Clearing more than gathering

This weekend I was incredibly productive, despite battling lasting migraine symptoms from Friday. I finished the last fieldwork funding application I’ll submit as a doctoral student, bringing the total amount to $30k. I finished up my round of reviews of the extended abstracts for the special issue of ACME I’m organizing with David Meek (on the politics of knowledge production in the geoweb). I made what are likely to be the last major edits to the Mapping Youth Journeyswebsite (despite there being much more work needed). And I got something off my back that’s been bothering me for a while - a rant against Elsevier’s troubling practices (in an email I sent to my department, an action that a few people took the right - oops, I mean the wrong - way). I also sent out an application that I wrote with Elyse Gordon for a summer institute in digital spatial humanities, representing the MYJ project and our work in the Public Scholarship Certificate program.

So, I cleared a few things off my plate. I wouldn’t be a good grad student if that didn’t mean taking new things on, though. I sent Francis Harvey my intent to run for student representative of the GIS specialty group of the AAG. I also talked with Lea Shanley at the Woodrow Wilson Center about a summer/fall internship around VGI and crisis mapping policy. That position would give me first-hand access to all the people I need to interview for my research.

I ended up clearing more off my plate than I took on. And somehow I also managed to meet with family for dinner and, later, friends for drinks (twice in the same weekend!