Why I blog

I’ve been thinking lately about why I originally set up this blog, and why, more than three years later, I continue to post on it. In the very early days I think I was looking for a place to work through some emerging ideas about digital forms of performance, in particular live broadcasts. I was still in the midst of another research project on a different topic, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to publish any work in this new area for quite some time. The blog seemed like a good way to document ideas as they came up, to get feedback on them, and then one day to put them together into something longer and more detailed–i.e. an academic publication.

The difference now is that ‘one day’ has finally arrived. The older project is finally done and dusted and the monograph out, and now my primary focus is on the publications that will come out of this research into digital technology and Shakespearean performance. At last, I’m able to devote the bulk of my research time to these ideas, and that time has also dramatically expanded, as I’m on study leave for about 7-8 months of this year. Hurrah!

But the thing I didn’t expect is that, now that I have the time and energy to focus solely on this digital research, I’ve actually started to blog less. In fact, I haven’t written a proper post on the subject for more than half a year. Instead, I’ve been writing up this research as a series of journal articles and chapters, and making plans for the book that will eventually come. Every research day has gone to this more publication-oriented mode of writing, and as a result the blog has lingered by the wayside.

So now that I am officially on sabbatical, I thought I’d take some time reflect on what I’ve learned about both my research and myself as a researcher through blogging, and to think about what I hope to get from it in the future…

1) Blogging offers a way of working oneself into a new research area, especially when time is limited and has to be split among many other things.

The biggest difference for me between starting my first book project and my second one has been time. When you’re working on your PhD, at least in the UK, your main focus is your research. After I started my first job I was suddenly responsible for a lot more things and many more people. Extended periods of research time took a particularly painful hit: I went from spending 4-5 days a week on my research to 1 if I was lucky. So this blog became a way of stealing snatches of time in between teaching, meetings, proof checking, and everything else to start working my way into a new topic. I could have done all this privately, keeping my own personal research diary, but to be honest being able to share my ideas with others was more motivating. This might be useful for me to remember in other aspects of my life: if I really want to do something, do it publicly/socially.

2) Blogging has allowed me to work up chunks of writing (and thinking) that can become part of future publications.

This is true, but also a bit trickier than I originally expected. It’s definitely been the case that several of the details I focused on in blogs have become key points in articles that I’ve recently been drafting. But I’ve also found myself a bit unsure about how to draw on this previous writing without duplicating it. For the most part I’ve developed existing points in new terms, but there are instances in which I’m just really happy with the way I originally wrote it. So I’ve actually been thinking about redacting the occasional sentence from some of my posts, should it prove an issue. I’m still not sure about all of this: I think it’s a grey area and that feelings about it can differ depending on who you ask. About 80% of A Year of Shakespeare had been published online before it became a book, for instance, and all that material is still available through www.yearofshakespeare.com. But I know that others are understandably more wary about material previously posted online, and so I’ve started thinking more pragmatically about what can go on the blog as I come closer to getting some of my ideas more officially in print.

3) Blogging has helped me become part of a community of researchers in this field, both directly and indirectly. 

This maybe seems like a no-brainer: blogging is social, responsive, immediate, conversational. You can respond to ideas in a few hours, whereas academic publishing would at best take a few months, and more realistically a few years. This doesn’t necessarily make blogging better than academic publishing–just different. I’ve been able to get talking to others in the field, both directly and indirectly, and to learn from them as I go. This has perhaps been the greatest benefit for me. The flip side is, now that I feel well connected and reasonably well read in the field, I kind of just want to get my head down and write my ideas up the old-fashioned way. Blogging has been a great way of getting started, but, as of yet, not the most natural way of continuing on.

4) Blogging can take a lot of different forms and, presumably, they can change with time. 

This is probably the most important thing for me right now. When I first started blogging, I was careful to post regularly and to make sure that those posts were in-depth pieces of writing that I would be happy to publish in more academic contexts. I still really value those posts, and I must say that they’ve been the most helpful in terms of generating feedback from others and establishing some of the key issues that have turned up again in longer publications. But shorter, more whimsical, more descriptive, and/or more irregular posts have their place too. I suspect that as I get further into the writing of this project, the blogs will become more about the process of writing or the activities that surround and support the writing, rather than the writing itself. We’ll see; I might surprise myself. But given how precious having time to write is, I plan to make the most of it while I have it. This blog–or, who knows, maybe a future one–will always be there when it’s time for something different.

 

Shakespeare Research in the Digital Age

In my last post I spent some time reflecting on the introduction to Shakespeare and the Digital World by way of the Year of Shakespeare project; in this post I want to dive right into part one of Carson and Kirwan’s edited collection, which focuses on RESEARCH.

