If you've been more than marginally interested in the epidemic called "Black Death" that wrought havoc on the population in the Middle Ages, you may have caught that there was a (sometimes quite heated, I gather) dispute about whether it was the Plague as we know it today, or something entirely else, or a mutation of the Plague, or a combination, or whatever. And I confess I was leaning towards "something else", too, just like a lot of other scholars.

But now they did it. You know, those archaeologists and other scientists? These guys that poke around in old stuff, messing around with our nice familiar concepts of history, dragging home old bones and potsherds and lumps of clay and textile and rusty metals? They did it. They found the DNA of the Bringer of Black Death.

And it's Yersinia Pestis.

Their research is published in an open-access peer reviewed journal (oh, we so need more of those), and you can read the whole article for yourself. Good old Yersinia. Wreaking documented havoc on mankind since 541.

On a modern textile blog (catering to industrial production mostly) you can find some facts about linen (drawn from a modern linen producer). The fact that is missing there is that while linen has very high tensile strength - which means you can hang a lot of weight from a thread - it is actually not very resistant against friction, wearing through relatively fast. Still, it's an interesting list.

If you're waiting to see the TARDIS in a cathedral, at least in a photo, go visit highlyeccentric's blog. I am officially stunned.

HistoriAnn and Notorious PhD blog about conference etiquette and the job of a panel commentator, respectively. If you're going to conferences or being in the danger of moderating/commenting a panel, I do recommend these posts and their discussion.

If you are wishing to learn about medieval beans and how to prepare a bean dish, go read Andreas' recounting of a cooking test run (he's giving a seminar in fall).

But if that all is not tickling your fancy, you can always hop over to the Yellow Press of Medievalist Studies* and learn about medieval flamethrowers. Yes, flamethrowers!

* I realise that this may be a bit harsh - but I get their RSS feed, and that is just what I sort of think when all the flashy titles pop up. Yes, I know that much of it is the scholar's own fault. Yes, I'm doing that myself. I discovered medievalists.net a while ago and was totally excited for a time, but learned soon that their offerings (as always, duh Katrin) has to be taken with some salt. It's a service that will dig up articles and stuff about the Middle Ages, but they are not a peer review organ, and there will be outdated or disputable papers on there. That said, I still like to get the feed, if only to learn about medieval flamethrowers once in a while. And now this footnote is almost getting longer than the rest of the post.

When in doubt what to blog, blog things like links.

Is that a blogger's adage? If not, can we make it one? I will at least do what it says and blog some links for you.

First of all, for those of you who know about the Maaseik embroideries, here's a direct link to their pictures (among others) from the kikirpa database. In case you don't know about the Maaseik embroideries, they are a series of 8./9thc century gold and silk embroideries. In case you don't know about the picture database of kikirpa.be, go take a look - it's worth it.

And in less serious at lest as important news, highlyeccentric blogs about the fate of a penis tree mural.

Finally, totally unmedieval but fascinating: Art from somebody who merges photos with pencil drawings. Really worth a look too. Text is in German, but the pictures are not, of course.

There's a flood of pictures in our lives, and everybody who likes to wield a digital camera will know how long it takes to sort and tag all the photos. Plus there's a growing amount of digitised historical pictures - statues, paintings, manuscript pages - that are available on the internet or on CDs and DVDs. And these are best and easiest to use if they are properly tagged so you can look for, say, a distaff. Or a donkey. Or whatever.

And IT people are actually working on this - they are working on image recognition software that will be able to recognise, say, a crown. Or a distaff. Or a donkey. or whatever, and all that on historical source material that has been digitised.

There's a full article (in German) about that over on Spiegel, in case you are interested.

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.

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!

The week before last, I had a nice evening with a fellow textile person who is researching about Peruvian backstrap weaving (connected with a find of a woven band). During our evening together, we scourged a bit of the Internet for weaving patterns and instructions, and stumbled across this:

Introduction to Backstrap Weaving

It's a nice, concise and very well-made introduction, and in case you are interested at all - go check it out. A few lightbulbs went off over my head during the course of the evening and the reading of the article, and that's always something nice to share.