Anthropology 703 Node: Writing the Field

Hi all,

Today I discussed the reverse order outline. Here is some more on this useful strategy, which is also called the “after the fact outline) (see here)

Turns out you are not the only Anthropologists thinking about your writing. In fact, at this very moment there are a large number that are actively reflecting on their writing habits and practice,  and keeping each other accountable!  For example, check out the project over at Durham University (in the UK)  (EDIT: I just noted these old links aren’t working…stay tuned, I’m hoping to find all of them!) This website is dedicated to, “supporting social science researchers who are seeking to engage more effectively with the practical and intellectual issues that arise in the quest to produce texts that are engaging, accurate and analytically insightful.” There are lots of things that might be useful, including a section on graduate students chatting about the thesis writing process. I wanted to draw your attention to the section on “writing on writing”, which includes some interesting short pieces on the writing process. There are quite a few Anthropologists involved, and our old friend the sociologist Howard Becker also appears.  This appears to be mostly qualitative writing, but may be of use to the most quantitative amongst you as well. Some highlights:

Marilyn Strathern (a big name in Anthropology if you haven’t heard of her) on the “data-theory gap”

What initially may appear to the young research student as a gap between data and text changes colour over time.   Habituation to writing creates other kinds of gaps, such as that awful one between everything one has already written and a new venture, or between the magnitude of the field of enquiry, the heap on the plate, and the bit one wants to bite off for now.   I describe one particular gap just as I find myself often describing it to students who seem cast down or a bit low or even depressed about writing.  I am sure there are times when my comments come over rather unfeeling, as not caring enough about the state they are in.  I think that is because I want to say that, while I am sorry if someone is feeling miserable, it doesn’t help for me to feed it with commiserations.  Rather, what I from my own moods can tell them about what may be happening (sometimes not always) is that the gap opening up between what needs doing and the capacity to do it can actually be a prerequisite to writing at all.   Similar gaps can make people stumble at any point or in any corner of their lives; for the would-be writer they can be the threshhold of creativity.

Tim Ingold on handwriting:

I am saddened by the rule, observed in my own institution as in most others, that requires students to produce work in a standardised, word-processed format. I am told that one reason for this rule is that it allows work to be checked for originality, using anti-plagiarism software. From the start, students are introduced to the idea that academic writing is a game whose primary object is to generate novelty through the juxtaposition and recombination of materials from prescribed sources. Word processors were expressly designed as devices with which to play this game, and it is one that many academics, having been trained in its conventions, are only too keen to carry on. But the game is a travesty of the writer’s craft. Contrary to university regulations, I encourage my students to write by hand, as well as to draw, and to compare their experience of doing so with that of using the computer. The response has been unequivocal. Handwriting and drawing, they report, re-awaken long-suppressed sensibilities and induce a greater sense of personal involvement, leading in turn to profound insight.

Medical Anthropologist Arthur Kleinman on “searching for a voice”:

But perhaps my strongest advice on writing comes down to these two recommendations. First, if you are going to write, then write. Write every day. Write when you are most wide awake. But write. And edit yourself (and do so severely) and rewrite. Second, aspire to prose that is arresting, prose that is beautiful. Most of the time, like me, you won’t achieve it. No matter, it is the journey of aspiration that counts, that lets you weigh the best words of strong writers and test them against your own strengths, that lets you experiment, eventually comes to burnish and improve what you do write. And that will matter for your readers and ultimately for the writer in you.

…and finally, Becker on some [more] “words on writing”:

The most common faults arising from such causes these days include the piles of unnecessary bibliographic references decorating academic writing and the incessant use of passive grammatical constructions. Authors generally insert those unnecessary references because the item has turned up in a bibliographic computer search or because some critic has said “You haven’t mentioned So-and-so, who has also written on this subject.” It’s far easier to insert the whole list the search engine turned up or to mention So-and-so than to make the perfectly good argument for not doing so you might have ready. I solve this problem for myself by insisting that every reference in what I write contain specific page numbers–not the whole article or book, just the pages relevant to the point where the reference has been inserted. Occasionally I do mean to refer to the whole book or article but usually not, there’s just a paragraph or sentence that’s relevant and I have the page number to put in. I generally suspect, perhaps unfairly, that authors who don’t provide page numbers haven’t read the item they’re citing.

