I have clearly not been very good at keeping up my blog here. I’m going to blame the obvious culprit: my dissertation.
The good news is that I finally seem to have figured out a writing routine that is productive for me. This consists of producing 2 pages a day, 7 days a week, religiously. Every once in a while this is very easy to do, and I allow myself to claim those days as gifts. More often than not, however, it takes a few hours, and there’s not a bit of anxiety around getting myself started. And then there are those days when it’s like gouging my eyes out. But I do it anyway, and 2 pages is just about manageable.
At this point I’ve come to realize that at least 87.4% of writing a dissertation is figuring out the magnitude of the task and how I, personally, can be the productive writer of such a large project. A humbling process, to be sure!
I’m also continuing to do systems development and database work on Timothy Tangherlini’s Danish Folklore Project and Lisa Parkes’s Virtual Study Abroad Site (both at UCLA), as well as development on my own LitMap project.
I have to say that it is hard to fully concentrate on both analyzing literature and coding algorithms. Each of them requires such immersive attention. Full blog post on that soon.
I did attend the MLA (Modern Languages Association) Conference in San Francisco in December/January and sat on a panel named “Imagining Collaboration in the Humanities.” All of us on the panel did actually talk about real-life collaboration in the humanities, and there was quite a lively discussion afterwards. Here were my main points of discussion:
- Group authorship — how do we deal with this in the humanities, which has long operated on the single author model?
- The challenges of “translating” between humanities and hard science/computer project members.
- The challenges of project management — in a collaborative work environment, who is in charge? What model of management do we choose? whose project is it?
- Which model of group work do we choose when working collaboratively in the humanities? The scientific laboratory model? A model from the social sciences? What about models that have emerged out of feminist discourse?
- How are academic institutions dealing with humanities dissertations that have collaboratively authored elements? UCLA, for example, doesn’t “count” any collaboratively authored work. Is this model still feasible as collaboration becomes more common?
