James Harriman-Smith

Category: Blog

  • Library Collection

    As I put the final touches to my book’s draft manuscript, I realized that I had achieved a new status as a scholar. For the first time, I now have a reader’s card for four of the five legal deposit libraries in the UK. One of the rules I have given myself as an academic…

  • Book Manuscript

    So, I finally submitted my book manuscript this week. Because of that, and the amount of time spent reading, rereading and rewriting myself that this activity entailed, this is not going to be a particularly long post. Let it take the form of a list, in hommage to Eric Griffiths’s If Not Critical, which –…

  • Magical Thinking

    I remember when I first told someone that I played the fantasy cardgame Magic: The Gathering. That was nearly a decade ago now, and the excruciating set of emotions I experienced then have faded, but I still don’t tell many people this. To the best of my knowledge, none of my colleagues know that I…

  • Teaching Assessment

    It’s a bit ironic, but I keep having ideas about teaching while I’m on research leave from teaching. I suppose it’s the new perspective I’ve acquired, and will make the most of these thoughts by putting them down in blog posts from time to time. The one that came to me most recently concerned assessment.…

  • The Speed of Criticism

    My teachers would often write ‘slow down’ or ‘unpack this’ on my essays. I do the same thing now with my students’ writing, and – during this research leave especially – with my own. The comment appears whenever something is explained in insufficient detail, when the author makes a point and then rushes to another…

  • Research Leave Begins

    Today is the last day of the first week of my research leave, and my last opportunity to begin something that I promised I would do, namely to resurrect this blog with weekly posts for the duration of my time out of teaching. I have no idea what I’ll be writing about, but I do…

  • Making a Prompter – part 3

    This post continues from part two, which itself is a continuation of part one. I now had a working programme, but one which my target audience of students, actors and academics would have difficulty interacting with. Before I made the website user-friendly, however, I still had some bugs to squash. I added another dialogue box…

  • Making a Prompter – part 2

    This post continues from part one. Term finished, and I had a little bit of headroom to start thinking about my coding again. I tried to polish my code, but couldn’t solve all of its problems. I tried a different approach, using XSLT to change how a TEI-XML version of a play was displayed, such…

  • Making a Prompter – part 1

    I’ve been trying to teach myself to code ever since I took a year out between my MPhil and my PhD, way back in 2014. Teaching oneself to code, however, is very different from my other autodidactic project: teaching myself German. Whereas I can happily learn little bits of German, memorize grammar and vocabulary and…

  • In Praise of Spreadsheets

    I’ve always been a fan of spreadsheets. I’ve maintained tables of my spending for over a decade now, and, even before that, would regularly fire up Excel in order to arrange my thoughts or figures. Nowadays, I use spreadsheets for all sorts of different things, and, as this is perhaps not one might expect a…