There is lots more there, so do take a look (again, I’m hoping to find archives of these posts!)

Hi all,

As I had more detailed questions on how I process my notes, I thought I’d walk you through an example. I think this might show where the easy work happens, but also the hard work of thinking/linking.

I am currently working on a paper for the Society for American Archaeology on my ongoing project at the ancient site of Tiwanaku. One of the sections in this (short!) presentation will be on proto-urbanism, an issue explored in my region in great detail by the late John Janusek. This chunk of work was well suited for a short 45 minute time block I had for writing yesterday. Below are the steps I took.

I searched Obsidian, and discovered quickly that I have never actually synthesized Janusek’s thoughts on proto-urbanism (and how it is in communication with others’ work). So, I dug up a 2015 article where I knew he discussed his thinking in some detail. I didn’t sit down and read the entire paper and highlight/annotate (my usual approach when dealing with a new paper). Instead, I simply jumped to the sections where he discussed this issue, and copy and pasted into a text document.

I then worked to synthesize down all the relevant information into key points. At this stage I added titles as a way to structure the content of the key ideas. As I tighten these down, I make sure that I am properly referencing where the ideas come from.

Once edited down/paraphrased in my own words (for my own interests), the many chunks of quoted text resulted in 4 key points: “Cities as Process” (a point that I know connects with other notes I have in my collection), “Incipient proto-urbanism in the Titicaca basin” (the issue that drove me to this article in the first place), “Late Formative proto-urbanism and periodicity” (I think I have notes on this), and “Andean Proto-urbanism and animistic ecologies” (again, linked to other notes that I have). So the next stage – and really the one that Ahrens stressed in the reading last week – is thinking further with these, and connecting them. So off to Obsidian I go.

Above I’m adding relevant information to Obsidian note. Note that when I type the # symbol it draws up all the tags in a “auto-complete” fashion. For this note, I will add tags for #religion/animism #urbanism and #relational_ontology. Also note that I have added the bibliographic information. Not yet added are the Literature notes (a note that compiles all the notes I have taken from this reading) and the relevant associated other notes.

As I add the relevant information, I’ll also clean up the note and try to think more about why I took this note and how it might connect. For instance, in the animistic ecology note, I will do a quick search of my database to see if I have notes with Urban + animism. And I do!

Above is a previous note that I took on urbanism and animism in an article on Hittite urbanisms. I add a link both here and on my previous note – clearly I have a number of themes emerging on this theme on animism and urbanism (which often is under the umbrella of relational archaeologies). I direct myself to the notes on a later Janusek article where he further develops this thinking on “eco-regime” and animism.

I continue to do this with all four notes, trying to parse the various connections and conversations that each note engages. Ahrens is useful here

“The slip-box forces us to ask numerous elaborating questions: What does it mean? How does it connect to … ? What is the difference between … ? What is it similar to? That the slip-box is not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections between notes. Connections can be made between heterogeneous notes – as long as the connection makes sense…the slip-box is forcing us to elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously.”

So, I find other connections: to Wengrow and Graeber on “seasonal complexity” (which helps me think about urbanism as not being the same year round), to Bandy’s writing on the seasonality of raised field agriculture in the region, all of which is connected in the individual note. My note on Cities as Process connects to a much more networked series of notes I use in my Ancient Cities class (but is not immediately relevant to this writing project).

Above a “literature note” that assembles all links to all the notes taken on a particular reading, and the abstract. While not at all necessary, I like having a bird’s eye view of what I produced out of something I read. If I come back to this article in 6-months time, I may add to it given a particular issue I’m grappling with…at which point the list of permanent notes would grow.

