Wrapping up the Getty.

This week is wrap-up week.

I think I’ve achieve most of what I want. Working as a scholar at the Getty has been an amazing experience. I would recommend anyone with a serious conservation project that can be done succinctly within the timeframes should apply for a GCI scholar term.

When you arrive at the Getty you are told that the three months will disappear very fast, they did. As ever you start your project with certain parameters and ideas about what you’re going to get out of, your project then evolves as you gather information and results. Mine went through several stages stages of expanding and contracting. I now have some half decent timelines for metal finishing processes are massive database of PDF files which will be turned into a substantial bibliography and history and technology article. I also have a wide-ranging selection of conservation papers for the conservation review article. I’ve played with various forms of digital scholarship and have started to refine my processes even further.

On the Mac I’m using Zotero, Evernote, Scrivener, and Dragon. Most of this is transferable to linux. I’m pretty sure Dragon will work in wine.

Over the next few months I will post timelines, parts of chapters, bibliographies, and draft articles to this website. I will be asking for your candid non-critical feedback. I will be trying very hard to adopt the open source principle of release early and release often so initially I don’t care if there are problems with a page or information I don’t have I will put that in the post hoping that other people can help.

I’m looking for people who can help me decipher some of the German, Chinese, Japanese and East European articles I have. These articles I think outline the development of metal finishing in their home countries so it would be good to add these to a timeline. Currently my timelines are worldwide but I would like to make some of them regional.

I’ll be sad to leave here on Friday but I’ll be going on a road trip up to Seattle with my daughter to see some of the US. That should be great fun.