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As I’ve blogged about before, I’m not all that big into making New Year’s Resolutions on and around January 1st. For me — and for many other academics I know — it is the start of the academic year that gets me thinking about what I would like to do differently, areas I can improve in, etc. The fresh start of a new school year always seems to me like a much better time to make these sort of grand plans than the snowy, cold days of early January do.
As I take stock at the end of the summer I am, for the first time in my academic career, pleased with the amount of work I did over the past 4 months. Did I get everything crossed off the very ambitious list I made back in May? No, but I got quite a bit of it done. I finished up a couple of very big, daunting tasks that have been hanging over my head for…oh…well, quite some time. I also got some new writing done and have reconnected with the research I’ve been wanting to work on for a while. I took a couple of vacation-style trips (camping and hiking! yay!), but didn’t travel extensively for research this summer. I stayed home and processed/worked on the research I’ve collected from places like the British Library and Library and Archives Canada over the past few summers. One of the things that was giving me a considerable amount of angst over the last few years was that I’d gathered all this great stuff but have not found time to really work with it. It was really great to get in to this material in a meaningful way this summer. I was chatting with a friend and colleague about this a few weeks ago, and she said that she thinks this is pretty standard. That you either have to commit to travel and visiting archives/research sites in a summer OR commit to writing and processing the research previously gathered.
At any rate, I’ve begun working through the material I collected over the past few summers and am starting to see the work I want to do on this subject come together in ways that continue to excite me. My resolution for this academic new year, then, is a simple one — to keep this momentum going through the fall term. In order to do that I know I need to protect my research days with as much vigour as I can possibly muster. Term started this week and I’m happy to report that I stubbornly clung to this plan in spite of the whirlwind of meetings and back-to-class activities that are taking place right now. Let’s see if I can make it last right through until my sabbatical begins in January!
-Last night I watched the first two episodes of CBC’s The Great Food Revolution. I hadn’t intended to watch it, but the TV stayed on after Jeopardy and it only took me a few minutes to get hooked. In two hours this show covered many interesting topics — cooking schools, celebrity chefs, how sushi became popular in North America and the “behind the scenes” processes that go into the development of President’s Choice products. (and, yes, I’ll admit I’m a bit of a slave to the PC brand). Anyhow, this was a very interesting 2 hours of TV-watching and I’m looking forward to the remaining two episodes.
-I have finished the latest round of edits on a major research project that I’ve been working on for many, many years. I packaged it up and sent it off this morning. I’m still thinking of ways to celebrate the occasion. Suggestions welcome.
-I am supposed to be getting a new hot water tank today. Why does this fill me with dread? I think I’ve convinced myself that it will be more complicated that it is supposed to be. This aspect of home ownership (the upgrades and renovations that I can’t possibly fathom doing myself) freaks me out. Still, I want to avoid the situation that happened in the last rental house I lived in. In that house the bottom of the old hot water tank rusted right away and flooded the basement. It was an old house, so replacing the tank was not a straight-forward job (something about an old chimney and no chimney liner) and we were without hot water for days. I sincerely hope that I got all of my bad hot water tank karma out of the way that time and that things will be uneventful on this front today.
[Update: so, when the LivClean guy was out here setting up this whole new hot water tank dealio the other day I specifically asked him about the chimney liner, given the last experience I had with a hot water tank. He, apparently, checked and said I have a proper liner and everything would be fine. The technicians just stomped in and out of my house and couldn't do the install because, you guessed it, I didn't have a chimney liner. Whatever.]
The Brock Review is seeking submissions for an upcoming general issue (Volume 11, Number 1). Articles that focus on any research topic in the Humanities will be considered for publication, but articles addressing interdisciplinary topics are especially encouraged. Creative pieces will also be considered for publication in this issue. Deadline for submissions to this general issue is September 30, 2009.
Please visit the journal website for article guidelines and submission instructions.
The Brock Review is an online refereed journal published by the Humanities Research Institute at Brock University.
I continue to plod on with the manuscript edits. Plod, plod, plod.
I have spent the entire day on a paragraph. An innocent-sounding query by one of the lovely people who reviewed one of my manuscripts ended up sending me on quite a fact chasing mission. The idea was that I needed to add in a sentence or two to an existing paragraph, you know, to clarify things and add in a little factoid. Searching for this particular factoid seemed like it would be a straightforward research question, but it ended up being anything but.
Imagine, for instance, that there existed a law banning, say, eating ice cream cones in public. But this imaginary ice cream cone law had different clauses for, say, sugar cones vs. regular cones — maybe one was banned earlier. And would frozen yogurt count? And what if different branches of the legislating institution had different laws on the books about eating ice cream cones in public? All of the sudden it becomes quite difficult to offer up a straightforward factoid-laden sentence explaining the imaginary ice cream ban. Yeah…that is about the size of the research/writing I did today, substituting, of course, the imaginary ice cream ban with the actual subject of my research. The digging I did today revealed some really important stuff and this will certainly strengthen this section of the manuscript, but I would really like to have more than a single paragraph to show for about 9 hours of work.
Slow and steady wins the race and all that jazz. I feel like I’m running through jello right now.
I woke up with some fresh ideas and a scary to do list this morning. I’m currently editing 2 manuscripts and, while both of those projects are going well, they are taking a bit longer than I’d like. (I actually spent over an hour on one footnote yesterday — not a simple citation, but a longer, explanatory note that was tricky to write). These are both projects that have been hanging around my life for many years. I am looking forward to moving them both out and on to the next step, whatever form that may be. I love these projects in the way one loves a cranky old relative. They are near and dear to me and I want the best for them, but sometimes they wear me down.