Ok. I now have all that I can work with from Janusek on proto-urbanism. These notes now serve for a paragraph in my conference presentation on proto-urbanism.

Janusek (2015) argues that Tiwanaku “emergent centrality” came from previous centuries of “incipient urbanism”, of a broader distributed network of Late Formative centers and settlements. These places, sites like Chiripa and Kala Uyuni on the Taraco Peninsula and Khonkho Wanakne, were site of “cyclical ritual convergence”. The site of Khonkho Wankane (show image) was an example of “distributed proto-urbanism”, across both the landscape but also across the human:non-human divide. There were many such proto-urban centers that were networked, but the glue was as much in stones, mountains, as water as it was in politically-motivated leaders. In Andes both human and non-human forces and cycles were built in/embodied within proto-urban forms. Janusek argues that Tiwanaku was founded on an ” utterly pragmatic, if profoundly ritualized, animistic ecology” (Janusek 2015: 230).

As recent writings stress, however, such ancient urbansims were likely cyclical in nature (see Graeber and Wengrow 2021 on “seasonal complexity”). Janusek points to a range of evidence – including ephemeral surfaces covered by thin layers of erosional sedimentation and short-term hearths – to suggest that these were “sparsely inhabited centers of recurring periodic gathering and ritual activity.” The implication of this “cyclical mobility” is that not all those that built these centers or participated in the rituals lived in the center. As we will below, our efforts to understand the earliest occupations of Tiwanaku are driven by a goal to take seriously both the human and non-human, but also the seasonal complexity that may have characterized this dynamic place.

It is still a “shitty rough draft”, and will likely change as other aspects of the paper develop. But I have now woven in how my take on other issues – namely the importance of non-human entities and seasonality (both which Janusek only briefly touches on in his discussion) – aligns with the theme of proto-urbanism. And I know that there are a series of connected paths I can explore in my network of notes if I need to engage an associated topic. Next time I have 45 minutes, I’ll be grappling with a section in the text on how our new phasing of the site is transforming our understanding. Here I *know * that I have ~6 or 7 existing relevant notes I can simply lay out and play with to synthesize this argument.

A last point to remember: this is just *my system*. This can all be accomplished in fewer steps or more analogue driven approaches. The critical point is the thinking that goes with the note-making, and how the writing happens at each step along the way.

Hi all,
A few follow ups on today’s discussion of info-glut tools. I gave a lecture last year at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship. Much of it touches on issues we explored today, but perhaps of interest. The recording and associated links can be found here and here.

Some of you are interested in having a go with Obsidian, but haven’t used markdown. Here is a quick primer. Here is a converter if you have word files you want in that format.

Anyways – happy to help if you want some basics of getting things started.

A reminder: please get me your Annual Reviews to the Dropbox folder once you have identified the piece you will writing about.

Hi all,

Before our class tomorrow I wanted to share a couple of books that I am always pushing on people. Let’s start with an oldie but goodie (which is also available for free on the internet as a PDF)

I’ll discuss the book in more detail next week, but for now, here is a great quote from his Chapter 9:

Every book has a skeleton hidden between its boards. Your job is to find it. A book comes to you with flesh on its bare bones and clothes over its flesh. It is all dressed up. I am not asking you to be impolite or cruel. You do not have to undress it or tear the flesh off its limbs to get at the firm structure that underlies the soft. But you must read the book with X-ray eyes, for it is an essential part of your first apprehension of any book to grasp its structure.

You know how violently some people are opposed to vivisection. There are others who feel as strongly against analysis of any sort. They simply do not like to have things taken apart, even if the only instrument used in cutting up is the mind. They somehow feel that something is being destroyed by analysis. This is particularly true in the case of works of art. If you try to show them the inner structure, the articulation of the parts, the way the joints fit together, they react as if you had murdered the poem or the piece of music.

