Epistemographer

It’s been a good 5 months since my last even vaguely-substantial post and more than a year since I’ve posted deeply and regularly, and I’ve been mulling over the reasons why. Have no fear – this is emphatically *not* one of those “I’m sorry for not posting” posts (after having written a few of those over the years, I swore I’d never do so again). I’m not apologetic about my absence, just curious as to its root causes. As someone who’s very vocal about the utility and importance of scholarly blogs, I figure it’s worth thinking a little deeply about *why* I’ve stayed away from my own for so long.

The easy answer is to nod toward a sabbatical of sorts; the idea that one needs to take a break and step away from one’s daily routine every so often is a commonly held truth in academia, and it makes sense that academic blogging might follow a similar pattern. Writing a blog is mostly no different than any other form of writing, especially in the way that patterns build up over time to the point of habit, and then calcification. A blog sabbatical might thus function the same as any other sabbatical, offering a chance to refresh one’s mind and return to the day-to-day with a fresh perspective.

The thing is, though, that answer doesn’t really fit. I *haven’t* been on a sabbatical in any real sense of the word; if anything, the past 6 months have professionally been the busiest I’ve had in years. There are all sorts of projects I’ve been working on that would be prime blog fodder (and, hopefully, will be in future posts), and my mind’s been racing with one idea after another. This, of course, would argue for a second explanation for my electronic absence: the lack of enough hours in the day to both *do* everything I’ve got on my agenda *and* write about it after the fact.

While appealing in its sheer practicality, this explanation doesn’t really feel right either; it’s not that I’ve been wanting to write and simply haven’t found time, but rather that I’ve had an actual aversion to firing up Wordpress at all. Something in the back of my mind has been deliberately refraining from blogging, which seems more than a bit hypocritical given a) my blog evangelism and b) the fact that I actually do believe what I’m spouting.

So what gives?

As I’ve been thinking about this, I keep coming back to the question of identity. In a very real way, writing is an act of identity-construction; as academics, our professional identities are first and foremost shaped by what (and where) we’ve published, and we figure out who each other is through a sort of triangulation of published sources. This point is best made when you look at the tenure process: the general impressions of fellow colleagues and students are important, but the single most important thing to a tenure committee is the quality and placement of published work. As an academic, you literally are what you publish.

And that, I think, gets to the deeper question of my blogging absence. While I’ve been incredibly busy over the past 5 months, the vast, vast majority of my time has been consumed with technical work. I did more coding this summer than at any other time in my life, and while the work has been been fun and satisfying in many ways sense, it’s not what I want my career (or, perhaps more importantly, my life) to be. I’ve been joking lately that if I wanted to be a programmer, I wouldn’t have spent 6 years in an STS PhD program (and, for that matter, I’d be making *way* more money), but there’s a truth there – while there’s something that I find incredibly seductive about the tunnel-visioned focus and discrete satisfactions of programming, there are downsides as well (as my long-suffering wife will eagerly attest). Over the past week, as I’ve been poking my head out of the moment-to-moment work of putting out fires for my various projects, I’m realizing that this is more or less *all I’ve done* for months, and I miss many of the things that got me into academia in the first place.

On an abstract level, I think that there’s a tension between *making* tools and *using* tools that comes from a deeper question of audience. When you’re using a tool (or hacking a tool that someone else has already built), there’s a singleminded focus on your own purpose – there’s an end that you want to achieve, and you reach for whatever’s at hand that will (sometimes with a little adjustment) help you get there.[1] When trying to *build* a tool, on the other hand, there’s a fundamental shift in orientation – rather than only thinking about your own intentions, you have to think about your users and anticipate *their* needs and desires. In my own experience, this outward orientation results in a sort of self-abnegation, and you risk becoming the writer who writes what she thinks her audience wants to hear, rather than what she herself wants to say. Combine this with the particularly internalist aspect of web/app development (the code is a uniquely closed system which seduces one into a vaguely-autistic trance), and it’s been all too easy for me to lose sight of my own research and intentions.

In my work at CHNM, I’ve been able to really immerse myself in the making of tools for scholarship for the first time; it’s been a remarkable experience, and I feel lucky to have been able to spend my time thinking abstractly about issues of methodology and practice things that most scholars can only think about in the day-to-day press of research and teaching. At the same time, though, I think I’ve let the pendulum swing too far to one side, spending all my time *building* tools for scholarship and teaching and very little time *using* them. This is dangerous on several fronts: on one hand, I worry about falling into a humanities computing version of the adjunct teaching trap, wherein I spend my first few years out of grad school establishing an identity as a technician rather than a fully-fleshed scholar; at the same time, I risk becoming an hollow voice, my arguments for the adoption of new media tools into scholarly practice hypocritically disconnected from any actual practice on my part.

On a subconscious level, I think I’ve known these things for a while, ergo my blog silence. If in a very real way my blog is my identity, it makes a whole lot of sense that my work over the past few months would result in a sort of blogging paralysis – if my lived practice doesn’t match the identity I want to present to the profession as a whole, that dissonance would keep me from writing anything at all. It’s not that I don’t want to be seen as a code guy…far from it! It’s more than I want to be multi-faceted, with the coding and tool-building being one part of my identity.[2] I think this is possible – I know and admire people who manage a better balance[4], and I think I’ve got it in me to correct course.

So, what’s the upshot of all this?[5] Basically, that my blog writing (or, more pointedly, lack of it) is an indicator of a deeper imbalance in my professional life, one which I’m going to be trying to correct in the weeks to come. Hopefully, as I do so, I’ll start rebuilding the blog (and identity) that I’ve let lay more or less fallow for the past year.

fn1. I think of the work that “Bill Turkel”:http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com is doing on his blog as a paramount example of this sort of *use*; he’s working with code, but always motivated by his own research questions rather than a desire to build things for others.

fn2. This is of course compounded by the “sophomore work” problem that any academic faces after truly finishing the dissertation (my final manuscript is being sent to the publisher in a month[3])…it’s hard enough work establishing a professional identity that reaches beyond the dissertation, without adding the whole coding/writing, methodology/research tension.

fn3. Right…by the way, I signed a book contract with MIT’s Inside Technology series months ago.

fn4. Read: Roy Rosenzweig (though I don’t know if I’ve got his superhuman work ethic).

fn5. Aside from being a prime example of the “confessional voice” that my friend Amber describes as underlying much of reality TV.