I went down to interview Prof Valerie Moller on the quality of life story this morning, and spoke with her for an hour on her research and different things affecting quality of life in Grahamstown. A lot of what she said seemed a little vague, but there are still some very interesting stories in there, and I've emailed Jonathan Ancer with some possible angles for a Grocott's article. I like this sort of story because it relates directly to our mission and vision of showing people about how academic research at Rhodes relates to them.
Grocott's is full of this quality-of-life stuff, of course. It deals with service delivery, crime, the wealth gap, the generation gap and so on all the time, but what's nice about Valerie Moller's research is that it pulls all those things together to show exactly how it affects the mindsets of people in this town. One thing she feels is that there's a lack of pride in Grahamstown. It's not surprising that some people find this place quite a backwater, but I still think it's a really fun, quirky backwater to be in, definitely the Arb City.
I don't know if anyone else has seen, but there's some juicy stuff coming off the mailing lists. I've told Activate tonight I'll do a story on the Translate@thon, a project to translate some software like the Rhodes webmail program into different languages. It's going to be pretty exciting. But there are even more tantalising prospects for the future: I got a whole raft of Humanities faculty board minutes, which might have some very interesting info in them. Then there's a survey being done by the HR division on lecturers' pay, which would be a great jumping-off point to start a lecturers' pay feature on.
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