How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall? Part 1

...Practice, Practice, Practice - or so goes the joke.

I will be giving a paper at my first conference (or should that be 'my first paper at a conference' - or even 'my first paper anywhere!') in a couple of weeks and in that time honoured tradition I don't feel remotely ready yet I feel strangely unnervous about it. 

It is a conference called Devils and Dolls: Depictions of the Dichotomous Child and is being held at the University of Bristol (not Carnegie Hall, unfortunately), so it should feel all very proper and everything. I am giving a paper called (excitingly), 'Sentiment and Science: The 'Before and After' Child in the Barnardo's Children Photographs'. I added the 'Sentiment and Science' part recently because all the other speakers had really exciting titles and mine felt really dull.  

                         

One thing I really hate in writing something is when you have all this STUFF and you know it all matters and its all appropriate but yo can't possibly SQUEEZE it into a 20 minute lecture and you don't even know where to begin and despite all the things that the internet can do it still can't invent a good program where you can see all your notes and images and stuff in an easy way like in the CSI and Law and Order where they start piecing together all the clues on a big clipboard and that coloured string gets EVERYWHERE and don't even get me started on Scrivener - I know it has a pinboard function but its crap, quite frankly, so I might as well actually resort to getting an actual, real clipboard from Wilkinson's and actually, really printing my images and quotes and bits off and sticking them all up on the actual, real clipboard in actual, real time and space and EVERYTHING.

So, in an effort to try to make sense of all the information and pictures I have I thought the best way to do it would be  to actually write my slides as blog posts and post them online - at least to give me a sense of what I am trying to do/say.
This strikes me as rather a good idea but in the meantime, I actually started working on individual slides and I think they are coming together a bit better. Sorting out how the images are gonna play helped me to think about what i'm going to say.