Software for Biographers: 2

In my last post I said that there were two ways in which you can run PC-only software MS Access on a Mac if, like me, you want to use Mac-only software Scrivener for organising your thesis.

The first way is to use Boot Camp to partition your Intel-based Mac's hard drive and to install Windows (XP, Vista or 7) on to one part, leaving the other part to your Mac's operating system. You can then decide on rebooting whether to use your computer as a PC or as a Mac. This may be satisfactory if you don't want to run a program from each operating system at the same time. If you are happy with this solution, then the Boot Camp Assistant (accessible via Search on Finder) enables you to do so without further cost other than that of a Windows installation disk.

The second way is to create a 'virtual machine' on your Mac and to run your PC software on it. This involves you with the additional cost (around £65) of the software to create this machine. I chose Parallels Desktop for Mac, described on Wikipedia as "hardware emulation virtualization software, using hypervisor technology that works by mapping the host computer's hardware resources [i.e. those on the PC] directly to the virtual machine's resources. Each virtual machine thus operates identically to a standalone computer, with virtually all the resources of a physical computer."

As so often is the case, installing Parallels software was nothing like as easy as claimed on the box, but it was finally successfully done on the second day of contact with Harsha, the company's excellent support engineer in Bangalore.

This now enables me to have my MS Access database open in a window on the left of my screen and a Scrivener page open on the right of it. A major feature of Scrivener is that it enables you to store bits of text on virtual index cards which you can re-arrange to your heart's content on a virtual corkboard before exporting selected text on them to the text editor and eventually exporting to your preferred wordprocessing program.

On the Scrivener website it points out that "Writing a novel, research paper, script or any long-form text involves more than hammering away at the keys until you're done. Collecting research, ordering fragmented ideas, shuffling index cards in search of that elusive structure—most writing software is fired up only after much of the hard work is done."

I agree, and contend that the ability to move bits of text around on screen like pieces of a physical jigsaw puzzle will make my actually writing my thesis (once I have stopped blogging and have finished my prosopographical database) simple and straightforward: I also contend that attempting to do this merely by using cut-and-paste within a wordprocessing program would be much harder and slower.

Even if you agree with my contention, you may well feel that the expense of the hardware (iMac), virtualization software (Parallels) and document-structuring software (Scrivener) would be unnecessary if there was a decent means of creating shufflable index cards on a PC. I have to confess that if I knew last summer what I know now, I might well have not gone to all the trouble and expense of moving from PC to Mac. You see, I have just discovered Stickies.

Stickies are virtual Post-It notes that you can create in Windows but not on Macs. You can create them and move them around the screen, where they will remain till you remove them or put them on to a wordprocessor file of which you may just have written the chapter title. When you close that file, the stickies disappear with your text: when you reopen it, there they are again. Stickies software is, amazingly, free!

I do not have the time at this stage to do anything further about Stickies, but if there is some demand by biographers for a comparison of these methodologies, then I will show how I could have used them when producing my thesis. In the meantime I am going to use the following model, based on the Untersuchungs-Ordnungs-Realisierungs Prinzip.

Collecting (research material stored as gobbets/factoids on records on an MS Access database)
leading to
Selecting (created by copying research material from relevant database records onto Scrivener index cards and shuffling these into the right sequence for each section)
leading to
Perfecting (copying the research material into a [Word or Pages] wordprocessor file before expanding and polishing research material, then adding link passages etc.)

Software for Biographers: 1

I grandiloquently entitled the paper I wrote last spring term How Writers Write Biography: a Preliminary Study of British and American Practice. I wanted to get some idea about how much use biographers make of new technology and in particular at what stage (if at all) do they start tapping away at a computer keyboard.

You may well imagine that, in the brief time I had to research and write the paper, I found out little of significance. One point that did interest me, though, was that there seemed to be little correlation between writers' level of technical savviness and the point at which their wordprocessing begins: just because someone is computer literate does not necessarily mean that he will write his first draft on screen.

This also begs the question, what is a first draft? Does not a well-sequenced series of index cards, or a series of re-arranged pages from a reporter's notebook constitute a first draft? And what about Winston Churchill? He, famously, used not to see what he had dictated until it arrived on his desk in galley proofs, at which point only he would start revising. I used to run a typesetting company, and I shudder to think what his typesetting bills must have been.

