The weather outside cannot decide whether it is still winter (a bit of snow is covering the ground) or not winter anymore (it's not very cold, and the snow does not stay for long). It has been like this for a while now. The cat has stopped caring and just upped her morning walks again to their longer version, the snow seems to have lost some of its cat-repellancy.

In other news: A good while ago I posted about the boat building project in England, where some folks (quite a lot of them, actually) are building a bronze age sewn-plank boat. Well, looks like it's finished! And here is a time-lapse video summing it all up.



A while ago, I chatted to one of the people from the project, and she said that the project has generated a lot of response, and upped the visitor count of the museum. I was very glad to hear that, and now I'm looking forward to their launch, planned for March!

There is that article that I am writing (or, rather, re-writing according to the suggestions made by the reviewers). It's about, who would have thought it, the never-ending spinning experiment. And it is driving me nuts.

Why? Well, for one thing, I am trying really hard to get some proper plots out of the thing. Which, according to my instructions and due to the help of a lovely person who knows R should be no problem... but my modules keep crashing, not reacting, or not giving me the results I need.

And then there's the citations. I have read in gazillions of publications that "thick yarn is made with heavy spindles"... and of course I did not take that as a note. And now I need to add a few more references to this, and it seems I cannot find them anymore. This is probably due to the fact that many of these books or articles were quite basic, or not typical scientific reference literature - but it makes it not easier to re-find them. So I will be shamelessly blegging:
Do you know a book (preferably something like a beginner's guide) or an (archaeological) article about hand-spindles and hand-spinning where heavy spindles are linked to thick(er) yarns? Please tell me in the comments. That would be really helpful.

If I am now going to admit that I did not really catch on about the stuff going on with the skeleton in the carpark thing, it makes me feel self-conscious. But thank goodness I have a lovely friend at the other end of the world who did - and who sent me the links to the BBC radio site yesterday, in time for me to catch the Great Announcement.

Long story short: There have been several years' work in trying to trace the burial place of Richard III of England, and they finally found him. Skeletal as well as DNA analysis strongly hints to the skeleton belonging to the king. And you can read more in this report here, where there are also lots of extra links.

That is also a very nice presentation of archaeology for the public - very well done.

I have not written a list of all the things I need to do because I do not want to see such a long list. Among the things that would be on it are: take care of the bookkeeping (especially the one considering the car costs, since that is necessary for one of the steps in finishing last year's tax work, and that should be done before March at the latest); scan in more of the spinning experiment visual survey cards in a high dpi setting (tedious, boring work that eats up time and nerves because of its pure, undiluted boringness); have a bit more of a spin-in with my Great Wheel (that is currently standing in the living room) since there was that project planned with lovely Vix that requires about 500 m of decent wheel-spun yarn; testspin with the other, new little wheel that lives here since the start of the year and see what has to be done to fix it; finish an article; work my way through many chapters of the project I have with Gillian; review and possibly change (or at least tweak) my website; make a new info leaflet; plan the next Textile Forum; and I will now stop noting things now or I could really have just written a list to shock me.

Also coming up? Each year's sudden February need to sort and put away any jumble standing around and clear tables and spaces. And have a thorough cleaning of the place. So... plenty of work around here, as you can see. But as they say: "Everything is better with a cup of tea." Which is exactly what I shall get myself now before starting into the day. I am determined to make at least a little dent in the stack of stuff to do with today's work!

As the long-term readers among you might know, I am using EndNote for my citation and bibliography needs. Theoretically, I also have all the .pdf files that I have of articles in one folder on my system, and all the titles of these articles in the EndNote database.

Theoretically. Which, unfortunately, is not at all what I really have - over time, a large stack of .pdfs has accumulated that are not yet in the database, because it all meant opening the file, copying the relevant bibliographical data into the database, then saving the file under a new (and unique) name also written to the database file. Yes, the programme can theoretically attach files to database entries - but I have never gotten the hang of that, and I also prefer to have things separately in case of desasters.

