Hello
It’s been a little while since I last updated the blog. In fact, I think it’s been a lot of a while since I spoke to the community at all! Sorry about that.
Since my last update on what we’re going with ErrantScience things have been very, very busy. In the interest of keeping this update short and punchy, here are the highlights of what I’ve been up to: drew lots of cartoon commissions, helped write some books, illustrated some books, started a company, edited a magazine, gave lots of training and switched coffee blend.
Sadly, in all that, I dropped the ball both on the ErrantScience blog and then more recently on producing regular ErrantScience cartoons.
Both of which I very much enjoy doing, and both of which I miss having the time for. So I’ve decided to stop missing having the time for them and start making the time for them. Which sounds totally simple and easy when I put it like that and not at all a lot of work… gulp.
The blog
First off, from now, we’re going back to a regular ErrantScience blog schedule, as a trial. ErrantScience hasn’t had blog content for quite a while, and I’m not sure how it’ll do and if it’s even something people want. So we’re going to tun the trial for 6 months, check the stats and then review it. Which means if you like it please tell us, comment on it or share it! Writing blog article for the void is a lot less satisfying that writing then for people that are actually enjoying them 🙂
The blog is going to be kept up-to-date by our amazing new volunteer, Anna. I’ve managed to write enough blog posts for a few months ahead of time, and Anna is going to be responsible for removing all the typos and getting them out to everyone on time.
Cartoons!
We’re also going back to daily cartoon posting on social media. It will take some time to build up the drawing schedule with new content, so bare with me as I get back to regular cartooning. I’ve got a bunch of outstanding suggestions from our followers (I do take suggestions) and I have a very large set of notes and sketches ready to start working through. But to start with, it will be a lot of archival content.
Archives!!
Speaking of archives… we have a proper cartoon archive now. It is still being built, and we’ll write a more detailed post highlighting it, but if you’ve read this far you can go have a browse before everyone else finds it.
The archive is a permanent repository of all the ~2000+ cartoons I’ve drawn over the years, with proper licensing and DOI links so you can use them in your presentations and papers! As of this blog article, we are at around 25% of the way through uploading cartoons. The metadata is quite time-consuming to prepare, but we want them uploaded and archived properly.
The archive site was set up by the wonderful people at Figshare who gave us this home about 4 years ago. It was very nice of them to give us this repo and I’m very grateful… even if it’s taken a while to use it properly!
So that’s it.
I’ve been very busy, but I’m back now, I’m working hard on getting regular content out, I’ve got some great help, and most importantly my coffee is far more delicious than ever.