Most of the desk research I did was based on the series of articles published in The Guardian from 2007 onwards entitled Writers' Rooms, which sometimes gave insights into the creative process, as well as describing where this principally takes place. Hilary Mantel for example wrote this:

Some preliminaries happen at the huge notice board in the kitchen, where I am building my new novel about Thomas Cromwell. It helps me structure a book if I can see what I'm doing. The chronological line and the flashbacks get worked out on postcards. As I narrow the focus, each postcard comes to represent a scene, and behind it I pin everything that belongs to it – tiny observations, descriptions, statistics, lines of dialogue. Then I can take it to the computer and work it through.

This seems to me to be a very good description of how many writers, and in particular biographers, work or would like to work. What particularly interested me, though, was the last sentence, which implied that what she did at this stage was to transposed all this material directly into her wordprocessor, using the cut and paste facility for fine tuning.

Such American research as I was able to do was by e-mail, writing to the high percentage of people who gave their contact details on The Biographer's Craft website: this was in marked (and dismal) contrast to the small percentage of people who give their e-mail addresses on the equivalent British sites. A respondent from Oregon was particularly helpful and insightful, writing this:

For me, the salient features of a good writing app are the ease of editing, cutting and pasting (which make it easier to try different versions of a story, see how it looks, then modify or return to the original); ease of access to tools like word count, thesaurus, dictionary, highlighting, footnoting etc); ease of style modifications (font, italics, boldface, et al), formatting (line spacing, justification, setting margins, etc); metadata, and combining words with images. I'd rather just have the rest of the features out of my way! Hence something intentionally simple like TextEdit and Bean and WriteRoom works best. I use Scrivener to make it easier to deal with several documents at once and to structure stories, then do final formatting in Bean, Pages or whatever.

This was the first time I had heard about Scrivener. I naturally looked up reviews for it, and was blown away by this:

No doubt, Scrivener is THE BEST creative writing software ever.
Completely customizable, you can write your novel, your script, you screenplay, your OWN WAY.
It has TONS of features, literally THOUSANDS of feature, I don't think one man can be aware of all of them, and that's why they're posting a "Tip of the Day" each and every day on their Facebook fan page.
In order for people to be aware of what MORE they can actually do with the piece of software they've bought!
Also, many writers have moved from Windows to OS X just to have Scrivener! It's like the Photoshop of creative writing, it's THE standard, it really defined and REDEFINED how things are, and how they should have been from the very beginning.

On the strength of this and other reviews, I went out and bought a nice big iMac to draft my thesis on The Double Life and Afterlife of a Virgin Martyr. It was only when I found the topic to be unsatisfactory and I switched to the prosopographical one Pre-Conquest Travellers to Rome that I hit a major problem: the version of MS Office for the iMac does not include the database program Access I used to use on my old PC and you can't of course practice prosopography these days without a database.

The cost-free solution would be for me to abandon Access and learn the free and open source database software MySQL (for structured query language): this, incidentally, is what the Anglo-Saxon prosopographical database runs on. However, I don't want to spend time on the MySQL learning curve and, above all, the Database for Historians course run by the Institute for Historical Research is focused on Access.

There are a couple of other solutions which I will investigate this week: watch this space!

Prosopography and the Via Francigena

Prosopography is a new term: it does not appear in my edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary reprinted and corrected in 1959. The Online OED gives this somewhat unhelpful definition:

a description of a person's appearance, personality, career, etc., or a collection of such descriptions.
[mass noun] the study of prosopographies, especially as an aspect of the study of Roman history.

Think of prosopography as a collective biography or, as a current prosopography practitioner has described it, "a means of profiling any group of recorded persons linked by any common factor". The prosopographical approach was used in the early to mid twentieth century by historians studying matters such as the governing class of imperial Rome, the creation of the American constitution and the motivation of members of the eighteenth century House of Commons.

According to Lawrence Stone, the populariser of the term prosopography, the approach was "Invented as a tool of political history, [but] it is now [1971] being increasingly employed by the social historians." An outstanding example of such use was made soon after in Montaillou, the study of life, love and death in a C14 Pyrenean village, using a mass of depositions in the Vatican archives made by villagers to the Inquisition, determined to stamp out the last vestiges of the Cathar heresy in Occitania.

