I'm back - nobody panic!

I haven't totally neglected this blog, I swear. I've just been so busy lately!

As well as all essays, projects and reports we have to do, our project at the Geffrye Museum has kind of taken over our lives, as we were kind of warned it would. It hardly seems believable that it's almost finished - my got the last of our portfolio contributions in yesterday, our interactive map is going live on the website this week and we're finished off our digital story about tea on Tuesday. The exhibition itself goes up in the museum on the 16th of May and is well worth a look.

I still have an ethnography to write, as well as an individual report on our project. And then there's a 4 week work placement (at the Science Museum!) and a dissertation to write.

So, much work left to finish. But what can I say? I missed blogging too much.

Anyway, here's a few of photos from the time I've been missing.

As I was saying, the Geffrye project does kind of take over. Been spending an awful lot of time there, but it's an awesome place to be.

And the project team have been great to work with.

I've found myself spending far too much time on tea-related activities in the last few weeks.

No, making 'tea' out of tea leaves wasn't strictly necessary for the project but it looked like fun and it's ended up going in our slideshow!

Between working, I've been trying to make the most of summer. Fun times with the gang and such:

Riding Michael when I can.

Mikey and I have been trying to practice our jumping.

We need a lot of practice.

Hopefully the summer will see a lot more time for that!

Promise not to abandon this again - it's my new month's resolution!

My Reading List

I'm currently on 'reading week'. A little break from lectures and seminars; not so much a break from work.

Our Geffrye Museum project is now in full swing, with the web team's projects approved and deadlines set. Being a real project in a real museum, it doesn't really set store by academic timetabling, and our work is running on as normal, although we are without the weekly team meeting this Friday. So a large part of 'reading week' for me will consist not of reading but of playing with photoshop as we continue to work on our designs for an interactive map, images for our 'digital story' and ideas for a possible set of advertisement cards to lay about in the museum's restaurant.

We're very excited about the resources we're creating. We finally have some nice graphics set for the map, which will let people discover the international origins of objects from the English home. I can't wait until we have a name set for the project, at which point we can set up our Twitter, Flickr and Blogger accounts and start getting people to pay attention to our fantabulous participatory events.

There is actually some reading involved. Our digital story, along with a good deal of the blog content we will be posting, is focused on 'the History of Tea in English Homes' which, while something I always wished my undergraduate degree had included a module on, is something I need to do a fair bit of research to be able to write.

Cue wonderful books such as this and the browsing of tea-related blogs and things we can link to. I love it when work is enjoyable.

Less cheery, but just as interesting, this week I am also researching the heritage of gangs and violent crime in the capital. Fetishisation and commodification thereof. We might participate via the Kray Twins Walk. I am morbidly fascinated by morbid fascination.

This is all in aid of research experience for an ethnography we are expected to write for our coursework. I have yet decide on exactly what my subject should be...it's supposed to be London-focused, on a group or particular aspect of culture or lifestyle. I want to do something equestrian-related but I'm not sure how far going to a different yard  to my own with people I don't know would satisfy the requirement we try to focus on something unfamiliar to us. But anyway this means there's also reading on writing the enthography itself, which I've never done before! Scary!

But then I'd never written a report before last November and I thankfully got a very acceptable mark for that.

Lastly, my next piece of coursework is a report on an antiquities dealership! More reading, more field trips!


But first, I think his evening I will take some time to work on personal projects. I'm making a recipe folder!