Our Epigrammetry-Anniversary – part I

Can you believe it? We are celebrating out 1^st anniversary! We are not that sure when we made out first online apperance, because our blog here, our Twitter account and our Instagram account show different dates, but they sampel around the 15^th, so we decided to give you a one-year-overview of our life as epigrammetrists.

I will start with a little overview on my last year – which was crazy and really awful and really good and really exhausting. Life turned upside down on a lot of occasions. But I did it.

I am at the very last stage of my PhD and I am getting really excited about it. I have a new job and I am in the middle of a pandemic, trying to prepare a university course on iconography. I must admit here, I somehow thought about my first university course in a very easy way. Talking to students about a topic I like. Now it is talking about a topic I like and figuring out how to do it with video and distance learning.

Sarah and I are also busy working on our first course we will give together at our home university – on digital classics. What else? 😉 I like the thought to talk about our favorite topics in out digital historical world. We learned a lot that last year.

I took some programming courses on R and Python (my first experiences as a happy noob are summarized here). I participated at a workshop on TEI and digital epigraphy. I gave my first course lessons together with my boss. We finished the project I was working on next to my dissertation. Well, I finished my first thesis draft in December, ready for Christmas break – what a feeling (read all about here and here). But the thing with first drafts is tricky – once they are written (which is a Herculian task indeed), they have to be re-written, because of the revisions and corrections your supervisor claims to be necessary, no matter what. If you are PhD student, you are vulnerable within this phase – more vulnerable than you might think. I nearly burst into tears, because I was so stressed out and done with all of it; after all, my Christmas break was well-deserved but way too short to re-charge my batteries. You have to consider your time needed to do a proper break, mark my words!

So, I did revisions and corrections for nearly a 100 days now – you can read about that on my post on my 100 days of dissertation challenge and you can follow my way on my instagram account.

My new job brought new motivation – I am now busy learning how to be a good university teacher and in the middle of this corona-crisis it is not that easy. I had three conferences scheduled this spring and summer, but yeah, well… And I love conferencing a lot. Even, if it is hard to be a humanities youngster and doing all that networking stuff for your first time. But I got used to it. And I am really sad about all those cancellations because of the networking. Because of the fact that now I won’t be able to listen to great minds and hearing about their research. But this time now is so crazy and different, it is hard to stay calm. It is important to protect our loved ones. It is important to protect ourselves. It is hard and challenging. I just made a step back and focused on my selfcare advises I posted some time ago (have a look at my how to do selfcare on planning, physical exercise, social life). I did some planning, I started with my jogging routine and I planned a lot of face-timing and phone calls with my loved ones. I am relieved that I am locked down with my love, because all alone I would be definitely talking with the furniture by now. Or maybe made friends with the spiders and the insects living at my balcony.

Our blog has provided me with a new hobby full of action and fun. I love our boulder sessions and I learned a lot from that (read everything about it in this section). I have now the opportunities to do research on my guilty pleasure topics like 3D modelling or geoinformation systems. Soon, my thesis will be done and there will be more time for me and the blogposts here. And I am really looking forward on doing interesting new posts.

I am looking forward to a new year being a bouldering epigrammetrist. ❤️

I hope, you are alle well and safe. Tell me, if there are any topics you are especially interested in and want to read about on this blog!

All the best,

Astrid 🙂