May 05, 2005
I finally came to grips with the realization that I won't make it to YAPC::NA this year, which is a damn shame because it's incredibly cheap (US$85 for 3 days! decent rooms at CDN $79/night!) and would be a great chance to go to Toronto, and I do so terribly miss living and breathing Perl. That's bad enough.
Then, what arrives in the mail today? A brochure for a week-long workshop on studying medieval manuscripts up at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library .
The Minnesota Manuscript Research Laboratory is a project developed by the Center for Medieval Studies (CMS) in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota ― Twin Cities, in collaboration with the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John's University, Collegeville.
The Laboratory's objective is to make available to interested and qualified graduate and undergraduate students and others who are interested an orientation to the study of medieval manuscripts and their contents.
To this end, the Laboratory is developing a coordinated sequence of learning materials, which it proposes to make available on-line: for example, through websites maintained by CMS and HMML.
During the week beginning Sunday, June 5 and ending on Friday, June 10, the Laboratory will hold a workshop to help its designers test the pedagogical effectiveness of various new materials and to give participants a practical, hands-on introduction to the study of manuscripts.
This is the sort of thing that leaves me hyperventilating with excitement. Seriously. And I can't go. If I had more than a month's notice, if I'd budgeted for it this summer, if I weren't years out of touch with this sort of study, if I didn't think that a week away from the family were a bad idea so shortly on the heels of 4 days away, if I weren't so good at making up excuses, then maybe I'd go. But alas, it's not in the cards.
I really have to plan to do something like this next year. The Center for Medieval Studies is always putting on cool events like this. And YAPC. Gotta remember YAPC.
