ETD 2007 - paper delivered

I'm at ETD 2007 right now. I gave my talk yesterday morning, Swedish time. I sort of followed the thread of my paper but I also gave a demo.

I started with a joke that I got from a very clever child because it was tenuously related to the conference.

We were chatting at home about who was smartest. The long suffering Sandra said something along the lines of she was smart because she recently got a degree. That made me smarter, cos I have two degrees and an Associate Diploma in Outdoor Education.

Our daughter, who's nearly 9, without missing a beat held her arms up in a big 'L' shape and claimed to have 90 degrees. That's 90º. I think that means she's very clever.

The feedback to my paper has been quite positive; looks like the ICE content management system is going to get a few new users. Bearing in mind the comments from Tom Worthington about how hard it can be to set up Subversion and ICE, if anyone who was there would like help to try it out drop me a line.

I got a mention in a talk by G. Sayeed Choudhury, in his talk on usebility; he's talking about how literacies are changing, and mentioned how the ICE demo showed how a thesis can be much more dynamic than just a PDF or printed book.

Peter Murray-Rust was impressed with the potential for ICE, and he's referenced it in his talk, blogged here.

Peter's presentation The Power of the Electronic Scientific Thesis and The dissertation in an age of data driven humanities by Greg Crane both looked at ways that electronic texts can come alive if systems can look into them and find semantics. Peter showed programs that recognize chemical markup and render it visually, for example. We know we can do this kind of thing with ICE, see the way we can generate slideshows from documents that contain slide microformats.

Peter and I have started talking about how this might work with ICE – I'll post more later when I've had a look at the issue.