Been a little quiet on the research blog front as most of late last year and the beginning of this year was occupied with the making of 100,000 (entirely by hand using a manual tablet press!) vanilla tablets for an exhibition on fakes at Science Gallery Dublin. Actually, quite a lot of the research behind the piece didn’t really make it into the installation, which is a shame and frustration (but rather par for the course), as much of this information is far more interesting than the four vanilla/vanillin tablets which exhibition visitors were able to taste. I’ll have to do a separate post on that when I get a moment.

In other exciting (read daunting) news, I’ve been accepted onto an AHRC-funded practice-based PhD programme with the BxNU Institute and the Cultural Negotiation of Science research group at Northumbria University. The research project is called Indirect Observations and will look at data taking & analysis, event reconstruction, computational visualisation and imaging processes in experimental physics (mainly HEP and neutrinos, possibly with neutrino-driven explosions of supernovae simulations on the side for good measure). I’ll be working through the idea of the image as a process, epistemological issues with observing secondary effects, and trying to figure out how to shoehorn in Wesley Goatley’s critical data aesthetics. No doubt, I’ll be writing more regularly about this come October.