and that having enough social time and space is crucial to a good conference - because you sort of hold up a "find me" flag by giving your paper which is not worth so much if you then can't be found and talked to. Leeds did very well on that, with a break of 45 minutes after each session of 90 minutes, leaving enough time to change venues (a short bus ride or short walk) in addition to having tea and a short chat. Or more tea and a longer chat if you didn't have to change. Most sessions that I attended were also ending very much on time, some even a tad shorter than the time allotted to them, so the coffee breaks were available in full length.

As to the papers themselves, I came to Leeds with high hopes of getting lots of solid good and maybe a few brilliant papers - partly because I had heard so much about Leeds as the really large conference in Europe, partly because I was really lucky with the last few conferences that I attended, and that had raised my expectations. NESAT had three full days of papers, and there was not a single one below at least really interesting to me, and a few absolutely brilliant papers. That does make a benchmark that is just hard to reach.

Going to a conference is always a sort of gamble, and even more so if you don't know the names or it's out of your field (which often coincides, and was the case for me in Leeds). You might end up in papers that are not what you expected.
Now, that in itself is not bad. I have had unexpected-but-really-brilliant papers in the past, and I have heard things about stuff way out of my area of interest that I wouldn't have wanted to miss for anything. Going out of your own field, or out of your normal area of interest, is also very good to broaden the horizon and find out what others are up to. In Leeds, however, I ended up in quite a lot of sessions that were partly or completely not so thrilling to me.

This does not mean that the papers were not pleasing to attending colleagues - in fact, I have heard people praise some that I was not so very enthusiastic about. One of the possible reasons for this different evaluation is that I have a very crafts-oriented, hands-on look at things. When I see an object, I automatically try to assess the worth of materials, the time and the amount of craft skill necessary to create it. I love to see details, I like to hear about chemical analysis of materials, I dig the natural sciences approaches to stuff, and I like to learn how those things function. The strong craft focus also has formed my way of viewing historical processes and the world of the past. This does not necessarily mean that I am right in my views and assessment - it does, however, mean that there are things stated in other person's papers that are paperworthy to the colleagues attending the session with me, while I go "oh thank you Captain Obvious" in my mind. Maybe I should be happy about this because it means that non-archaeological medieval studies are looking at craft themes now as well, or looking at picture and text sources in a way similar to how I have been looking at them for a good while from my different background, but it just is not so thrilling for me personally to sit in a Thank-You-Captain-Obvious paper. (That will abbreviate to TYCO paper. That's kind of fun.)

One thing that added to my disappointment was also that quite a few of the textile-theme titled papers were of the sort that held nothing new, or nothing particularly interesting, for me. And that some of the papers with a textile keyword in the title had nothing whatsoever to do with textiles - which seemed kind of odd to me. And since I had decided to come to Leeds partly because of the relatively large amount of papers on textiles, this taken all together was a major letdown.

All that moaning and rambling, though, does not mean that there were no papers that thrilled me. I went to a few really exciting ones, like the one where a medieval city map of Antwerpen (with data of house names and who worked in which profession where in the city) was reconstructed... from medieval ledgers documenting property transfer. A whole city! That was absolutely stunning.
There was a nice keynote lecture, too - about scavenging for scrap metals in after-Roman Britain as a sign for the poverty that was not mentioned in the texts, and one about the different effects on their rights that the aftermath of the Black Death brought to peasants and craftspeople.
A really interesting paper about the social value of embroiderers - which must have been quite high, according to the grants of land given to them as payment; there was a wonderful (and very object-centred) panel titled "Pimp my Belt" that I thoroughly enjoyed; I heard stuff about food, craftspeople, riding equipment, material and immaterial treasure in the early middle ages, and women's rights in Carolingian society. And I got into contact with the people who had given those papers, chats were had, cards and adresses were exchanged, and I hope that good communication and future networking will come from this.

Taken all together, I can look back and say that Leeds academically was not quite what I had hoped. But it offered enough nice and interesting papers and persons to make me happy enough - I don't regret going there at all - even if it was not the wonderful three-day-long mindboggle that I had hoped to get. And my own very high expectations are probably partly at fault for this feeling, plus the fact that historians and philologists just tend to think a bit differently and approach things differently than archaeologists do, and some of the chains of reasoning and ways to look at things or interpret them just don't click with me. That said, I think it is good to see and experience these differences once in a while, too - and that was also something I definitely got to do at Leeds.

First of all, I'm back from Leeds, and I got or did everything that makes a conference: a conference pack (though it didn't include a pen, nor a writing pad), meeting new people, a few mindboggling papers, ideas for future projects, too much caffeinated hot drinks, book buying, and one night where I stayed up way, way past bedtime to chat with colleagues. That said, I'll give a more extensive review of the academic part in another post.

And I also learned things about Britain. For example that they have developed a really nasty habit of adding sweeteners to sugary soft drinks. And why on earth does anybody want to add sweeteners to a sugary drink? I just don't get it (and it tastes nasty). I like to have one of these sugary soft drinks once in a while, even if they are bad for you. But let's take one. There are two reasons why people drink it: To get the sugar or to get the taste. Or both. (The liquid is an added benefit, yes.) So I understand having a drink with sweeteners for those who only want the taste, even though that changes with the substitution. (In that case, I personally would choose a different drink then, but that's me.) But sugar and sweetener? Please. That's just stupid. Sweeteners are bad for the system, and I believe they are even worse than the sugars, who are undisputedly not the healthiest thing to consume (as one of the Leeds papers also showed with a nice graph correllating caries cavity frequency and sugar consumption over the last three or so centuries). They'll tell your body "calories come here! calories ahoy!", which then proceeds to get some insulin ready for the sugary bounty - which never comes, making your blood sugar levels plummet to new depths and the body react with the feeling of hunger. Which will lead to exactly the opposite effect of what the "diet" drinks promise you.

It took me several drinks to find out that they really do it to every sugary soft drink, after which point I stuck to either water or pure juice.

I also learned, unfortunately, that it is not possible to buy teabags at Manchester Airport. There's no real supermarket there (nor at the airport station). So I had to go home without a stash of teabags to replenish our quickly dwindling supply of Yorkshire tea (which really, as it promises, works splendidly in hard water), and we'll have to buy PG tips or something in a turkish grocery store when we run out. I also did not get lemon curd, because I was not willing to pay almost 6 quid for one glass - thanks, but for that price, I'll cook it myself. (Hint: it's not really hard to do.)

And I learned even more. That I'm not your classic conference-going medievalist, because then I should have checked my email about daily on the conference. (I firmly believe that the Out-of-Office autoreply was invented so that I can have times without having to check my email. And that includes conferences as well as vacation times.) That I'm not able of doing basic grocery shopping after doing bookshopping in a proper, large Waterstone's. That amazon.com has bought thebookdepository.co.uk (those *insert nasty new favourite swearword, also learned in Leeds, here*!) and I thus have to find yet another supplier of books. That the English rail system and especially their way of showing platforms and destinations on the tables in the station is really, really special and not at all what you are used to as a German. And that I really like duck with cherry sauce (part of the medieval theme dinner).

... I am still at Leeds conference. Today's the last day, and I'll be travelling home tomorrow, and since I ran out of links and ideas when I pre-blogged this on Sunday morning, you'll go without a proper blog post today and without a blog post at all tomorrow.



I'll be back on Monday, and after almost a full week at the IMC, I am pretty sure there will be some stories to tell.