The advent of the computer and the development of database software that can easily be used by researchers has made the accumulation and analysis of socio-historical data much easier than any paper- or card-based system. A couple of recent examples, given on Wikipedia's Prosopography page, are Living and Dying in England 1100–1540 (a group picture of monastic life, centered on the aggregate experience of the monks of Westminster Abbey) and Angels in the Office (a group biography of women secretarial workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) . These give "a mosaic formed of documentary flashes of momentary insight into a multitude of obscure lives that can never be pieced together into individual biographies."

These researches focus on "Intentional Groups, with explicit shared interests", but there are more diffuse groups like that in A Preliminary Prosopography of the Victorian Street, in which "the spatial classifications, occupations, and domestic arrangements of a street in Victorian Oxford" were studied.

My projected prosopography of the Via Francigena would contain data on people who had travelled from England to Rome since the arrival of the mission of St Augustine in 597 up to, initially, the Norman Conquest in 1066. My first step will be to identify as many of these people as possible. I will identify them on two websites.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Nearly all public libraries in the UK subscribe to the Oxford DNB online. This means I can access the dictionary, free, via my local library. On this index page I just type in BUCKS followed by my card number.

The Search facility enables me to search it for entries about people who lived between 597 and 1066 and where text in the entry contains the words "to Rome" or "at Rome". It is then a simple matter to copy the core information about the person (name, dates, office/rank) and the thirty or so words containing "to/at Rome". This raw list will later be used to tabulate the data.

Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England

This extraordinary resource, developed over the last decade by Cambridge and UCL, is freely accessible without even having to log on here

I am searching the database via the left-hand frame by two of the seven search criteria:
Events > Life events/social and economic acts and relations > Journey (or Pilgrimage, if listed)
Location > Specific location > Rome

Each then lists individuals in the central frame, by name and identifying number: thus Alfred the cake-burner is shown as ALFRED 8: (m/l ix) the Great, king of the Anglo-Saxons, 871-899

Clicking on Alfred 8 displays in the right-hand column a Factoid (=incident with primary source reference) list. In Alfred's case factoids are grouped into 10 categories of which Events is one. This in turn has about 50 categories of which Journey lists 30 factoids, of which one reads
Æthelwulf 1.journey to Rome with Alfred 8: Æthelwulf 1 went to Rome with Alfred 8.: Asser.VitAlfredi 11 (855)

Clicking on the reference (Asser.VitAlfredi) displays details of both the edition of the primary source and its most recent translation.
Stevenson, William Henry – Asser's Life of King Alfred, Together with the Annals of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser. Edited with an Introduction and Commentary. – Oxford 1959 pp1-95
Keynes, Simon, and Lapidge, Michael – Alfred the Great: Asser's 'Life of King Alfred' and Other Contemporary Sources. Translated with an Introduction and Notes. – Harmondsworth 1983 pp67-110

These factoids will later be tabulated.

Tabulation

I do not yet know exactly how I will tabulate this data. I will decide this by the time the Winter Term starts on 18 January so that I can shortly after discuss with the Dean how I can use it when working on a new thesis as the final element of my MA course..

New Year, New Way

Our 2010 Christmas card had a note about something we had each done during the year. It said

SHE painted the palm in KwaZulu Natal last spring and is now doing portraiture in her studio at home

HE has stopped (temporarily?) his MA course at the University of Buckingham and is currently idle

Possibly the main reason for stopping was that I became disenchanted with the topic of my thesis, writing which constitutes the last stage in the MA course. At the outset I had wanted to write one entitled From Clay Tablet to iTablet: the Impact of Technology on How Biography gets Written and on my website, http://claytablet2itablet.net, I had selected the ten pieces of life writing made over five millennia which would illustrate my thesis.

This topic was ultimately unacceptable to the university and I suggested instead taking one of these pieces of life writing and charting how the subject's influence had waxed and waned over the centuries. The subject was Gwenfrewi, a seventh century Welsh saint known in English as Winifred, who was beheaded by a frustrated suitor, miraculously restored to life by her sainted uncle Beuno and lived again as a chaste abbess in a remote Welsh valley. According to one of her first two biographers – writing five centuries after these dramatic events – miracles took place at Holywell (the place of her first death) and at Shrewsbury (whither her relics had recently been translated and enshrined), both places becoming famous pilgrimage destinations.