I realized the other day that I need to do even a little bit of work each week on my new research, generating new ideas even while I’m finishing up these older projects. It is that spark of imagination, excitement and creativity that goes with the brainstorming of a new project that I think makes academic work so addictive, what keeps us coming back and helps us to push through the bouts of writer’s block, the tedium of revisions and the sting of rejection letters.
This is why, then, I found myself brainstorming about a new piece of writing this morning even as the two aged manuscripts were sitting on the corner of my desk, giving me the evil eye. A call for papers grabbed my attention and as I was going through my morning routine of making tea, showering, etc. I couldn’t stop thinking about that CFP. A proposal must surely be written, but what form will it take, what research will it draw on? I turned to my newest favorite thing in writing productivity, Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die and hashed out a few rough thoughts. Much more work needs to be done, of course, but it is a start. I’ll keep mulling it over in the back of my head as I return to my two old friends.
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I’m sitting at my kitchen table with piles of paper spread all around me. I’ve spent the past couple of days really digging into the edits on my manuscript (affectionately referred to as “the project that must not be named”). I got off to a slow start on this project this month, but the good news is that I’ve found my groove now and am actually enjoying it. The feedback I got from the reviewers was positive and encouraging and full of excellent suggestions — just what I needed to kick-start my energy and enthusiasm for this project again.
I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that I didn’t get off to the flying start I’d hoped earlier in May. As I’ve previously posted, May is a tough month — geez, it is almost a year to the day since I found my groove last year. Maybe next year I should just book holidays for the first few weeks in May and be done with it. I could go somewhere where the pollen counts are lower and skip the allergies too. But I’d miss all the early season gardening. Such a dilemma!
I think I’ll try to keep going with these edits tonight. I am, however, taking little breaks to watch the cast of characters assembling for the evening in my backyard: a young-looking skunk, a birdseed-loving rabbit, a pair of Baltimore Orioles and a delightful assortment of other birds, including a little baby sparrow who is doing that funny dance they do when they want to be fed.
We hear the term Open Access a lot these days, and I’m excited by the number of journals that are using this publishing model. When we relaunched The Brock Review the decision to go with an online, Open Access format was almost an automatic one.
I am amazed at the perception that some people still cling to regarding the intellectual rigor of these journals. Papers published in Open Access journals still go out for peer review and there are still the same standards and expectations of the scholarship, the difference is that anyone with an internet connection (instead of anyone with an institutional password) can read the published articles. Isn’t this what sharing knowledge is all about?
I recently read a wonderfully thought-provoking blog post about Open Access over at Academic Evolution. In this post, the author talks about how Galileo embraced the idea of sharing knowledge and draws some interesting parallels between what was going on in Galileo’s time and our current situation. A very interesting read — be sure to check it out!
When I was in grad school I discovered the magic of freewriting. It certainly helped me work through new ideas and writer’s block when I was working on my dissertation, but I’ve not consistently kept up the habit in recent years. I need to get back to it. It works. Simple as that.
I’ve been stuck on an idea for a little while now so yesterday I decided to do some freewriting to help get unstuck. I shut off the laptop, grabbed a pen and a notebook and began to write. I surprised myself by writing 8 pages. Not all of it is usable, and some of it is repetitive. However, the exercise brought out some ideas and approaches that I didn’t even know I was thinking about.
I need this to be a productive summer on the writing front. I have a number of projects started and need to move them on out. I am officially committing to doing a session of freewriting every day. You can hold me to that.
In my academic work I focus on a range of topics, but, in general, the historical period that interests me the most is the end of the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th. I often find myself in archives, reading letters and diaries of historical figures who are significant to whatever research project I am working on at the time. This process of discovery through the day-to-day writings of my research subjects is, perhaps, one of my favourite things about doing academic work. These brittle and stained pages contain so much information and tell stories in a way that official history textbooks can not.
I wonder what will become of our day-to-day archives. It is rare that I sit down and compose a letter on paper (with a pen!) these days. Correspondence happens by email or by IM. Sure, we can save copies of emails in folders, but what happens when the current software and operating systems we use become obsolete? How many personal stories will be lost from our generation? What kind of archive will we leave for those curious about the world in the early decades of the 21st century?
I’ve been struggling with a piece I’ve been writing for months — months!! I had all the basic facts and information down, but was missing the thread to pull it all together. This piece is supposed to soon be appearing as a journal article and I promised the editor I’d send him my revised manuscript this week (not my first extension on this piece, I’m ashamed to admit), but I’ve been sitting here at my desk all week trying to bring this thing together and have just been struggling. I’ve added, deleted, reorganized, rewritten and nothing seemed to work.
At 4pm today, while chatting with a friend on Google Talk, I hit on an idea. We talked it through on IM and, low and behold, it is the elusive thread I’ve been looking for all these months. I’ve spent the past couple of hours reworking the piece so this thread is now woven through the piece and it seems to be working. I should be able to package it out and send it off by tomorrow at the latest. Thank freaking goodness for that! I think if I was another day late with this piece the journal editor would drive to my house and bop me on the head with a nerf bat.
I have written enough to know that this seems to be part of the process, so now when I feel like my head will explode from frustration I know the solution is nearby. However, this knowledge does not minimize the sheer aggravation that necessarily accompanies the “just before breakthrough” period. It is absolute hell. If anyone knows how to bypass this, please drop me a line.
