Conversations with the dead: how computer technology has changed my life as a researcher
This March 1st it is exactly 10 years since my father died. He died as a result of the "last resort" operation which removed half of the cancer-infected liver which he had lived and fought with for nearly two years.

My father was a wonderful person. He liked to whistle, to play games, to socialise. He was never afraid of learning something new - he took up playing the piano (actually my piano) at the age of 65.

Born in a decade (the 1920's) in which cars were still a rarity and films had no sound, he left behind him when he died, a computer - the latest example of the many technological advancements he managed to embrace in his lifetime. By current standards it was a pretty decent computer, with a 286 processor and Windows 3.1 installed. It was his first real "personal" computer. He used it for word processing and playing games like Solitaire. But professional number crunching and data storage computers were used at "his" lab from the early 80's.

When I think back on all the things, I have wanted to share with him for last ten years, I think that most of all I have wanted to tell him how much computer technology has changed my life. Sharing the amazement, contemplating how computer technology itself has evolved with a speed and a direction that neither of us would have been able to foresee.

My father was a veterinarian. He never got a ph.d. - but nevertheless you could call what he did for "applied research". He spent most of his professional life figuring out how one could prevent cows from developing mastitis. This included lab research of bacteria as well as for instance studies of how farmers kept their stables clean. For most of my childhood, his work and research had him travel around the world, visiting and/or speaking at a number of international conferences and seminars. As a child I learnt much more about the world through him than what was taught me in geography class. I spent three years in Malawi with him and my mother while he got an animal hospital off the ground. Here I learnt that a wife can be bought for the right number of cows and that elephants, lions and zebras should be allowed to live their lives on the savannah, not in a zoo. Later, back in Denmark, he brought me home small souvenirs from all over the world: US (sticky stribed candy), Russia (a wollen shawl with roses), India (fragant leather sandals) and most of the countries in Europe (including a precious green glass cat from Czechoslovakia). With regular intervals friends and colleagues he had made and met during his journeys and his time in Africa would come to visit our family and the lab he ran, literally next door to our living room. I remember, learning to eat rice with finely laquered chopsticks given to me by an exotic chinese colleague.

My father kept in touch with all the people he met and knew through phonecalls and letters - which, on his part, in the last years were often typed on the computer and printed out. I know he would have liked to see them more and keep in touch more often. Christmas was the information peak of the year: he would get stacks of cards for christmas, updating him with news about families in US, UK and Norway, many of the accompagnying letters still carefully typed on a manual typing machine.

Today, I wish I could show him this weblog. I wish I could show him the weblogs of my friends and colleagues. I wish I could show him how these weblogs and all the emails I exchange with people keeps me almost constantly posted (literally speaking!) on what goes on in theirs and my life. I wish I could show him how you can find almost everything on the internet - such as references to his own publications (2) or a shared knowledge base for veterinarians like Konettet.dk. I wish I could demonstrate how a google search on my name will reveal most of what I have been up to for the last 5 years, tracking most of the conferences I've attended. I wish I could tell him how, when I go to conferences, I can easily find and hook up with my colleagues with the aid of mobile phones and sms'ing. Or how I can take several hundreds of photos of what I do at these conferences and of the countries, in which they take place, with a digital camera - photos which I can then instantly transfer to my computer and show other people as a "slide show". I wish I could show him how technology disminishes the distance between here and there: how a talk in Sweden can now effortlessly be broadcast instantly on the web, so family and friends can watch it on their computers back in Denmark.

I wish I could tell him how I now work with computers, not as a technology, but as a medium, and how, for professional as well as private reasons, I use the computer as a means of expression, to write and sometimes tell the stories I've always wanted to tell.

Perhaps he still listens somewhere.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 00:03