Heron by Dan Bergstrom

I took a bike ride on the trail today and saw a heron hunting in the creek and a deer hanging out on the trail. These are not pictures of them.

Doe, a deer, a female deer by NatureNerd (probably outside)

Today was a day of all writing! It was tougher than I thought though. I have examples of different places transitioning from XML to RDF metadata for various reasons and I want to document each of those within the article for discussion. I was under the impression that documentation would not be complicated but each case was actually really tough to get my brain back into and remember what I read and what they were doing. I started formulating this idea of treating these articles and presentations as use cases after I had read or encountered some of them so my notes tended to be too high-level and I had to revisit the articles and presentations again. But today helped me shape some of my thinking and suspicions about triple stores and their relationship to Fedora. And it’s making me want to get into the Dive into Hydra-Works Tutorial, which I’m going to do but possibly not until I pick up the research leave again after the holidays. I doubt I can get through it in one day and I should continue writing tomorrow – that’s a stronger way to end this week, I think.

Today was finally a whole day dedicated to research leaving! Lots of reading and no writing, but lots of reading! At this point it feels like my article is going to be all about how complicated this topic is because everyone is talking about the same things in different ways and it’s hard to keep it all sorted. We seem to have a split in views between the Semantic Web world and the Library world on how to discuss things like URIs, for example. Semantic Web folks seem to think of them as links with meaning for a web of data where the Library world talks about them as authorized sources for common reference points. If they aren’t the same thing, they’re awfully close and we might just need to high five and move on to making this stuff work.

And I still made it to the gym! High five for me too!

I wrote a little in the morning and a little in the afternoon and did nothing towards my article the rest of the day. Fail, fail-y fail fail. I work worked today instead and I think I managed to finish some things that needed to be done but they took much longer than I thought they would. And I rode the bike into the office for a committee meeting. On the plus side, that was the daily workout, but the focus of the day was, unfortunately, work.

I also think that what I wrote today might end up in the trash but I’m continuing to analyze the thoughts of various authors on RDF and XML, the differences between them, and the things to think about when moving from XML to RDF.

Frustrating progress, but I’m turning on the out-of-office message tomorrow and leaving the email turned off. That has to help, right?

From Animalmemes

I’m going to try some diary-style posts to track my progress through research leave and see how it goes. I have 3 weeks total, split up around the holidays, to write this article I posted about back in August. Stuff has been percolating and I have been reading and thinking. I presented at DLF in October about it and now I just need to get it done.

So today – I managed to establish that my Introduction was already written (I was going to write that today, Past Me, but whatever, be more efficient than Present Me – it’s fine). I started on the Literature Review section instead, which might be turning more into an Unpacking of Concepts section. And I managed to make it to the gym! (It’s on my daily tracking spreadsheet of things I’d like to do so it makes me hopeful that I will do that regularly. So much to look forward to!)

But I also had to do some work work because that’s how things go when you make plans. I’m hoping tomorrow is the last day I’ll have to do that but it’s made my work day go late (not unusual for me but I am really over that bad habit) and dinner is growing cold next to me right now. We’ll try this again tomorrow and see if research work and work work can end at a normal time. So done for today!