That is why I have used the metaphor of the X ray. No harm is done to the living organism by having its skeleton lighted up. The patient does not even feel as if his privacy had been infringed upon. Yet the doctor has discovered the disposition of the parts. He has a visible map of the total layout. He has an architect’s ground plan. No one doubts the usefulness of such knowledge to help further operations on the living organism.

Well, in the same way, you can penetrate beneath the moving surface of a book to its rigid skeleton. You can see the way the parts are articulated, how they hang together, and the thread that ties them into a whole. You can do this without impairing in the least the vitality of the book you are reading. You need not fear that Humpty-Dumpty will be all in pieces, never to come together again. The whole can’t remain in animation while you proceed to find out what makes the wheels go round.

This reflects some of the themes that I have been bringing up all semester. Underlying structures of writing matter…but they should also impact how you read and annotate.

The other book may be a nice complement to my discussion of PDF management and info-glut this week. This book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, is written by Steven Johnson. It is a fascinating read (and you can watch a short animation here of some of the ideas), but in particular his discussion of common-place books.

The philosopher John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during his first year at Oxford. Over the next decade he developed and refined an elaborate system for indexing the book’s content. Locke thought his method important enough that he appended it to a printing of his canonical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Here’s an excerpt from his “instructions for use”:

“When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA, I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. i. if in the space marked E. i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.”

Locke’s approach seems almost comical in its intricacy, but it was a response to a specific set of design constraints: creating a functional index in only two pages that could be expanded as the commonplace book accumulated more quotes and observations. In a certain sense, this is a search algorithm, a defined series of steps that allows the user to index the text in a way that makes it easier to query. Locke’s method proved so popular that a century later, an enterprising publisher named John Bell printed a notebook entitled: “Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” Put another way, Bell created a commonplace book by commonplacing someone else’s technique for maintaining a commonplace book. The book included eight pages of instructions on Locke’s indexing method, a system which not only made it easier to find passages, but also served the higher purpose of “facilitat[ing] reflexive thought.”

The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association. The historian Robert Darnton describes this tangled mix of writing and reading:

“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.”

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. The beauty of Locke’s scheme was that it provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings.

But all of this magic was predicated on one thing: that the words could be copied, re-arranged, put to surprising new uses in surprising new contexts. By stitching together passages written by multiple authors, without their explicit permission or consultation, some new awareness could take shape.”

A few pages later Johnson discusses DEVONthink as a useful way to do such work digitally. (You can read some of this on a shorter blog he wrote).  I’ll discuss this software tomorrow 

Below are a few themes that students have taken on in recent years. (I’ve simply posted the title along with their introductory paragraph). Hope this helps!

“In conversation: Histories in the Making”:
“This week’s blog takes a look at current issues of history, or what constitutes the past within the disciplines of religion and anthropological archaeology. Exchanges between a religion studies student, Sam M., and an archaeology student, Stefanie W., take place to first understand the differences between these disciplines and to highlight the variety of approaches in search of multiple truths that cross-cut the making of histories. Underwriting this in our conversations between religion and archaeology is the focus on misnomers of “objectivity” and “accuracy,” as well as our perceptions of what history constitutes in the interpretations of identities and worldviews amongst different individuals, communities, and societies.”

