The Proceedings have arrived and look fabulous (imho, but i also designed the frontpage ;), the nametags are all made and ready to wear, all the conference packages have been put together and are ready to be handed out, the atrium is dressed up for the event, the workshop people know where to dine, the camera for a piece at the ELINOR evening is now working, equipment have been ordered for the concert and contact person for that in place, the second press releas have been sent out, the wiki bug has been fixed, the student help who couldnt make it to the intro has been shown how to handle the tech in the atrium, the dj knows what music to play and in general thanks to the two fabulous local organisers working with me on this, there really isn't much left to worry about. It almost feels like nemesis that I'm considering taking a short nap on the gameroom couch before meeting up with a presenter for a tech check across continents.

Now it feels almost like the night before christmas eve, Im as exited as a kid waiting to see which gifts are under the tree and if other people like the gifts I made for them. And tomorrow I even get to open the entire event which Im looking so much forward to, a bit like lighting the candles on the christmas tree and calling in the rest of the family to watch it I guess, to stay with the metaphor (of a Danish christmas).

Oh, and in fact, I had time to dash off this morning and do an "displaced live" interview together with a political blogger (in Århus) and another researcher, Lene Hansen (in Copenhagen with me) for P1 (national radio), the program Apropos. It's about the use and importance of political weblogs. Will be broadcast tomorrow at 15.30 and 20.30 on P1 and put on the web afterwards.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 17:46 (0) comments

My first week back in Denmark soon over. It is clearly the season of what seems like constant darkness and cosy hours of candle light. I'm almost happy I have to spend most of the time in front of the computer anyway!

Mørk er november og løvfaldet slut,
vandet begynder at fryse,
lyset fra solen og blomsterne brudt –
da må vort hjerte selv lyse.
(Thorkild Bjørnvig)

Dark is November, leaf fall gone,
water soon is frozen,
hearts must supply the light of sun
the light of flowers broken
(rough translation trying to catch the rhytm of this beautiful song by Thorkild Bjørnvig)

Fyi, the rest of the song continues on a more positive note - and it's not that Im depressed or anything, it just takes a little bit of getting used living in darkness again ;).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 18:57 (0) comments

and running, while trying to get over the shock of being confronted with the darkness and cold of the Danish November.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 00:29 (1) comments

After leading a pretty quiet life for the duration of my stay here, it is typicial that suddenly my last week here at Georgia Tech has turned out to be pretty action packed. I've been to the Graveyard Game, organised by Jane McGonigal and co, shopping with Mirjam, dining with Patrik and Jay, meeting with Beki, and Dave, then Anja, a new Danish face, suddenly emerged, there was the parting lunch with the other Scandinavian, the admin meeting with Ken, and a few of the game boys came over tonight.

When Im not talking to people, there is DAC which is taking up a lot of time at the moment, and I dont expect the workload to be any less before after the conference. But generally I really like the chairing and think we are in for a really good conference!

Had hoped to get some serious writing done, perhaps tomorrow, my last and hopefully quiet day at Tech, there will be time. Sunday Im flying home. Admittedly, primarily because of things happening that had nothing to do with GTech, some weeks were long in september - but now I really feel that time has passed way to quickly and I wish that I could have stayed longer. Sabbaticals rule!

Oh, btw, the last cultural American experience this time around will be the attendance of this show.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 03:54 (0) comments

The nominees. Winners announced November 24th.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 21:09 (0) comments

There is a story on the international CNN website right now:Police capture teen murder suspect. The apparent boyfriend of a 14-year old teenager has shot her parents after a discussion about her curfew, following they fled and have now been found by the police. Though a very tragic and sad story in itself (my thoughts go to the poor families involved), what caught my ey is that in the article about the incident, CNN/AP tries to the describe the youngsters by referring to..their websites:

Both Ludwig and Kara Borden maintain Web sites. Hers refers to interests in soccer, art and her Christian faith; his says he enjoys "having soft air gun wars" and claims expertise in "getting in trouble." (CNN, Nov. 14)

It is, of course, interesting that a website in a story like this, is - as the most natural thing - mentioned as a source of information about the young people in question; this is a good indication of how people's website have become an integral part of what is identified as their "personality". In this case, I'm also wondering: Do the websites provide us with info about them much quicker and easierly than talking to their friends, and is that why the journalists look at them? Are the journalist of this piece giving us this piece of information because the fact that they both had a website supports the "secret life" perspective on the story? Is it interesting to mention the websites because the information on them support the roles the youngsters have been casted to play by the media? Can we imagine a near future (if not the now) where the police would be keeping tabs on the websites to see if they would be updated with info about the teenagers whereabouts?
# posted by Lisbeth at: 19:08 (3) comments

...is an attorney working in Atlanta and currently featuring in a commercial on the MARTA subway. If I were to stay around, I'd definitely hire him, just for the name...
Oh, and he has a homepage, which tells me that he, amongst other things, specialises in "Catastrophic Personal Injury". Hmmh.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 04:41 (0) comments

Today, Im giving a talk on my death stories research project at GTechs's LCC/GVU depts. joint Brown Bag Lecture series.
Speaking at 12am, US time. It will be webcast.

