Catching up

I have sadly been distracted by my proper job at the RCA - too busy to blog. This is a quick summary of recent activities before I get pulled away again.

• Florian Kräutli, EPSRC research student, has been doing a great job. Activities include:
• We wrote a joint paper for a workshop at CHI 2013, the big annual Human Computer Interaction conference: Boyd Davis, S. and Kräutli, F. Time in Perspective: a visual approach to models of time. Workshop: Changing Perspectives of Time in HCI. CHI 2013, Palais de Congrès de Paris, Paris, 27th April - 2nd May 2013. We discussed a range of issues arising from making time visual and - as often before - contrasted the crudeness of many digital approaches with the subtle approach of much older examples on paper. Florian went to Paris to present the paper.
• Writing a joint full paper for an annual conference in London: Krautli, F and Boyd Davis, S. Known Unknowns: representing uncertainty in historical time. Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, British Computer Society, London, 29-31 July 2013. Here we concentrated on the representation of uncertainty.
• We have had a proposal accepted for a paper at ESSHC in Austria next spring: Boyd Davis, S and Kräutli, F. Scholarly chronographics: can a timeline be useful in historiography? European Social Science History Conference. Vienna. 23-26 April 2014.
• We have been working with the Britten-Pears Foundation on timelines of Benjamin Britten's works.
• My own work has included:
• A presentation to Scientiae 2013 in April:  The Two Eyes of History: the origins of chronographics. Scientiae 2013: Disciplines of Knowing in the Early-Modern World, University of Warwick, 18th-20th April 2013. This focused on the two intellectual inputs to early timelines: an ontology of time based on linearity and uniformity, and an epistemology - used in order to articulate and convey this concept - of treating time as space, and history as a kind of geography. 
• The Scientiae presentation led to a chapter proposal being accepted for a book to be published by Pickering and Chatto during 2014.  May not duration be represented as distinctly as space?  This will continue the theme of the early timeline pioneers' reliance on geographic metaphors, verbal or visual, as they sought ways to visualise time. 
• I gave an invited talk to the Information Design Association: Inventing the Timeline: a history of visual history. Information Design Association, Royal College of Art, 29 January 2013.
• The paper with Emma Bevan and Aleksei Kudikov for EVA 2012 was chosen for a book of the best of EVA papers from four years of the conference: Boyd Davis, S., Bevan, E. and Kudikov, A. Just In Time: defining historical chronographics. In: Jonathan Bowen, Suzanne Keene, Kia Ng (eds.) Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4471-5405-1. 243-257.
• I helped Liliya Korallo, now Dr. Korallo after completing her PhD successfully at Middlesex University, to write a chapter that was essentially a digest of the thesis: Korallo, L., Boyd Davis, S., Foreman, N. and Moar, M. Human-centric Chronographics: making historical time memorable. In: Weidong Huang (ed.) Human centric visualization: theories, methodologies and case studies. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4614-7484-5. 473-512.

That's it for now.