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) : Making of a Hindu India
“Earlier this year, riots in Delhi resulted in the death of at least 51 individuals, with the majority being Muslims (The Guardian, 16 March, 2020). These riots were the direct result of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a controversial citizenship bill passed by the Indian parliament in December 2019. This act offers citizenship rights to the so-called persecuted minorities of India’s neighbouring countries (Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh) where Muslims are the majority population. According to the CAA, Hindu, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Christian migrants from the aforementioned countries who took refuge in India earlier than December 2014 would be naturalized as Indian citizens under the basis of religious persecution. However, those who claim citizenship under this Act are not required to prove said religious persecution. Identifying as non-Muslim is sufficient to claim Indian citizenship, making it clear that with the CAA, the ruling party of India, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), is trying to create an environment of existential fear amongst Muslim Indians. This blog will explore the rise of religious nationalism and discrimination in India through an examination of the region’s religious and political history and archaeology; discussing initially India’s history of mistrust, followed by a study of the Partition Era and archaeology’s role in the creation of Indian identity, and then the attempted erasure of tribes in India – an underrepresented minority in the country. Having provided this context, we will discuss the role of the BJP in appropriating the past in order to spread false narratives about what it means to be Indian, equating Indian identity with the Hindu religion.”

“Blurred Prospects”
The anthropology graduate student experience can be incredibly rewarding on a personal and professional level but remains marked by institutional, sub-disciplinary, and individual uncertainty. We invoke the metaphor of “blurriness,” a quality of haze and ill-defined sight, to discuss our thoughts on the academy as two first-year doctoral students. Loa Gordon is a social-medical anthropologist who studies the self-administered care practices of Ontario university students with mental health struggles. Julien Favreau is a geoarchaeologist who studies 2 million-year-old stone tools from East Africa to determine from which outcrops human ancestors procured raw materials. Below we will reflect on the precarities we face as hopeful academics. By discussing the blurriness we encounter in the academy, in our respective sub-disciplinary niches, and in our individual research, we will delineate common feelings among our cohort and provide a platform on which to openly address these pressing issues.

“Identity and Interdisciplinary Studies: a comparison of archaeological and bioarchaeological perspectives”:
Identity is a broad and encompassing topic that touches on every aspect of our lives, so it makes sense that anthropological engagement of identity takes many forms. This blog post looks at two of these engagements, archaeology and biological anthropology, to (1) see where differences and similarities lie in the investigation of identity, and (2) to explore if one sub-discipline really needs the other. To do this, two articles were selected by specialists in the respective fields: one of us is a biological anthropologist looking at Roman diet through stable isotopes, the other a paleoethnobotanist exploring early hunter-gatherer diet, subsistence, and foodways in the south-central Andes. A brief description of the articles are presented below, as well as discussions on common threads and divergences between the articles.

“Anthropologists are ‘Story Telling Animals“
The concern for narrative and story telling is one theme that cross-cuts anthropological archaeology and social anthropology. We have covered this topic in class but there are particulars that are unique to each sub-field that we wished to cover in this week’s collaborative blog. The one commonality that the two fields share is the troublesome notion of objectivity. In the following paragraphs, we would like to examine narrative and its effectiveness in the two anthropological sub-fields.

An Experimentation in Collaboration: A Dual Approach to Traditional Ecological Knowledge:
Inspired by Koster et al.’s (2016) research in Current Anthropology we have chosen to discuss a topic which intersects our disciplinary interests of natural and social science. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is a body of knowledge that is site specific and is developed through generation of cultural transmission (Drew 2006). This knowledge concerns relationships between Indigenous persons, other organisms, and the living environment. Various disciplines have incorporated TEK in their research programs, and here we focus on its presence in anthropology. In this collaborative blog, we explore this issue from archaeological and sociocultural perspectives. These intersections concern the historical and ecological perspectives, management practices, and cautions of TEK.

Hi all! I wanted to briefly describe my writing for this semester. As I mentioned in class, I often have several things on the go, each at different stages. For instance, I am about to (this week!) resubmit a paper to the Canadian Journal of Archaeology with my PhD student Kayla, recent PhD Eloi, and our recently departed colleague Shanti Morell-Hart (now at Brown) on McMaster and Latin American archaeology. I have two other papers currently in peer review that may arrive back on my desk in the coming weeks months that may disrupt the plans below. But my major writing projects this semester is one “monkey on my back” article that I need to finish, and several conference papers.

