Gender & Computing

Not quite new, but landed in my mail box a few days back - When Species Meet, by Donna Haraway, published 2007.

Starting from the questions “Whom do we touch when we touch a dog?”, Haraway guides us through another long journey among our companion species. Still in the first chapter, but somehow her writing seemed more accessible to me, perhaps because of my shared passion for dogs.

The first dogs we meet are not of flesh and blood, but an overgrown root and Sydnes Harris’ vitruvian dog (borrowed from CartoonStock.com).

It is the 25th anniversary of Digital Culture this year. We have already had a couple of anniversary-guest lecturers, with among others, Michael Joyce, hypertext author and professor of English at Vassar College, talking about “Authorship as Re-placement”.

Last week and this week we have Roderick Coover visiting, and he has given a guest lecture about his new book, SWITCHING CODES: THINKING THROUGH NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN THE HUMANITIES AND ARTS, and presented a film about French wine makers. There’s still an opportunity to meet Coover, as he will present some of his work at Akademiet Cinemateket 19.00 today.

We had 59 primary applicants for our new Bachelor in Digital Culture, starting this fall, and more than 400 had the program on second or third place on their wish list! The highest number at our department, LLE, and we are a bit proud!

If you are thinking about organizing a conference this fall, please avoid mid October! Statistically we do a lot of things in certain patterns, and one of the patterns seems to be to choose mid October for conferences. Probably sounds sensible when planning it 8-10 months ahead, and I can easily imagine the discussion as if we’d had it ourselves: “We’ll have the conference next fall - mid term is probably best: after the term start and before the exams. Let’s make it mid October.”

And the result? A number of interesting conferences competing with each other.
As a participant of the Meta-analysis of gender and science research project I will be at the conference Beyond the leaky pipeline, 19-20 October 2010 in Brussels, Belgium.

Which means that I will miss out on HiNC3 where I’m also part of the program committee:
The Third IFIP WG 9.7 Working Conference on
History of Nordic Computing
HiNC3
18 - 20 October 2010
Stockholm, Sweden

And I will miss out on this:
NordiCHI 2010: Extending boundaries,
October 16th - 20th, 2010
Reykjavik, Iceland
(CFP Deadline April 12)

I could reach AoiR’s 11th conference, if I don’t go home in between:
Internet Research 11.0 – Sustainability, Participation
October 21-23, 2010 in Gothenburg, Sweden

A new Bachelor in Digital Culture, University of Bergen, is starting autumn 2010. Description of the program is only in Norwegian at the moment, but will soon be made available in English.

Read more about Digital Culture at University of Bergen:

Digital Culture

Digital Culture Courses

New Opportunities for Nordic Exchange

Digital Culture Reserach

.. a new tool..

And it works

We have two PhD fellowships advertised right now, with a deadline of January 31. We’re particularly interested in candidates interested in researching electronic literature (perhaps in connection with our freshly-funded project on creativity in electronic literature), digital art, social media, gender and technology, the history of technology, computer games, blogging and related topics. While the positions are open to applicants within our whole department (including literature, art history, linguistics, classics and theatre studies in addition to digital culture), we should have a good chance of getting a PhD candidate accepted within the field of digital culture.

Read more on Jill’s blog.

Today is the first day of my new job. Actually, the job itself isn’t new. I’ve been teaching here at Humanistic informatics (or rather, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, which we are called now) for 10 years and 9 months already. (That might be something to have in mind if you are considering a career within academia.) The “new” thing is that I now have a permanent position. My first ever, actually!

This autumn it is also 20 years since I first arrived at the University of Bergen, as a student. And that was not a student with a clear idea of where she was heading. But it turned out ok, I think.

Jill and Scott’s daughter, Jessica Ann Rettberg, was born last Saturday. Congratulations! Can’t wait to see her

My computer died yesterday.

And all my emails (of newer date) with it. (umm.. and backup didn’t work out too well..)

So now you know, if you wonder why I haven’t answered your email - send me a new one.

UPDATE:

Computer alive again and although the harddrive didn’t survive, emails were successfully retrieved.