ABSTRACT
Durham University, May 2007: Our instructor sings our praise as the water levels skyrocket and the ground fades away beneath a transparent layer of blue. “Congratulations, you've got flooding!” Quite, by a click of the mouse we have submitted the flood plain on the screens in front of us to a deluge of surreal proportions. The flow of water quickly reaches the edge of the animation window and queues up in a square column behind a bridge crossing the river. Despite the fact that we are all novices in the art of hydraulic computer modelling, it is painstakingly obvious to all of us that we may have managed to produce a flood, but not a particularly credible or realistic one of those. We are still a far cry from claiming that we are simulating something that could realistically take place. But that is not the point right now. What feels like a real achievement is that the model is actually running after an unending stream of bugs and error messages. Finally, we seem to be doing something right; we have learned how to feed it the correct stuf ; it is complying. Or rather, we are complying: at this point in the training exercise the happy amateurs are tuning in to the demands of the software and for the first time we get a sense of what it means to become a modeller.
