It’s all going a bit third-century crisis down at the pond – which is to say that we’re into day 4 of the great Emperor Dragonfly Emergence 2023, and by my count we’ve now had either 35 or 36. A single Anax imperator emerging from the depths of the pond and breaking out of its exuvia (nymph exoskeleton) is a magnificent experience – they do it at night, to avoid predators before they’ve really got the hang of flying, but I’ve seen them crawling up their chosen reeds in the evening, and then sometimes in the morning a straggler is still extending and drying off its wings before taking to the air with a sudden clatter (for insect-level values of ‘clatter’). With seven or eight of them fighting over the sturdiest reeds in the best positions, the occasion loses a certain amount of dignity, especially when latecomers start locking their legs into position not around a plant stem but around the exuvia of a predecessor, itself locked tightly onto a plant stem. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Musings’ Category
Stargazer
Posted in Musings, tagged dragonflies, pond life on May 24, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Out Of Time
Posted in Musings, tagged Georgics, In Our Time, Vergil on May 17, 2023| Leave a Comment »
I’m writing this on the train back from London on May 10th, after recording an episode of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg and wonderful colleagues Katharine Earnshaw and Diana Spencer, on the subject of Vergil’s Georgics – yes, there was a reason why I responded to thunderstorms and flooding in the South-West last week with quotes from the storm section of Book 1. I’m posting this on the morning of broadcast – the programme is no longer recorded live on Thursday mornings, which sadly takes away a little of the high-wire thrill of over-caffeinated improvisation, but they can now do wonderful things with editing – so as not to spoil the surprise, and to reduce the amount of time people have to get worked up about quite how far out of my lane I’m wandering this time. With a bit of luck they will now be too busy laughing at my increasingly mannered delivery… (more…)
New Kid In Town
Posted in Musings, tagged assessment, ChatGPT, teaching on May 16, 2023| Leave a Comment »
It’s actually remarkable that ChatGPT has been around for only six months; not so much because of how much it’s developed and transformed our lives in that time, but because of the volume of discussion about whether it’s about to transform our lives, restructure the entire economy, destroy traditional approaches to education etc. – it feels like I’ve been reading this stuff for ages. I’m aware that I’ve contributed to this, and am indeed egging myself on, so to speak, by attending exploratory workshops on the topic that encourage me to reflect further on its potential impact and how we should respond, and then write blog posts about it. Am I ahead of the game in trying to get to grips with this new technology and its implications – or am I getting caught up with the hype, in the way that people were once convinced that MOOCs would sweep away old-fashioned universities or got incredibly excited about the pedagogical potential of Second Life? (more…)
Everyone Is Everybody Else
Posted in Musings, tagged ancient history, ESSHC, globalisation, historical theory on April 27, 2023| Leave a Comment »
And so farewell!* To Göteborg (and its unbelievable range of amazing imperial stouts, above all), to the European Social Science History Conference for another two years, and, slightly abruptly, to my role as one of the co-chairs of the Antiquity network of said conference. I think I’ve been doing that role for about ten years – the fact that it involves only short bursts of activity every other year, rather than anything more sustained, means I keep forgetting. On the one hand, it isn’t a huge task and it does offer the chance to try to gather ancient economic and social historians together to exchange ideas and, occasionally, remind historians of other periods that we exist, plus an excuse for visiting some great European cities; on the other hand, I can imagine that from the outside it might look a bit like an attempt at hanging onto a position of power and influence, gate-keeping and extending patronage etc. Which it never has been, but that still meant it was starting to feel like time to pass things on to someone else. It’s just been a bit quick, from an informal chat with a potential successor one day to realising next evening that this was my last time co-organising our bit of the conference. The dogs bark; the cavalcade moves on. (more…)
Almost, But Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Tea
Posted in Musings, tagged assessment, ChatGPT, higher education on April 6, 2023| 4 Comments »
One of the (relatively few) things I hate about marking student work is the sinking feeling when a suspicion of plagiarism starts to form; the moment when something like an abrupt switch of style or changes in spelling or the wording of a phase makes you look over the pages you’ve already read and start spotting more such possible indications. Turnitin, as we all know, is moderately useless – it generates lots of false positives (well-formatted bibliography entries and properly referenced quotes) while missing stuff that can be found with a quick google – so this suspicion implies the need to invest a load of time in identifying and checking likely sources and marking up the exercise, while experiencing a general feeling of annoyance and disappointment.
Well, I’ve now found something worse: (more…)
The Bots Are Back In Town
Posted in Musings, tagged Thucydides, Twitter on March 24, 2023| Leave a Comment »
I’ve been doing a lot of muting on the Twitter this morning – over eighty separate accounts, all of which tweet out short extracts from that early P.G. Wodehouse story I’ve discussed before, as well as other stuff that I can’t be bothered to look up. For the most part, that’s all they do; whereas the accounts I muted back in the autumn generally sent out images or gifs as well as text, apparently advertising things like betting sites for the World Cup, the vast majority of these just individually meaningless fragments of text (the exceptions are a sub-group that include pictures of anime girls). (more…)
Rule The World
Posted in Musings, tagged higher education, work, work-life balance on March 14, 2023| 8 Comments »
According to my wife, my falling over and breaking my foot was my body, or perhaps the universe, telling me that I need to slow down and look after myself. I’m not sure how far this is a genuine philosophical position and how far she is grasping at any available argument to try to get me to slow down – she said similar things about the Long COVID that’s drained my energy and intellectual capacity over the last few years – but that could likewise be interpreted either way… (more…)
It Wasn’t Me
Posted in Musings, tagged plagiarism, Writing on March 10, 2023| 6 Comments »
I massively pissed off my wife a few nights ago, by going upstairs to the ‘study’ (which doubles as the music room, as well as general storage and nursery for chilli seedlings) to work on my jazz composition homework for twenty minutes or so, and re-emerging just under an hour later. I readily accept that this is not acceptable behaviour, and have agreed to try setting myself an alarm next time – because this was genuinely a matter of losing track of time due to total absorption in the task of trying to get a melodic phrase right. You can almost hear it in your mind, you know you’ll know it when you hear it, but there are so many different things to try adjusting in the hope of getting closer to what it’s supposed to be, not to mention the need to try to save the better versions in case you want to return to them, that suddenly an hour has gone by and you’re not necessarily any closer to success. (more…)
Oh, Well
Posted in Musings, tagged commemoration, G.B. Grundy, Sphacteria, Thucydides, topography on February 24, 2023| 2 Comments »
What makes for a decent academic legacy? How should one want to be remembered, and by whom? Such a potentially morbid and self-regarding train of thought is not in fact prompted by the fact that I’ve now added a broken foot to the Long COVID, insomnia and constant general tiredness that are making me feel old and useless. (more…)
(I Don’t Want A) Photograph
Posted in Musings, tagged plagiarism, teaching on February 17, 2023| 6 Comments »
Many years ago, with my ‘faculty teaching quality assurance’ hat on, I had to go and observe a lecture as several students in the class had complained that the lecturer’s presentations were heavily plagiarised. This seemed an entirely bizarre and improbable accusation, but they were insistent and credible – and it did indeed turn out to be the case; it wasn’t just that large chunks of text from scholarly publications were included on the PowerPoint slides without any attribution, but these passages, and associated material that wasn’t posted on the slides, were read out word for word without any indication that these weren’t the lecturer’s own words. I don’t know how the students had first twigged this, but once you have that sort of suspicion, it was incredibly easy just to google a few phrases and identify the source. (more…)
Sphinx 