Interesting tidbits from specific sessions:

• Sunday’s plenary was excellent in both scope and quality (if a bit polemical at times). Both Genevieve Bell (ethnographer working for Intel Research) and Andrew Keen gave this (highly international) crowd a lot to think about how the Internet needs to consider becoming less Anglo-centric.
• The e-research crossing the pond session was a little less informative than I hoped, though the panelists did reach some common ground on 1) the differences that public funding agencies (JISC, Councils) make in the UK and 2) the incredible difficulties in dealing with different data collection and curation practices between scientific disciplines.
• Monday’s poster session included adjacent papers (serendipity lives!) on aspects of FRBR by Allen Renear, Allyson Carlyle, and a consultant to NASA who was attempting to apply the FRBR entities to astronomical observation data. The discussion among us and other passers-by was quite lively, and lasted over two hours…
• Connie Yowell (director of education grants for MacArthur), in the second plenary, gave a polished overview of several research projects into young people’s use of digital media. Perhaps her most interesting points were the nuanced views on the CONVERGENCE of old and new media, rather than the most popular approaches to only focus on what is new (“school is one node on young people’s learning network”), and on how digital media offer young people support for both good and bad behaviors (suicide, anorexia). In other words, she sees Millennial behaviors as both new and old, and value-neutral.
• Later in the day, I went to the single session concerning info technologies in the arts and humanities, a SIG which has been moribund for the past couple of years. It was extremely interesting to me to see the difficulties these researchers were facing, many of the challenges dealing with the very nature of the humanities: how do we craft quantitative and thus machine-readable measures for works usually read in qualitative terms?

Big public thanks are due to all the CO-ASIST members who helped welcome the society to Columbus!

Tour begins at 3:30pm on Tuesday, October 28, 2008 and lasts between an hour and an hour and a half depending on questions. Numbers are limited for the tour so please sign-up online or at the sign-in sheet on the message board at the conference. The Cartoon Research Library is a short drive or bus ride north on High street (#2 bus) to Ohio State University; the Library is in the same building as the Wexner Center for the Arts, on High Street between 15th and 17th avenue.

Tour OSU’s Digital Union, which is the place on campus to put your hands on emerging technologies. The Digital Union is an experimental space where faculty, staff, and students can learn about and test everything from video and audio equipment to surface computing and lecture recording systems. The tour will include the new Learning Collaboration Studio, a classroom designed with radical flexibility in mind. The Studio is the spot where faculty can test-drive accessible technologies, interactive whiteboards, videoconferencing and virtual environments and experiment with their use as teaching tools. The tour will end with a screening of digital media projects from the Digital Union.

Tour begins at 3:00pm on Tuesday, October 28, and lasts roughly an hour. Please sign-up online or at the sign-in sheet on the message board at the conference. The Digital Union is a short drive or bus ride north on High Street (#2 bus) to Ohio State University, then 2 blocks West on 18^th Ave. The Union is Room 370 in the Science and Engineering Library on the OSU campus.

Join us for a spooky hour long walking tour right at your front door – we’ll leave from the conference hotel. The stories take place in some of our city’s finest historic structures. From Abe Lincoln’s last dance to the mayor who still looks after the city – hear tales of early Columbus and its residents. Halloween customs and forgotten cemeteries of Old Columbus Town add to the atmosphere. Cost is $10 for conference attendees, proceeds to benefit the non-profit Columbus Landmarks Foundation (http://columbuslandmarks.org).

Tour will gather in the main lobby of the conference hotel, and will begin at 7:30pm on Sunday, October 26. Pre-registration either online or at the sign-in sheet on the conference message board is a must.