The first is a paper on Andean asethetics, in particular exploring the imagery on “Terminal Late Formative” ceramics, textiles and stone monoliths.

I presented this work to a group of archaeologists and art historians at Columbia University last year. The paper explores the role of ancient imagery over the course of ~150 years, as the site of Tiwanaku is being transformed into a critical Andean urban assemblage. Here is my current introduction:

“Researchers working in the Lake Titicaca basin are making significant headway in understanding the timing and processes in the emergence of Tiwanaku. The ancient Andean center, located in the southern Lake Titicaca basin of Bolivia, urbanized rapidly in the late 6th century and early 7th century AD. Archaeological work over the past century has demonstrated that Tiwanaku was characterized by impressive craft production, with feasting events involving chicha or corn beer and other mind altering substances and interaction with other-than-humans such as stone monoliths. Despite the significant research over the past century, researchers have struggled to fit the site and polity into conventional political economy models of early states. While the polity clearly influenced a broad region of Andean South America, we have yet to find clear military or economic control over Middle Horizon landscapes.

Images, however, played a particularly important role at the urban center and Tiwanaku aesthetics reached across significant distances. In this paper, I argue that the visual economies of the earlier periods of the site , a time known as the “Terminal Late Formative” (Marsh et al. 2019), are critical for understanding the new worlds associated with the Middle Horizon. I pay particular attention to ceramics known as Qeya, but also to early southern Titicaca basin monoliths and textiles from the broader region. While archaeologists have been researching Formative Period societies across the region for several decades (see for instance x, y, z) , very little has been published on the earliest visual economy associated with the site, which was a time of significant political change and expanding social networks. The researchers who have engaged this imagery have done so to identify the origins of the later iconographic systems of urban Tiwanaku and regional patterns, not to understand the early dynamics at the site itself. I argue that visuals were far from mere “by-products” of broader social and political processes, but instead were essential actants in Tiwanaku social projects. These aesthetic systems co-emerge with new monumental complexes and emplacement of a wide variety of stone sculptural beings. I ask a different set of questions than those exploring the birth-place of particular iconographical styles. What kind of role did these image rich objects play in emergent networks? Were these objects associated with founding families and broader work parties involved in early building projects? Finally, were the New Worlds that emerged at Tiwanaku associated with new ways of seeing?”

The paper was well received at Columbia, but the audience highlighted a few critical things for me to grapple with:

• the need to tighten up my key argument/stakes (an issue that I was already concerned about – there is a lot going in in this paper!)
• Defining terms. I am juggling a few different issues here (aesthetics, images, art) all of which have considerable baggage in general, but even more so in the context of the ancient Andes.
• Interpretation: I have an argument around the use of hallucinogenics. My current explanation/understanding is far too vague.

So, I am reworking the paper, with helpful feedback from my writing group, with the hope to submit this Cambridge Archaeological Journal this summer. Instead of presenting my timeline, below is my writing log from week to week (a screen-grab from the writing program Scrivener) from last year when I was working on it more intensely.

The other writing projects are several conference papers. I have a paper I’m giving at the Society for American Archaeology meetings. Both engage my recent work at Tiwanaku. The first is a paper in honour of Ann Stahl , who was an important mentor to me. My paper is titled “Improvisation, Intellectual Crosscurrents, and Creativity at an Emergent Andean Center”, and really engages some of the threads from the paper discussed above. The other presentation (“Visualizing the Origins of Monumentality: the Case of Tiwanaku, Bolivia”) is a collaboration with my partner Kathryn Killackey, and discusses our recent work at visualization at Tiwanaku.

For the conference papers I tend to chip away. I have lots of little pieces of “tiny text” written as notes in my note-taking app of choice Obsidian. I continue working to create reading notes, to convert them to more permanent in Obsidian. In the coming weeks I’ll start playing with my notes to construct a mind map to see how the various pieces might fit together. (Below is an early mind map for a paper currently in press)

Clearly lots to do! See you next week.

