digital & analogue

This evening I have been attempting to order robes for graduation. Graduation is going to be on the third of May, at the Royal Albert Hall. Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that I really do want the Ritual and Ceremony to make it all feel a bit more real, because my thesis submission was digital and my viva was digital and my corrections were digital and none of it quite felt real. The sheer implausibility of my corrections all being voluntary did not help this sense.

(I say "Some time ago, I came to the conclusion": you will be shocked to hear that there was a lot of subsequent dithering, but when the deadline came I did actually book.)

Part of the amusement is that the ceremony itself is entirely theatrical: unlike my other degrees I did not need to participate in this performance, either in person or in absentia, in order to have the doctorate conferred. It was all made official on the first of October in, good grief, 2021. It is a frippery, and I am amused that it is indulging in the frippery that I am choosing to use as a waymarker.

The other bit of the amusement is the fact that a requirement of booking my gown & hood is providing a copy of my degree certificate.

And it was only at this point -- the preparation for the culmination of this process I started pretty close to bang on a decade ago, if we take into account when I interviewed -- that it dawned on me that my degree certificate is the one part of this entire rigmarole that has, from my perspective, only ever been purely analogue.

Which is how I found myself taking a digital photograph of a piece of physical paper in order to complete my online booking for the event at which I am going to walk unnecessarily across a stage for the purpose of making more concrete in my own head the fact that a huge quantity of digital work constituted the completion of my Doktorarbeit.

(And then, of course, the Ede & Ravenscroft online form Did Not Work, so tomorrow I get to phone them. WHAT, I ask you, is the point! of a digital age! if I still have to TALK TO PEOPLE on the TELEPHONE using my FACE NOISES! But this, too, feels like a fittingly drawn-out conclusion...)