The lack of recent updates has been result of the end of my Research Internship in France, and all the consequent rush in tying up loose ends there, and setting up new projects here. All this international coming back and forth (how much luggage can one reasonably accumulate in four months?!) will end up killing me.

A good piece of news, though: I’ve passed my qualification for maître de conférences (which basically means that the French government considers me apt to be a teacher/researcher).

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I was in Rio de Janeiro for the Carnaval,  and I’ve had the opportunity to meet Dr. Eustáquio J. Reis from IPEA (the Brazilian Institute of Applied Economics Research), who is coordinating an interesting project to preserve and diffuse the Memory of Brazilian Statistics, using digitisation and the Web as the main tools.

Before I’ve got interested to the subject of high-dimensional indexing, the long term preservation of digital data (and its use to give access to cultural heritage assets) was my main research interest, as my M.Sc. dissertation reveals. So, it was with pleasure that I revisited the subject at an informal lunch, on the picturesque neighbourhood of Santa Tereza. We browsed important questions like file formats, standards for image acquisitions, search tools, the possibilities (and limitations) of character recognition, and the difficult balance between short term access and long term preservation every project has to achieve.

I am looking forward to see the new developments of this project, which concerns a type of cultural asset which is often overlooked, despite its enormous importance: quantitative data.