Early in 2012, Carnivalesque recruited a new Co-ordinator to help with the Ancient/Medieval editions. Hannah has done a wonderful job and it’s been really great to have her on board.

However, despite her efforts, it’s continued to be extremely difficult to recruit hosts (and get nominations) for the Ancient/Medieval editions of the carnival. With this in mind, we are making some important changes for 2013.

We will no longer hold separate ancient/medieval and early modern editions: each edition will cover the full range from ancient history to the late 18th century.

We’ll aim to have at least two hosts per year whose main interests are ancient/medieval, but this won’t be to a fixed schedule.

For 2013, we plan to have 8 editions at roughly 6-7 week intervals. Provisional dates (all Saturdays; but please note this is all quite flexible):

• 19 January
• 9 March
• 27 April
• 8 June 
• 27 July 
• 7 September
• 26 October
• 7 December

If you’d like to host an edition, get in touch! Contact info is available at the website, leave a comment below, or just send a tweet @CesqueHC

Interdisciplinary conference, University of York, 21-22 June 2013

The burgeoning field of sensory history offers a fertile ground for reconsideration of religious studies across disciplinary boundaries. We welcome papers from anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, historians, literary scholars, musicologists, philosophers, theologians, and any other interested parties. …

Proposals (max. 300 words) for papers of 20 minutes are welcomed both from established scholars, and from postgraduate students. Applications from panels of three speakers are encouraged, as well as individual proposals.

My early modern blogs project, Early Modern Commons, is now more than a year old. Today I’ve posted a major overhaul of the backend (let’s call it v2.0), moving away from WordPress into a purpose-built database.

Hopefully it’ll be lighter and faster loading. A few URLs will be broken, unfortunately, as I’ve had to change some blog IDs, but mostly everything should work.

I’ve also added about 25 blogs (and have a few more to come), taking the count over 200 – probably about 220 by the time I’ve completed the additions.

The most important change is that I’ve added aggregation for blog posts as well as blogs. EMC began with an idea for an enhanced blogroll (growing out of my long-standing dissatisfaction with the standard list-of-names blogroll), and at its core will continue to provide that service. But I’ve been keen to do more with it, and that’s now possible with the backend changes.

The new Recent Posts feature is quite basic at the moment but it will be possible to expand it and to make it more sophisticated, especially with a little help from the bloggers themselves. For example, it could be possible to have a ‘Research Blogging’ feed if bloggers are willing to tag their posts with a distinctive category/keyword to denote research-heavy posts (discussion welcome on what the keyword should be) – a simplified version of Research Blogging. I’ll also be experimenting with the use of keyword filters to create more feeds like the one for CFPs and conferences (and to improve that one; it’s not quite right at the moment).

Feedback welcome, and if you have any ideas for future developments let me know.

University of Sheffield, 6 – 8 September 2012

Registration is open now!

The University of Sheffield’s Humanities Research Institute with the support of the Network of Expert Centres and Centernet is delighted to invite you to a new conference intended to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities.

At Sheffield we understand the digital humanities to mean the use of technology within arts, heritage and humanities research as both a method of inquiry and a means of dissemination. We’re therefore excited to have a varied programme with speakers from disciplines across the arts, humanities and heritage domains.
Programme

Our keynote speakers are:
Professor Andrew Prescott (Head of Department, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London)
Professor Lorna Hughes (University of Wales Chair in Digital Collections at the National Library of Wales)
Professor Philip Ethington (Professor of History and Political Science, University of Southern California and Co-Director of the USC Center for Transformative Scholarship)

Full programme (pdf)

Carnivalesque is looking for someone to help with running ancient/medieval editions every other month. This would mainly involve finding hosts and assisting with publicity. Could you help?

The Carnival’s resident medievalist has been unable to participate much lately because of work pressures, and my own expertise is largely early modern (I’m particularly ignorant when it comes to the pre-medieval blogosphere), so I think that side of the Carnival has been a bit neglected.

The role won’t take up much time, but the main commitments will be:
1. publicity for upcoming editions. They are usually scheduled for weekends in the second half of the month, and the main publicity work starts up to a couple of weeks beforehand, in addition to promoting the edition after it’s posted. You may also need to help with finding material for editions from time to time, if there’s a shortage of nominations.
2. recruiting hosts for future editions. We usually try to keep at least a couple of editions ahead by placing regular calls for hosts, but sometimes you may need to actively recruit/cajole/armtwist if there aren’t any volunteers.

Novice hosts in particular are likely to look to you for support and guidance.

Therefore, you need to have good knowledge of quality blogging about the ancient and medieval world and plenty contacts with bloggers. You don’t necessarily have to be an academic or student but you probably will be, or have been, a blogger yourself. You should be familiar with blog carnivals, and ideally you’ll have experience of hosting.

If interested, please get in touch – leave a comment below, tweet me @sharon_howard or use the contact form.

I set up some Twitter archives for the American Historical Association 2012 meeting. Now the meeting is finished and the Twitter streams are dying down, I thought I’d shove the data into a spreadsheet and get a snapshot for some stats (all counts at time of snapshot, 12 January).

#AHA2012 or #AHA12
Number of tweets: 4590
Number of tweeters: 679 (6.8 tweets per tweeter)
382 (56.3%) posted 1 tweet only
86 (12.7%) posted 10 tweets or more
8 (1.2%) posted 100 or more
Most prolific individual: 306 tweets

#THATcamp
Number of tweets: 581
Number of tweeters: 151
78 (51.7%) posted 1 tweet
15 (9.9%) posted 10 tweets or more
Most prolific individual: 34 tweets

I can make the data available for analysis if anyone wants it! (In fact, will probably put a version up on Google Docs in the next day or so.)

PS: Some similar stats from the MLA conference held at the same time, as of 10 January:

12K tweets, 1341 twitterers. 80% of tweets came from 30% of twitterers. 53% of twitterers tweeted only once.

It’s striking how similar the one-time only stats are, though the number of tweets per tweeter is higher (about 9). The numbers are larger overall because the MLA meeting is larger and Twitter is more established there (and they had free wifi in every room, I think, unlike the AHA). (Public Google Doc of all #MLA12 tweets here)