Starting the year off right

2016 will be better than 2015. My year ended with a busted foot, bedbugs, losing a good chunk of my possessions, and the sudden and unexpected death of my beloved cat, Wilshire Boulevard. Here she is in a photo I call “Capitalism”. A black-and-white cat draped over the back of an ugly couch. The drapes are hung backwards.Maybe I should properly eulogize her on this blog.

2016 began with a squirrel falling through our skylight. Soon after, a new school year started in the concrete turkey, and it’s kicked off well for me. I’m working on a big web redesign project, exercising the best parts of my brain, in order to make the awesomeness of where I work more visible and discoverable. I’m also working up an article on the violence that Library of Congress cartographic classification & cataloguing rules obscure for a presentation at a Toronto staff library conference this summer.

On the school front, I’ve only got four!more!years! in the MI program as a part-time student, and am happy to be enrolled in Managing Audiovisual Material with Brock Silversides of UTL’s Media Commons, who is letting me write a dream assignment on Ken Burns’ Baseball. I’m taking a data analytics course too, in which I hope to create some geographically-enabled visualizations of American political sentiment with textual data mined from Republican campaign transcripts (sigh).

I am also continuing a research collaboration with Jane Schmidt into the recent rise of Little Free Libraries® in Toronto, a “community-building” project that has raised some eyebrows with us. Stay tuned for more, and keep your fingers crossed that I never see a bedbug ever again in my life.