The last week or so have been a set of downright pleasant days. Shall we count the ways:
Baseball’s position players reported to spring training yesterday
I exchanged awesome emails with the wife of the late jazz great Charles Mingus
We caught my friend Walter‘s really excellent show at the Armory Cafe in Somerville
We hung out with friends at Toad a couple nights later
My wife gave me an early birthday present of a high-priced Invictus wristwatch bought for a preposterously low price
And I wasn’t immediately shot down when I floated the idea of going to Chicago on the Center for Future Civic Media’s dime to present projects to high schoolers who happen to be students of one of my best friends
It’s like I’m Gatsby and life is a squirrel, and we’re just waiting for the right moment to attack and/or spoon each other.
It’s a lot better than the week or two prior, which was capped off by a scream from the bathroom as my wife accidentally discharged a loaded heart-shaped Valentine’s liquid soap:
One of the great things about my work at MIT is the preposterous level of encouragement the people there give each other. Example: even though I’m not a researcher, I get encouraged to post occasionally to the Center for Future Civic Media’s blog because I have a media background and am (nearly) equal in nerdiness to my formal researcher colleagues.
Since I’m in charge of making sure people post to our blog—which can be tough around Christmas—I’ll keep interviews in the hopper for use when posting is slow. Not only is that typical prudent editorial management, but it’s a really great way to approach people outside MIT that I admire.
Here’s a preview. Going up on the site sometime this week is an email interview I did with Michelle Springer, Project Manager for Digital Initiatives at the Library of Congress. Michelle was in charge of managing the Library of Congress’s partnership with Flickr. I asked Michelle to pick some favorite photos from the LoC’s Flickr photostream and to describe how they speak to what Flickr can do for the relationship between the public and a government institution:
The photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2178249475/ is a terrific example of the personal history and memories that these photos can evoke. The original caption was “Street in industrial town in Massachusetts.” Flickr members quickly identified the location, and the Library changed the title to Sylvia Sweets Tea Room, corner of School and Main streets, Brockton, Mass., both in the Flickr version and in the Prints and Photographs Online catalog. The Library also added a note to its own online catalog record for this picture (http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsac.1a33856) so that people are pointed to the constantly growing rich discussions out in Flickr.
The rest of the interview is great, so be sure to bookmark civic.mit.edu.
While my family has been in the loop all along, most of you probably don’t know that I’ve accepted a new position, this one at MIT. I’ll be the new Communications Manager for the Comparative Media Studies program and the Center for Future Civic Media.
It’s a big step in the right direction—lots more web and design work with a larger group of people, including undergrad and graduate students—but it’s about as easy leaving Tufts as it was leaving Houghton Mifflin, i.e., not very. Both set me up for seizing really good opportunities, and that is, after all, why I’m leaving for MIT now.
My last day at Tufts is August 22nd, so I’m keeping myself under the gun to finish a revamped website for the Feinstein Center before then. I start right back up at MIT on Monday the 25th.
And while I’m really excited to focus on web-based work, I will miss getting to edit and design lovely reports like this:
