4th - 10th February
When helping to organise an event, it's impressive how much time sending emails, updating websites and spreadsheets, having meetings and generally coordinating things can take up. So that's a lot of what I've done this week. Not PhD, but related enough to be excusable... sort of... (Smart Data Hack and Open Data Day: Joined Up Edinburgh)
I have finally booked plane tickets to Serbia for
Resonate new media festival, at which I'm hoping to
make useful contacts with independent digital media producers, learn some
stuff about big data visualisation at the workshops (my places at the ones
I've applied to haven't been confirmed yet though), and generally learn more
about the digital art scene (and figure out ways SW technologies can benefit
people who are part of it). And also to enjoy Belgrade, as I'll have a spare
couple of days either side of the festival. Because the flights were cheaper
then! Honest! I actually lost an entire afternoon hunting for cheapest
flights on websites that weren't obviously scams (Cheap-o-Airlines? Really??
Ultimately booking through JAT directly was the best option), then negotiating
cheapest trains to London in order to catch flights, then sending CouchSurfing
requests, because why spend money on a hostel when you can meet wonderful new
people and get tourist advice for free?
I also applied for a place at the Semantic Web Summer
School in Spain in July. It looks fantastic and
educational and stuff. And I applied for funding to help cover then 900EUR
entry cost (a whole week, accommodation and meals included), and
SICSA are providing £500, yay!
Two thirds of Ontologies with a
View met this week, and we discussed BBC use of Linked Data. I only
managed to skim the paper, but knew the general principles from articles I'd
read about their work before... I will read it properly at some point, though
I think a more technical discussion of what they did might be useful.