Each section in the book is fronted by a short introduction by one of the editors, and here Carson begins with a quotation from Katherine Rowe: ‘Older forms and values provide a vital intellectual framework for the way we use newer media, shaping the needs we bring to the new tools and the opportunities we find in them’ (qtd p. 10). It’s an apt start to a section that often focuses on the experience of the researcher, and especially on the experience of researchers for whom the world hasn’t always been digital. Essays from John Lavagnino, Bruce Smith, Farah Karim-Cooper, and David McInnis make up this thought-provoking opening section, and below are four big ideas I am left with after reading it.

(1) Digital research is more than what we think it is.

John Lavagnino starts us off with a snapshot of the long history of digital, electronic, and computer-assisted humanities research. Digital humanities may have come on the scene in or around 2008/9, he reminds us, but ‘”applied computing in the humanities” has been visible since the 1940s’ (p. 14). In addition to looking back, Lavagnino’s chapter also looks around and forward at digital research now, in particular its use of tools and resources created by industry rather than the academy (Google Books, YouTube, etc.), and the fact that even people who wouldn’t consider themselves digital humanities scholars are doing ‘invisibly digital research’ through their use of EEBO, Literature Online, and the like (p. 22). Bruce Smith’s subsequent chapter discusses what it feels like when that naturalized kind of digital research is made visible, primarily through its disruption. Here he reflects on the experience of locating a book in the library that eludes him online, which prompts him to consider how much and how quickly we have come to take for granted widespread access to research materials that were previously the focus of more limited, time-bound, and difficult scholarly pilgrimages.

(2) Digital research is more mediated than non-digital research– or is it?

Karim-Cooper’s chapter on iPad technology continues with a meditation on the experience of the researcher today, one who is ‘no longer able to sit for hours researching and writing in university libraries, but … [is] instead encouraged to run multiple projects simultaneously, create new partnerships and travel around speaking to the public, all while maintaining an impressive publishing profile’ (p. 37). Tools like the iPad help facilitate research in unlikely but necessary places — namely, on trains — but for Karim-Cooper they ultimately remain just that: tools. While research into haptic technologies is working on putting the sensation of touch back into the touchpad, Karim-Cooper observes how researchers ‘of the screen’ miss out on the full sensory experience of handling, and thus learning from, material books. Does this mediation of physical feeling, she wonders, also entail a parallel mediation of emotional and cognitive affect? When we use an iPad or any other screened device to read literature, ‘Will we be able to feel the effects of poetry in the same way?’ (p. 38). Smith likewise considers the embodied experience of the researcher, and the way in which digital research methods are reshaping what he calls ‘the phenomenology of knowledge’ (p. 29). For him, though, digital research is radically unmediated, in that pages from digital facsimiles appear to us online without context, without ‘sedimentation’, without history. They are simply there, and their dissociation from anything else leads Smith to suggest that digital research is a supremely ‘presentist’ way of working. What you see is what you get, but perhaps not much more.

(3) Digital research has often been about tools and resources, but maybe it needs to start being more about research questions.

Lavagnino’s opening essay suggests that the most influential digital scholarship has taken the shape of scholarly resources rather that critical or analytical innovations, and Smith and Karim-Cooper’s interest in the digital primarily as tool or approach adds to this line of thought. But David McInnis’s final chapter presents an example of how digital ways of working may also allow us to change the fundamental research questions we can ask. Although he explains that he and his colleagues did not initially think of the Lost Plays Database as an online project, they eventually realized they needed to go digital in order to allow for the international scholarly collaboration that was needed to meet the aims of their project: ‘Creating a record of this disparate and obscure information [i.e. that involved in tracing lost plays] relies on collective knowledge and the assemblage of information which has little significance on its own … encouraging new and easy ways of interacting with other scholars is essential if the sum is to be greater than its parts’ (pp. 45, 52). While we might often think of digital work as isolating, distancing, or even antisocial, McInnis shows that this certainly need not be the case. What’s more, his bibliography of the collaborative print publications that have emerged from the LPD project likewise illustrates that the divide between ‘traditional’ and digital ways of working may not always be as stark as we first think.

(4) Digital research is not necessarily easier, cheaper, more democratic, more manageable, more innovative, or faster than non-digital research.

Lavagnino starts the section with the warning that ‘a common problem has been unrealistic ambition or overestimation of what can be done in a purely computational way’ (p. 17), and McInnis finishes it with the observation that ‘the transition from print to web is often made with little planning or critical reflection’ (p. 43). That has certainly been my own experience in terms of digital projects. What’s the point of doing things digitally, if you don’t have a strong sense of how or why you’re doing them in the first place? Which is something I’ll no doubt come back to in my post on part 2 ofShakespeare and the Digital World, which focuses on teaching and pedagogy in the digital age.