Update: slides are here. There were quick a lot of students, and I got a couple of interesting links and examples from some of them (Final Fantasy 11 apparently has permadeath!).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:32 (0) comments

The exams office needs to know NOW if I can do exams for my upcoming course in late June. I have a nagging feeling that of course some brilliant conference is going to take place at the same time (conferences seem to cluster in march, june and october/november, in my experience). So here goes the preliminary list I came up with, trawling the net for 2006 conferences that might be of interest to me:

Information, Communication and New Media Studies: Networking a Multidisciplinary Field, February 2nd, 2006, Oxford.

Seminar on Playing Roles (Role Playing), Game Lab Tampere, March 23-24. Deadline for submissions: January 9th.

GDC, March 20-24, San Jose (maybe I should finally try going there?)

CODE - HumanSystems - Digital Bodies, Miami University, April 6-8th 2006. Organised by the International Digital Media & Arts Association and the Miami University Center for Interactive Media

2006 Games & Mobile Forum, April 26th, New York

The Impact of the Internet on the Mass Media in Europe. Delphi, Greece, April 26-28th

ICA 56th Annual Conference: Networking Communication Research (International Communication Association), Dresden Germany, June 19-23rd. Speakers include Manuel Castells and Jurgen Habermas. Plus there is a pre-conference workshop on June 18th: After the Mobile Phone?
Social Changes and the Development of Mobile Communication. Deadline for submissions were Nov 1 :(



Good conference lists:
NordiCom's conference list
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:25 (0) comments

As trustry readers and colleagues know, as well as being interested in "trends" in new media communication, I'm quite interested in issues related to online death (cf my death-stories project). So of course it tricked me, when I read this article in Danish Politiken
The Irish takes the mobile to the grave - about how the Irish are beginning to be burried with their mobile, just in case...

I havent been able to find the original AP release Politiken refers to, but this story from the The Ballyhoo Examiner definitely confirms the story (and Im quoting it here, as Ballyhoo Examiner don't to permalinks and it's ...very Irish):

Mobile Phone Call From The Grave
Deaths - 04 November 2005 - A FUNERAL ceremony in Ballyhoo was interrupted yesterday by the persistent ringing of a mobile phone - in the coffin.

'A lot more people are taking their mobiles and pagers to the grave nowadays,' says Con Coffey of Coffey Funeral Directors. 'It's a dead ancient Irish practice to bury your loved one with some of their personal mementos such as wedding rings, a photograph or a bottle of Black Bush,' he explains. 'Young girls literally live on their mobiles so they feel it's an extension of them. Or they might be frightened to death that they might wake up in the coffin - so they bring along their mobile so they can ring or text a pal from the grave.' Con says the mobile phone call wasn't the most unusual thing to happen at a funeral in recent times. There was the incident with the goat, and two years ago he even had to postpone a funeral after the deceased 'grew a moustache'....

Of course, someone have alreade designed a dedicated mobile phone to go in the coffin: How to stay in touch - even when you're dead.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:24 (0) comments

The AOL world of bloggers have their own non-AOL supported blog awards going: the VIVI awards. The Adventures of a desperately fat housewife is deservedly nominated for several categories of awards.
Just look at this sentence of hers: "Her doctor had been able to do nothing for her discomfort but prescribe a codeine based analgesic which only exacerbated her habitual constipation".
- I truly love it when people are able to write properly crafted English while simultaneously being wickedly funny in that subtly understated way of the Brits.

And I am also a little bit envious, because I am myself constantly struggling with this wonderful language, which is unfortunately not my own. I am beginning to feel restricted by it, my vocabulary consists of too few words, I get stuck with the same old phrases, again and again I am not able to say exactly what I want to say before I have looked things up in a dictionary. Perhaps I should go back to reading Jane Austen again - I openly confess, I have yet to find a writer whose command of the nuances of English language is more convincing than hers ...(fyi, I studied a year in England in the later part of the 90's and it took me a long time to catch up with English as it is spoken today; the locals were laughing their heads off, because they thought I spoke like an Jane Austen novel. Particularly that day, I mentioned someone coming "beaming down the stairs". Apparently people don't do that anymore ;)).

And talking about English language: go read the Scotsman.com and try to count the number of times, the journalists there use the word "outlandish"...Intriguing.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 20:20 (0) comments

Registration for The Digital Arts & Culture conference 2005 (that I happen to be chairing) is closing today, Friday November 4th. It's going to be a great conference (just take a look at the program)- do sign up and join us!

And if you are having problems with the system, let us know, send me a mail or drop me a comment here. We know it sucks big time :(. Hopefully, it has not prevented you from registering!

[posting to a DK-based server in the middle of the night US time is apparently completely impossible (with Blogger), this post was supposed to go up 10 hours ago. Sigh]
# posted by Lisbeth at: 07:47 (0) comments

Today at GTech, artist Marcel O'Gorman is presenting a lecture/performance called "Dreadmill". According to the blurp, he "explores the relationship between death and technology as he powers his presentation with a 5.7 kilometer run". Who can resist going to that kind of presentation? I expect the guy to be in pretty good shape and to have no heart problems, otherwise it is going to be a very long - or potential very dangerous - "lecture"...;).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 18:03 (0) comments

If you want to work in a seductive varm climate, in a city with friendly people and in a department with many clever people and a lot of interesting research going on, you should consider these Faculty positions at Georgia Tech (where I'm currently based).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 00:20 (0) comments