Dear dm-l,

I have the pleasure of announcing that the Digital Medievalist Project poster was awarded a third place in the recent poster competition for the Digital Resources in the Humanities conference which took place 5-8 September 2004. This placing may have been affected by my extremely active lobbying when I discovered the prize for winning the competition was a digital camera. (Third place only gets honorable mention *drat*) :-)

There were approximately 22 entrants in the competition and the winner was the "Cistercians in Yorkshire" project[1] which had some very sexy virtual reality recreations of monastic buildings from Yorkshire. I am happy another medieval entry won, and I think we can be comforted by the obvious need for the Digital Medievalist Project given the number of medieval related entries. Out of the 22 entrants listed in the booklet of poster abstracts, at least 7 of them are related to the Middle Ages.

One of the plenary speakers at the conference was Chris Patten[2] who made a breezingly polite tour of the posters and exhibitions. As he paused at our poster (maybe the bright background was a good idea...), I proceeded to explain the project to him. And as politicians do, he made himself appear very interested before quickly walking around the rest of them and departing.

I was pleased to find that a number of the other medieval poster entrants and speakers were already members of this list. I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of others who I know have only passing interest in the Middle Ages, but are interested in such aspects as text encoding also were lurking on the list.

-James

[1]http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk/ [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Patten --- Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk