My day has been a quite typical one in the early Spring, without teaching, but I did quite some teaching in Paris in the last few weeks and I really enjoyed the interaction with historians of art and architecture.

Today was quite a patchwork situation, touching almost all topics in my working life: giving thoughts to publication projects (my book on the cultural history of annotation, a DH monograph with colleagues and a smaller book with my Paris conferences in French), being in touch with our funded research projects in the field of Digital Humanities (some are being launched at the Leipzig conference today and tomorrow, especially ECodicology and NeLI [The Correspondecy Network]), organizing a conference on Digital Metalexicography with colleagues in Paris, staying in touch with my PhDs (one of them, Verena Teschke, is present at the DayofDH with our project on historical grammaticography), having a telephone conference with many countries, preparing courses (my lecture on Language Change begins next week in Trier) and trying to catch up with or run away from administrative things, ici et là….

In the morning I wanted to start the day with arranging and tidying my (physical) writing desk, that will be for tomorrow, the first thing, promis … In the evening I am looking forward to a nice and cosy place on the sofa, with a wonderful a friend gave me last time we met in Graz…

 

 

My next task (after answering Mails, reading applications, thinking and brainstorming with colleagues about a book project on the Digital Humanities, yes another one, but a real nice one…) is getting ready for a video conference connecting people from the DH research area from seven different countries, inclusive doing interviews in the frame of a large linguistic infrastructure project. After having tried several different tools we hope to have found the right one… and I’m keeping fingers crossed that my internet keeps hold in the old house I’m staying at.
Then, when we’ll be done, I’ll start writing my report on my stay as a visiting professor at the EPHE/Sorbonne in Paris – look what a nice view I’ve been granted with from the window of my appartement at the wonderful Maison Suger near St. Michel (on the opposite of our building, you can see the birth house of Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), the French writer and art critic, – here he spent his whole childhood).

My day began with a small problem, a very human one probably: my password for the Day of DH2013 didn’t work or my identity, maybe I wasn’t the one I thought I was? Existential questions in the early of the morning, ohlala there we go Day of DH, even the new one they send me didn’t work for some reason. Third attempt, voilà.
So I start to write these few lines and want to insert a nice illustration of a 17th century grammar showing the verbal category future: A man with his hands reaching to clouds in heaven. Result, a failure with an announcement in read : “Sorry, this file type is not permitted for security reasons.”, comment, pourquoi? Maybe the picture is too daring or venturous?

I think I need a coffee … then I’ll get launched and tray again. I hope the site will still be there, when I get back …