Road trip! Following my students remotely

On Friday, our teams at HC MID were smaller than usual. Of our new quartet studying manuscripts with chants written in neumes, two play in the marching band, and were on the road for Saturday’s football game at Lehigh. Four of our most experienced club members had an even longer trip to Bucknell where they were speaking at a Mellon-sponsored conference on “Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Public Scholarship.” They were too conscientious to miss a class, so they set on on the 350 mile drive down the east coast at about 3:30 on Friday… I can’t imagine how they were able to look this fresh at their Saturday morning session: while I have no desire to be 21 again, I have to marvel at what youth can do.

On Saturday, I followed tweets from the Bucknell conference in one window with the live stream of the Patriot League football telecast in another. In the flurry of laudatory comments from Bucknell, a couple of my favorites were from @MikeZarafonetis, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Haverford College (“omg student manuscripts, inscriptions, and documents club… awesome”) and a later follow up from Emily Sherwood (@emilygwynne), Assistant Director of Instructional Technology at Bucknell, “Can I hire them for project management?”

It was a tougher day at Lehigh, where Holy Cross lost, despite putting up 38 points. Some media summaries the next day mentioned that HC quarterback Peter Pujals threw for three touchdowns and 311 yards, and that tight end Lucas Nikolaisen scored the first two touchdowns of his career, one on a pass from Pujals. None that I saw mentioned that during last year’s football season, Pujals and Nikolaisen had teamed up to edit tables of the inclination of the equator to the ecliptic in an unpublished Greek manuscript of Ptolemy’s Almagest in Munich while taking Classics 121, “Ancient Science.” In the absence of contradictory evidence, I’m willing to hypothesize that their touchdown Saturday was probably the first time in college football history that two editors of material in Greek manuscripts had connected for a score.

I love my job, and I love the glimpses I get on the internet of what current and former students are up to.