There are two hybrid lectures hosted by the CTR tomorrow:

Textile Research in the Pre-digital Age AND Vindolanda, Berenike, Qasr Ibrim: Securing Textile Records for the Future.
Lectures by Lise Bender Jørgensen, Emeritus Professor of Nordic Archaeology at the Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Dept. of Historical Studies and John-Peter and Felicity Wild.

Time: 12 June 2024, 14:00-14:45
Place: South Campus, room 11B-1-05 and on Zoom
Organizer: Centre for Textile Research (CTR)

Abstracts:
Textile Research in the Pre-digital Age
This talk will present Bender Jørgensen' work on archaeological textiles during the 1970s and 1980s, which included visiting museums in most of Northern Europe at the time of the Iron Curtain, followed by field work in Egypt during the 1990s.

Vindolanda, Berenike, Qasr Ibrim: Securing Textile Records for the Future
Detailed records of archaeological textiles, written, drawn and photographed in the field, are vulnerable, particularly when they are not digital and have no secure home. Total digitization is a partial solution. In this discussion we present and comment on the (incomplete) digital archives for three key Roman sites, copies of which are being deposited with CTR for long-term curation, and use.

You can join the Zoom Meeting with this link, or use the Meeting ID: 629 5654 6156 and Passcode: 468241.

And if you're interested in more events and lectures by the CTR, check out their website! 

I'm currently working on translating (and shortening...) our NESAT presentation for an upcoming conference in German, and this, together with some other things, has made me ponder how presentations at NESAT, but also other conferences, have changed during the past years. Or maybe I should really say decades, but that makes me feel old.

Back when I started out in Uni, standard was still having slides, and one of the guidelines that a tutoring archaeologist gave us was two slides (shown in parallel) per minute when you are planning your presentation. 

Then came the advent of PowerPoint, and the utter freedom to have as much text, and as many pictures, as you wanted. In as quick a sequence as you wished to, because you're doing the clicking yourself and don't have to say "weiter" (or knock) so your helper puts in the next slide.

At the last NESAT, we had one old-style paper presentation (with powerpoint, but the rest of how it was designed was really more like back when slides were the usual thing), and the rest of them were all "modern style". The big difference, for me, was that the old-style presentation was slow enough in both text and images that you had enough time to jot down the key points and you could even have made a quick sketch of the key parts of the images. With the modern style presentations, you stand no chance. Information density and slide speed is so high that you cannot write fast enough for all the key points, let alone try and sketch something. Very few exceptions apply, but for me, the way to get the most out of the papers in modern style is to write down the things I find important or interesting that the speaker says, but that are not written as bullet points on the corresponding slide - and I make a photo of the slide in addition to that. 

Thinking back, this has changed over the past years too, I remember being able to write down more of the content that was presented. I don't think I have gotten that much slower in writing; my impression really is that the papers have become more densely packed with information all the time. (I do confess guilty of trying to fit as much into my presentations as possible, so I have definitely played my part in this development. Case in point - our NESAT presentation had 47 slides in total, for a run time of max 20 minutes. That's about 25.5 seconds per slide if you distribute the time equally.)

Looking at it like this, it's a small wonder we were all so tired after the conference days! It also seems to be quite different in other disciplines... which I also find very interesting. Maybe I should venture out to more neighbouring discipline conferences in the near future, to compare. 

The Section Française de la Direction des Antiquités du Soudan (SFDAS) is starting a cycle of hybrid lectures and conferences. The first event is organised on Thursday 21st of March, at 14.00 (Cairo time) / 13.00 (CET), and it is about textiles:

The sensory archaeology of garments. New approaches to the body in ancient Sudan and Nubia
Speaker is Elsa Yvanez, who is an associate professor at the Centre for Textile Research at the Uni of Copenhagen. 
Date of the presentation is March 21, 14:00 (Cairo time) / 13:00 (CET).

You can either go there in person to the IFAO, Mounira Palace or join online on the IFAO YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@institutfrancaisdarcheolog5642/featured 

A good while ago, I had a lovely trip to Vienna, where I gave a presentation which was also streamed online and recorded. So once I returned home, I put "check out and link to recording" on my to-do-list. 

And then, as things go, it took a while for it to be processed and uploaded, and in the meantime my to-do-list did some growing... so the item wandered ever further down the list. There's a stack of items in that part, things I'd like to do or check out but that are neither urgent nor really important, and they sit there waiting, patiently, for their day to come.

Once in a while, I scroll down the list to that half-forgotten part, and sometimes I drag an item back up to the top... and then sometimes-sometimes, I actually deal with it. 

In this case, here you are, the presentation I gave in Vienna:

I hope you enjoy it! 

Things going on here today? The usual day-to-day boring stuff. Trying to figure out some dates for conferences, travel, holidays, and online courses for the next months. Packing up stuff ordered in the shop to get it sent out. Writing for the presentation in Syke about the Bronze Age garments reconstruction.

It's a lot of fun to re-visit all the stages of production, and the images taken. I'm also slowly getting to the point where I have something like a plan on how to present the various individual pieces, and where and how to give the basic information for those in the audience who are not textile specialists. That is one of the challenges when doing a presentation for a completely unknown audience - you want to give enough basic explanations on what you are talking about so that everybody can follow, but it can't be too long or too elaborate, and you don't want to bore the part of the audience who already knows about it. For instance, I can't assume that everybody will know how weaving works in general, or on a warp-weighted loom specifically - so I have to explain this, because some understanding of the loom and the process are necessary to understand one of the characteristics of the large textile pieces: the weft crossings where several weavers worked together. Fortunately I also made the belt, and I have a video and pictures of that, so I can explain the basics here and then go on to the larger fabric, and the loom. 

Getting these presentations done takes quite a bit of time, especially as the ideas need to get sorted out, the sequence has to be found, and everything needs a day or two inbetween to settle in my head and organise itself. Good thing there's still a few days left before I have to finish!

I'm also trying to figure out if now is a good time to treat the peach tree against its curly leaf syndrome, or if it would be better to wait another one or two days. I find this always hard to tell. Last year I didn't catch the correct point in time, and there were lots of very, very curly leaves. There were still some peaches, but I can't say if the number of them had something to do with the tree not doing well, or the weather, or something else.

All this, of course, fueled by tea. Because everything is better with tea. Except when it's better with coffee... which is also being consumed. Why stick to one source of motivational caffeinated hot drink, after all, if you can have two?

You remember the Bronze Age garment reconstructions that I made, based on the finds from Egtved and Trindhøj? Well, I'm utterly delighted that they are very well received by the public at the museum in Syke - so well that there's a demand to hear more about it, and thus I will be travelling up North to give a little presentation on how they were made.

That is taking place on February 23, starting at 18:30, in the Forum Gesseler Goldhort in Syke... 

If you're interested and in the area, you can reserve your place here!

Here I am back again, for a few days, before the Week of Crazy will throw its shadow over my life. The Week of Crazy, also known as the European Textile Forum... 

For now, though, let me tell you that I had a wonderful time in Lübeck. It's really lovely to travel again, and to have actual physical presences when giving a presentation instead of just a camera. Though there was a camera, too, an in case you've missed it but would like to see what I did there, here's the presentation on Youtube:

The sound quality and the video quality are, unfortunately, not the very best - but at least it's there, and available, and I hope you will be able to hear all my (more or less bad) jokes.

I can also fully recommend the exhibition, which has some really spectacular items, among them a belt made from sea silk...