The new academic year is here and in full swing at Estoria HQ, and is promising to be even busier and more exciting than last year. Hold onto your hats. We have started to get dates sorted for various talks we will be giving and postgraduate workshops we will be running over the coming months. Included in these are crowdsourcing workshops in Birmingham and Madrid, and talks and papers in Toulouse, Birmingham and Queen Mary, London. Tomorrow we welcome our new colleague to the team, Dr Enrique Jerez, who will be joining us as a research fellow. His arrival calls for the customary Estoria-team trip to the sandwich shop. Also tomorrow we wish the best of luck to our very own Dr Bárbara Bordalejo as she starts her new job at the University of Leuven, complete with a university bicycle with her photo on. You heard it here first, people. It’s not goodbye though, as Bárbara will still be playing an active role in the Estoria project, although some of her duties will now be carried out by Enrique. In the last few weeks we have welcomed four crowdsourcers to the project – Nick, Silvia, Avellana and Gustavo, all of whom have surprised and delighted us with their productivity and conscientiousness to the transcription process, and are establishing themselves as honorary and important members of the Estoria team. Best of all, we are counting down the days to the second annual Estoria de Espanna Digital Project colloquium, this time at the University of Oxford in mid-November. We will publish the programme for the colloquium in due course. There will be speakers joining us from several universities across the globe, including established academics, post-docs and graduate students, and we will once again be welcoming the consejo científico. All this has been going on whilst Christian and I continue to consume our bodyweight in tea on a daily basis. Sometimes we even make one for the boss (Earl Grey, naturally).