This new, and acceptable, topic I entitled The Double Life and Afterlife of a Virgin Martyr. This would have had a number of interesting sections: holy wells; Welsh Christianity and monasticism; saintly relics; hagiography; the medieval cult of virginity; and pre- and post-Reformation pilgrimages. Each of these strands could of course have been illustrated by reference to incidents in Gwenfrewi's life and afterlife, but the trouble I increasingly experienced was that I could find no satisfactory keystone with which to crown and finish my projected arch, without which it would tumble into half-a-dozen only loosely related blocks. The final straw was my finding that Gwenfrewi is not recognised by the Bollandists (Jesuit historians in Belgium who for three centuries have sought to establish the truth about saints' lives) as a Martyr, but only as a Virgin. I felt both unable and unwilling to comment upon such faith-related issues, so I stopped work on this thesis in September.

Instead I went then to a language school in a small Tuscan town where I had intended to spend a month trying to bring my Italian up to another level. Unfortunately I had recently experienced a loss of hearing, so that I had unexpected difficulty in understanding both my teacher and my fellow-students and reluctantly went home after only a fortnight. I then thought about the possibility of our going to Tuscany in the spring, SHE to paint and HE to read and talk, and looked to see what Alternative Travel were offering. At http://www.atg-oxford.co.uk/trips1.php?tripcode=jfr is outlined a wonderful twenty day trek along the Via Francigena (the ancient pilgrim path to Rome), but with an unacceptable price tag.

Two things gradually struck me.

1. A prosopographical study of some of the people who trod the Via Francigena would make an interesting topic for a new thesis, with the working title of Pre-Conquest travellers from England to Rome
   
2. I reckon that we could do half the time (ten days) for a quarter of the price (£1,300), doing the section Pontremoli to Lucca, totalling about 85 miles, and looking for things they might also have seen (and planting a Piltdown-type hoax stone somewhere inscribed HIC ERAT SIGERIC)
   

Why continue to blog?

Drafted 13 June: finally uploaded 12 August

This question can only be answered by asking a preliminary question, why did I start a blog in the first place?

One reason why many people start one is to create an informal online forum where you can put forward your views and enable other people who share your interests to comment on them. In my case I was seeking to create some sort of dialogue between me and my fellow students in particular and biographers both at home and overseas.

In this I have been spectacularly unsuccessful. It appears that only one of my fellows have read what I wrote with any regularity or any appreciation. Only one comment has been added to any of the hundred-plus posts I have made to the blog over the last eight months. Nobody with whom I have contacted by e-mail with my blog address, included as a matter of course below my signature, have commented to me about it.

Another reason was to act as an incentive to me to pay close attention at group sessions so as to be able to write a summary immediately afterwards to act as an aide memoire to me and, perhaps, to my fellows. This ceased at the end of the first term when a complimentary comment about a visiting lecturer's enterprise in, first of all, finding a publisher for a biography unlikely to have wide appeal and, after that, devising ways of publicising it was taken the wrong way and I received a terse e-mail asking me to remove what I had written about the lecture.

A third reason was to provide me with a means of practicing writing coherent and reasonably lengthy pieces of text after many years of writing reasonably brief business communications. The blog served this purpose reasonably effectively for the first month or two, but I found that I soon got back into the habit of writing at length.

A final reason was that I was looking for a way of writing short pieces about episodes in my past which might later form part of an autobiography I might possibly write after finishing the course. The trouble was that these pieces did not really fit into the nature of normal blog posts, which are in the vast majority focussed on today and tomorrow but not yesterday. Then, just as only one fellow-student has commented upon the pieces about our course on my blog, so only one member of my family – and an in-law at that – has commented upon the autobiographical pieces on it. This is perhaps understandable. My surviving sibling has never used a computer: my three daughters and my wife may well have felt unease at the idea of my talking in public about some of the less happy moments in my life: thus it was that I definitively closed this strand of the blog by writing, a fortnight ago, a micro-autobiography in (precisely) a thousand words, utilising a laconic style and eschewing the first person singular pronoun in order to make the piece as unemotional and impersonal as possible.

So there really is little point in my continuing to spend time on this blog. It may be however that over the next month or two I may decide to start another one on another topic. If so, I will post its URL here.

Au revoir or adieu?

