Last month I finished the last major chapter of my PhD. Last year work was slow for a number of personal reasons which made me very, very glad I switched to part-time. This situation also meant I presented at and attended few conferences, which looking back on was a real shame. I really enjoy academic or disciplinary meetings, as they can be so inspiring, even when the subject is only vaguely related to my current work. Hearing what other people are doing and in particular how they are doing it or expressing it really gets my brain going.
However since Spring this year progress on my PhD has been really steady and satisfying, and I’m now working on revisions. To celebrate I’m off to the Connected Pasts Conference 2014 in London. I’ve not been to this conference before but I was really intrigued by it’s interdisciplinary approach, which brings together scientists and archaeologists undertaking network and complexity studies on archaeological data. I’ve not a huge amount of experience with network studies, but as you can probably tell from these posts I do love exploring large bodies or archaeological data. Although there’s been no confirmation yet, there’s talk of a workshop introducing techniques for this sort of analysis prior to the conference, which I’m really interested in attending. I really want to get to grips with other ways of looking at patterns and fluctuations in data over space and time, so hopefully this conference will give me an introduction to what’s possible in network analysis.
Given the time I hope to either live tweet the conference as is my usual habit (see my twitter account @RuthFT for tweets on the day or search twitter for tweets bearing the conference hashtag #tcp2014), and write up a conference review either for this site for PIA (the Institute postgraduate journal) or another journal. It’ll be odd to be back at Imperial where I first went to University after so many years, but I’m looking forwards to it. I believe there are still tickets (and very cheap they are too) available on the Eventbrite website if you’re interested.
Ruth Fillery-Travis 