So here I was, with a stack of pdf files - unsorted, and with quite a few non-articles crept in between them - and my database. Enter Qiqqa, a database/citation tool geared entirely towards .pdf collections. (If it were a little less geared towards those, and a bit more open and more import-friendly from EndNote's end, I would have considered switching to it completely.) In my process of checking out Qiqqa, I already tried to use it for sorting, organising, and EndNote-ing my pdf files, but it turned out to be a tiny bit less trivial than I had thought.

So I have made a clean slate in Qiqqa and have now tackled (again) the task of sorting my files and inputting them into EndNote. It's still a multi-step process, but much less tedious than before. Preparation step was to make three new folders for sorting: One to hold the batch of pdfs for processing, one to hold the exported files, and one for the "rejects" - files that have obscure bibliographical data that will have to be entered by hand.

Step one: Move a batch of pdf files from the big heap into the processing folder.
Step two: Import that folder into Qiqqa (or set it as watch folder). The programme will now index (and, if necessary, OCR) those files.
Step three: Use the inbuild BibTex-Sniffer to match bibliographical data to the individual files, and delete all the non-articles from the library.
Step four: Make sure to move all the files for hand processing from the processing folder to the "rejects" folder (else they will be lost), then delete them from the library.
Step five: Export bibliographical data to a .bib file.
Step six: Export complete library to the export folder.
Step seven: Convert BibTex-file to an Endnote .xml file using this nifty little programme.
Step eight: Import bibliographical data into Endnote (excluding duplicates). (I only had one minor glitch with importing up to now which seems to have been an incompatible record type number.)
Step nine: Add "pdf file available" or similar thing into a suitable field of each of the new references (this can be done quickly with "change and move fields").
Step ten: Move all the exported files from the "doc" subfolder in the export folder into the regular folder for referenced pdf files.
Step eleven: Delete everything from the export folder and the processing folder.
Step twelve: Delete all the entries of the library.

Then start over... until everything is processed. It takes some time, but on the other hand, it allows me to be sure I get everything referenced and lets me clear out all the other pdfs that crept in without too much woes. And with the possibility to do this in smaller batches, it's also not so overwhelming to add hundreds of BibTex entries at once.

(And if this blogpost has made you want a bibliography programme/database, here is a list of those currently available, including EN and Qiqqa.)

I have (of course) made use of the Cambridge Journal offer, but regrettably did not find much of interest for me in the 2012 yield of articles. (Though admittedly my topics are a bit special.)

There is also the journal "Internet Archaeology", a peer-reviewed online journal that has its back issues under an open access policy since this month. My check yielded no textile-related stuff, but for those of you who do not have such a narrow focus, here's the link. Enjoy.

I have finally caught up with the time-critical links on the blog (at least I hope so), and now I can move on to diminish my list of links to stuff again.

So, exciting stuff on the web right now...

- The V&A is still working on establishing the Textile and Clothing study collection at its new centre, and the opening date is (probably) summer or autumn 2013. They do have a lot of their collection accessible and searchable online. Though it's not the same as seeing the stuff up close, you can head to their digital catalogue and search the whole collection.

- Less pictures, more text: the Textile Conservation Centre offers a list of all the thesis titles and abstracts written in connection with their institution on their webpage. The institution has ended its life in 2009, but has a successor: The Centre for Textile Conservation and Technical Art History in Glasgow.

- The Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM) is planning a new exhibition on early modern clothing and textiles, probably starting in 2015 (see the German info page here).

- And finally and totally textile-unrelated, there is a new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice running at the moment. It's in form of a video blog made by Lizzie Bennet (plus some blogs from her sister Lydia), plus Twitter and tumblr story bits, and I think it's an awesome and thoroughly well-done adaptation of the story to modern times. You might want to click this link to get to the official page with all the story... but then, if you have work to do, you might not. (Not want to click the link. Because it will eat up your time. Ask me how I know.)