The M-Word Manifesto

I propose that writing one's life story in a thousand words is something that each of us might consider doing. I have just done so, and I want to say why I did it.

One reason was as an antidote to having to write one thousand words or a bit more about someone else, as part of the university course I am doing. This piece of writing has to follow the formal structure of entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, starting with details of when and where the subject was born and who his parents were, proceeding through his achievements and ending with a brief mention of his family, where he was buried and how much money he had left his heirs.

The formula varies little from that established for the first edition of the Dictionary, published over a number of years in the late nineteenth century. It reflects the outlook and attitudes of that time, one aspect of which had been memorably summed up by Byron earlier in that century when he wrote "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence".

This formula may seem, from one perspective, a reflection of Victorian male chauvinism, but from another it is eminently practical. It is (relatively) easy to dig up facts about a man's work: it is (exceedingly) hard to do the same about his relationships. Besides, it is easier to write about what someone did rather than how someone felt.

So it was that when I started writing an outline of my life story I found it very hard to write about my relationship with my two wives, particularly the first. I found it slightly easier to do so by writing about this by dropping the word 'I': omitting the personal pronoun enabled me to write much more dispassionately. Writing in staccato, disjointed phrases also helped. So it was that I ended up with something similar to that which used to appear at the start of chapters in many eighteenth and nineteenth century books, a series of phrases succinctly describing a topic or incident, separated by em dashes.

By the time I had finished I found that I had written just over a thousand words and had what might be called a Eureka moment. If I could edit it to make exactly one thousand words it could be the pattern for other people to write their own stories and we could be witnessing the genesis of a whole new genre. I have had many eureka moments in my life and most have turned out to be flashes in the pan than bull's eyes but, as I believe Cicero once wrote, "Dum spiro, spero": while I breathe, I hope.

In an earlier post to this blog I said why I wanted to do this: I felt that, because of the lack of opportunity for students on our course to get to know each other, I would write briefly about myself, let my fellow-students know I had done so and encourage them to do likewise. After writing it I found that the exercise was of far greater personal value. I found that I had written something that my grandchildren could read when they are older which would tell them about the life and times of their grandfather: I would that my grandfathers had done the same for me. I felt also that I had put, however faintly and however briefly, my footprint upon the sands of time.

This is why I am writing this manifesto with its alliterative title containing the Latin way of writing a thousand to reflect the length of my micro-autobiography and, perhaps, of other people, not just in the evening of their lives but also at their high noon.

It would be great fun for me to start another blog – say, M-autobiographies.blogspot.com – on which I could publish this and other life stories – like yours? C'mon, tell the world what you've done and how you've dealt with those two imposters, triumph and disaster: a thousand words is worth far more than a picture!

A Thousand Words is Enough for a Life Story

1933: born into Quaker family, third and youngest of three children – seven years after last sibling – home suburban Woking.

Father passionate gardener – prizes galore for hybridising irises – day job in electricity supply – post-nationalisation Chairman of London Electricity Board.

Sent away to boarding school in deep country one month after Dunkirk – fulfilling hobby-oriented school days – at prep school stamp-collecting, which sparked an interest in what happened when and where – started A History of the British Empire, Told on Stamps – at Leighton Park public school bookbinding and printing – bought Adana platen printing press aetat 14 for £4.17.6 (first "business") – won Minor Scholarship (worth a munificent £30 p.a.) to Trinity College, Oxford (exam having been taken to shorten National Service).

1952: RAF conscript – at Aircrew Selection Centre when KGVI dies – flying training in England and Scotland – basic training on Tiger Moths and Chipmunks – Oxfords (twin-engined advanced trainer) – skiing in Cairngorms – “wings” – Pilot Officer Randall – Meteors and Vampires (jets) – grounded after Korean Armistice – brief spell with Education Branch in Germany.

1954: hitch-hiking round North America – NY > Connecticut > Florida > Oklahoma > Highway 66 > California > Canada – spent 21st birthday watching Bannister beat Landy in Vancouver – Dreaming Spires – won (unofficial) University Shove Ha'penny Championship in the White Horse – read Modern History, intermittently – special subject Clausewitz and "Great Britain in the Mediterranean, 1797-1802".

