Web, Art, Science Camp - Conference Grid

So I recently attended the Web, Art, Science Un-conference / Camp and I must say it was pretty good. While it was a small affair attracting about 35 participants, the bulk being Web Scientists from Southampton, it was refreshing to see different literary work and analysis in a scientific context. I’d say that for the next one a greater effort needs to be made to attract practising artists and writers as opposed to scientist and academics studying literature. My only real problem with an event of this type is the lack of archival records which enable attendees and non-attendees to revisit the event and point to it in their papers; even if this is argumentation and opinion.

Paul de Bra’s un-keynote was really interactive and enlightening – with a history of hypertext, and then focusing on the current developments in the adaptive domain looking at the GALE System.

After the planning session I attended what seemed to be the more concrete session presenting work on groupware and planning support – but maybe this was a mistake. The two systems where also presented in the Demo session after lunch and the Web Science session – with its focus on human factors – would have been more useful – but without a transcript it’s difficult to follow the discussion post-hoc.

Demo’s followed lunch and every system out-there seemed to be onto something in it’s implementation – I liked them all and I think we’ll be here good things about each of them in the future.

The final session was a discussion on literary themes firstly their identification, and secondly their automated detection. Interesting work but not immediately of use in my work.

So on the whole a quality and interesting event.