Wild for Wikis!

Well, all of a sudden my spring schedule's turning wiki-tastic. My "The How of Wikis" presentation was just accepted for the Five Weeks to a Social Library course in February. Then an off-hand mention of this sparked a conversation with an art history prof (whom I TA-ed for six years ago), who is now interested in using wikis for a grant project and asked if I'd be interested in acting as their wiki consultant. If the project is funded, I'll be working on that next June.

We've got plane tickets for DC; now it's time to make some hotel reservations (despite my own reservations about the meaning of the phrase "budget hotel" in the DC area).

While visiting my parents in San Antonio this weekend, I went through the house, trying to find as many items for the digital family archive as I could. I came up with quite a list, which my Dad has apparently already been tackling; he called Sunday night to ask what detail shots I wanted of Grandma-the-Great's (GTG) quilts. Those are actually some of the objects I'm most eager to see in the archive; I plan to use the shot of the entire quilt as the "top" picture (they'll be hierarchically-arranged compound objects). Then I had Dad take detail images of individual quilt blocks--specifically, ones that he could identify the fabric's origin--for instance, scraps from his and his siblings' pajamas, and from his mother's aprons. Growing up, I was fascinated that the quilts were tangible bits of family history, not only because they were made by GTG, but because they featured scraps of their daily lives. I want a record of that for future generations, both in image and in text.