1957: joined Shell on marketing side – fell in love before departing for year in Argentina – then Kano (edge of the Sahara in Nigeria) – visit by fiancée – jilted – sent roses and wrote sonnet – re-wooing unfortunately successful – married – Port Harcourt – six months later deserts – quit job – divorce proceedings start.

1961: Insead (business school in Fontainebleau, France) – jobs in consultancy in the UK (Sales Audits and Glacier Metal) – meet a better Julia in the Alps.

1965: at Jordans Quaker Meeting House (where Penn, founder of colony where Julia spent the war, buried) – "Friends, I take this my Friend Julia to be my wife, promising through divine assistance to be unto her a loyal and loving husband until it shall please the Lord by death to separate us" – started first company, Trenchermans (mail order delicatessen) – two daughters born – company highly seasonal and ultimately unprofitable – joined Rentokil to start French branch – during UK training successful in selling their new washroom hygiene service – French offer revoked – resigned, to start Waterloo Services Company – "where there's muck, there's brass" – third daughter born – moved from flat in Richmond to big house on the hill – seven years surveying washrooms in City offices – tedium relieved by starting Richmond in Europe Association – goal to twin Richmond with Fontainebleau – success after four years – followed by only foray into politics: chairing trans-party campaign in referendum to keep UK in EU – Richmond has highest percentage "Yes" vote in London boroughs.

1977: read about phototypesetting and prospects for small companies in The Economist – exploratory trip to USA – buy first Compugraphic machine and start Randall Typographic – over-trade – during civil servants' strike use tax money to keep going – Nemesis – but clever accountant ensures that key equipment saved from clutches of Inland Revenue bailiffs – all RT's trade creditors eventually paid in full – Waterloo Services continues as reliable cash cow – typesetting continues as Electronic Village Limited – with beginnings of personal computing and word processing, endeavours to find ways of turning authors' keystrokes into type without rekeying in composing room – ASPIC (Authors Standard Prepress Interfacing Codes) devised and promoted as The Way Ahead – unsuccessful with publishers, but principles adapted to dealing with tabular matter in tour operators' brochures and stockbrokers' publications, at time that modems were first being used for data transmission – highly profitable contracts with Thomson Holidays and Quilter Goodison.

1970s and 80s: family holidays either on narrow boats or camping in France, usually Britanny – Mirror dinghy on top of Danbury – then Volvo and trailer for Avon inflatables and outboard – one great trip aqua-camping down Dordogne, crew in one Avon, camping gear in other one, lashed alongside – three more going daily from campsite on Côte de Granit Rose to uninhabited offshore Ile Moléne. Not all sunshine and laughter, though – business downturn resulted in being unable to pay school fees – pain – periods of Julia's illnesses – general family grief – six month rift in marriage and separation healed by Relate.

1990s: business decline and fall – arrival of the laser printer and desk top publishing undermines phototypesetting companies, just as they had undermined hot metal ones fifteen years earlier – attempts to carry on single-handed in our empty-nester house, on the edge of Richmond Park – found keyboarding company in New Delhi to key manuscripts with ASPIC codes inserted – delays in freighting papers out and disks back made turn-round unacceptably slow for book publishers – abandonment, and start of frustrating attempts to develop electronic flashcards for foreign vocabulary learning in collaboration successively with Hungarian count, blind physicist and Greek Etonian – sold Waterloo Services to Rentokil – take in students at local English school to plug income/expenditure gap.

On holidays used to go as the cicerone, cavaliere serviente and chef for Julia and painting class ladies who took villas in Britanny, Andalucia, Tuscany and Provence – marketed and cooked while they painted –sat silently at dinner listening to their talk – what not known about stretch-marks scarcely worth knowing

2000s: Calliope CALL software developed with Muscovite company – but "with so much language learning stuff freely available on the internet, why should we buy yours?" – final throw of the dice with attempt to get EU funding for improved version fails at final hurdle –

2007: sell Richmond house to meet pension inadequacy – "More bricks for the buck in Buckingham" – develop web sites gratis for local organisations – take over cooking, to compensate for reluctance to do any of the cleaning of new house (had done enough cleaning to last a lifetime while running Waterloo Services).

Now: MA in Biography course at University of Buckingham – genesis of concept of From Clay Tablet to iTablet – "Death closes all: but … something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done, / Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods" (Tennyson's Ulysses) – excelsior!