I am about to leave soon to do my annual pilgrimage to the Digital Humanities conference, this time held in Hamburg, Germany. I will also attend the UK’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute at Oxford. I am looking forward to it, although I still need help with the key things I want to say in my paper in Hamburg, which is in the category ‘Digital Humanities: Nature and Significance’, so it is pretty broad-ranging. I am discussing the tensions between ‘digital humanities’ and ‘eResearch, a subject I should be able to speak on with some authority, considering I have worked in eResearch agencies and centres for the past five years or so as an advocate of digital humanities approaches to computing. It is a matter of getting the balances right, defining the tensions between the two communities without drawing battle lines. And is it just a paper at a conference? So, I won’t necessarily solve the problem, but I need to make a clear case about the issue and how I address it.
I am going directly from Heathrow in London on the Thursday of the DH Summer Institute and then meeting friends for drinks that night. There are a couple of papers that I want to see on Friday, especially the session on how to put on a Summer school. Not that we have the capacity to do so at the moment, but it has been something that has been discussed as a part of the work of the aaDH. After Oxford, I will go back to London on Saturday. Then I am staying in Hoxton Square for a couple of nights. Then the train to Amsterdam, then a visit to Europeana, a project in the Hague where I will stay the night, then the train to Berlin where I will stay the weekend, then the train to Hamburg.  I am renting a room in a shared apartment as this is primarily a self-funded trip, so I am a little more daring than usual—. After the conference, the Easyjet returned to London for the weekend and returned home. I can’t wait. I am looking forward to this trip to the EU more than most.
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