On the IDP

One approach to consider is developing what is sometimes called a individual development plan in industry. Deliberate plans with step-by-step processes. One way you can set something like this up is a free-writing mode: but here perhaps setting up a 30-45 minute chunk of time. Put down what you need to/have to get done in the next 3-4 months (or even up to a year), then fill in the details later. (This can change, of course. It is only to give you a bird’s eye view of what is on your plate). This will also help you develop your writing-schedule for the next few months.

On the Schedule

Why a schedule? Because your life is full of urgent things and it is easy to put writing on the back-burner for that perfect chunk of time without non-urgent things. By laying out schedules and accountability for writing and by protecting our appointed writing time you can really get things done. One important reminder here is that most folks (ahem, including myself), underestimate how long a task will take. If you think it will take you one week to draft a conference abstract, try to give yourself two and a half weeks. Here a log will help.

On Logging your Writing

Why log your writing? Some scholars of writing have suggested that by keeping a log to track the amount of time you spend writing, the number of words you write, your mood on a given day, etc., can all help bring conscious attention to your writing practice. “What gets measured, gets managed” (Drucker, 1954), or by tracking a practice you pay more attention to it. But also a log will help you keep track of how long writing tasks really take!

Ok, hoping to share my writing plans in the next post!

(not a good one)

Also, I mentioned Feedly as a way to keep track of blogs today. It’s pretty easy to set up, and a way to draw together all the latest posts from blogs, news sites, etc., that you might want to keep track of.

Hi all,

Thanks for a good first class. I wanted to follow up from today with a quick post on social media and academia. Our discussion really drives home the fall from the 2016 optimism to social media that many of us (yes, including me) had for some elements of the genre. To be honest, I still see some value in these spaces – for better or worse I see this as an area for public engagement and one that we need to think through carefully (even if we choose not to participate). There are a variety of folks using it in productive ways (keep an eye on the blog role on the right had side for some good examples). You might look at the 2023 Anthropology Blog Resurvey Project. Or perhaps Colleen Morgan who introduced me to Carrigan years ago.

It *is* worth looking at Carrigan again, 8 years later, and his he lands on the issues he wrote about 7 years ago. His blog is worth a quick visit. He has recent posts on the “The increasingly hierarchical character of academic social media in 2023″. He says,

“I remember when it was possible to fill an event by just tweeting about it a few times from a highly visible account. It made organising events so easy and so much more fun as a result. Whereas now you need to share across countless social platforms and mailing lists. This is what happens when audiences fragment across multiple platforms. More labour involved in publicising and more noise across those platforms due to cross posting. Social media has declining returns for instrumental use unless you’re using paid advertising…The emerging attention economy in 2023 looks like it will take us back to the hierarchical norm. At what point do we all say ‘fuck it’ and just go back to using mailing lists? 🤦‍♂️”

And perhaps more pertinent, “Why academics need to organism, collectivism, and ‘socialise’ social media”. This post discusses a recent book that Carrigan co-authored with Dr Lambros Fatsis called “The Public and their Platforms”:

“Far from rejecting the importance of social platforms as a means of sharing research, however, the study advocates a strategic rethink. The authors call for what they style a ‘Digital Undercommons’: collectives of academics working together to ‘claim’ online spaces where research can be freely discussed, stored and shared with anyone interested in it. Researchers could use these clusters to build links with community groups and campaigns, aiming for ‘rich engagement, rather than massive reach’.

“The heart of this is an attempt to re-theorise what we are doing publicly as researchers,” Dr Mark Carrigan, Research Associate at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, and the book’s co-author, said.

“The proclaimed ideology of social media – as YouTube once put it – is that you can broadcast yourself. In truth, these platforms constrain or enable users, usually according to the interests of firms in Silicon Valley. We need to get rid of some of the conceptual baggage surrounding them in order to use them effectively.””

I think you all might enjoy this follow up!