One thing I came to understand is that “digital strategy” means a lot of things to a lot of people; my job as Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship had been newly created, and it fell to me to define what I thought the work entailed. In the end, I came to believe that what the Library needed most was a narrative, a vision for what it would be in a future seen by many as threatened by the gathering digital stormclouds, and I spent a lot of my time (in the eyes of some, probably too much of my time) talking to internal and external audiences, telling them stories about the current and future library. To me, this was and still is a promising story of an institution that is an engine for cultural production, a vibrant trading zone for ideas and experiences that is open to all in a particularly American (and particularly New Yorkish) way, a deeply humanistic vision of people drawn together by the rich collections and empowered by digital technology.

As for the Library’s “Digital Strategy” proper, it took more forms that I could have possibly expected, from a 25-page whitepaper that was whittled down to 10 pages, then 5, then 5 one-sheets with a paragraph each and bullet points. There were also slide decks. Oh, the slide decks. Slide decks with Booz Allen consultants, slide decks with McKinsey consultants, slide decks with internal consultants. And in the end, after three years of its evolution and numerous organizational configurations, I’m convinced that the core of the strategy to grow usage and deepen engagement is still as sound as when I first tried to graspingly articulate it in 2007. I’d love to post all of those documents for discussion (or at least my overly-thinky 25-page whitepaper), but for now here’s the 140-character version:

Focus on user experience. Leverage staff expertise for discovery. Digitize special collections. Proactively seed 3rd-party platforms. Trust the public.

Over the past few years, we’ve been able to do some remarkable things that held true to these pretty straightforward principles. And as my ideas for NYPL increasingly became my advice for other libraries, then for libraries, archives and museums, I came to understand that while the New York Public Library is one of the few perches from which one can speak to the broad community and be heard, right now I want to be able to focus all my efforts on initiatives that cross institutional boundaries. I’ve liked to characterize the current moment as a circle of libraries, museums, archives, universities, journalists, publishers, broadcasters and a number of others in the culture industries standing around, eyeing other and at the space in between them while wondering how they need to reconfigure for world of digitally networked knowledge. My new role will be to stand squarely in that space, and the change of perspective is exciting.

When asked about the institution, everyone I know and respect at the Library mentions the sheer possibility embodied by its collections, resources, staff, and communities (usually in an awestruck, “My God, it’s full of stars” tone). Working at the New York Public Library is a study in conflicting emotions; the Library can never reach its full potential because the ceiling is simply too high, the possibilities too immense. At the same time, the fact is that every day at the NYPL is full of minor miracles, chance encounters and inspiring mental connections that both hurl our culture forward and tangibly change lives. These moments are ultimately the work of the heroic staff of the Library, and it’s their company that I’ll miss most of all as I move on to this next adventure.

Lucky me, then, that Khoi Vin and Allan Cole went ahead and created Basic Maths. $30 and a tiny bit of tweaking later (sorry for my bastardizations, guys), and I’ve got a blog that represents the way I like information to look: stark and dense. It’s a little weird to have bought an off-the-rack wordpress theme (I keep thinking of the cookie-cutter avatars in Neil Stephensen’s Snow Crash ), but it feels comfortable enough and beats agonizing over a blank canvas.

Oh, and please pardon the mess while I clean up categories and other bits of residual debris….

1. In general over the past few years, the net flow has been inward, with me taking in more than I’m putting out in a productive way. I’ve always been okay with this, under the assumption that the synthetic way that my brain works means that I’ve got to trawl with a pretty big net and understand that not everything will fit together nicely (or necessarily be useful).
2. Before I joined NYPL in 2007, I was still writing in public, both in discussion fora and on this blog. I can’t say that I wrote meaningful stuff beyond a handful of posts, but it was a way for me to get ideas out in front of a broader audience, and the act of writing (even informally) made me sit down and really chew through the ideas in my head. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage the discipline to continue writing when I jumped on the moving treadmill that was the NYPL (not to mention life with a newborn). Blink your eyes, and we’re almost 3 years later.
   
3. Over the past couple of years, most of the knowledge I’ve been putting out for the world has taken the form of spoken words, either in meetings or in formal presentations. I’ve always loved discussion, and do believe that my best intellectual work happens in a conversational back-and-forth, but I’ve grown concerned that I’ve been indulging overmuch. Back when I was a proper academic, I was never much for publishing articles (my cv only lists one peer-reviewed article and one book review alongside my book), but that preference is starting to do me and my ideas a disservice, in that spoken words simply doesn’t scale to a broader audience (at least, not the way I’ve been doing them – more on that later).
4. Another thought about my time thus far at NYPL; the best persuasive writing I’ve done has been for an audience of a relative handful, whether Senior Management or Trustees. As I think about it, there’s a real shame here; at some point, it’d be great to publish a “greatest Hits” compilation of some of the long, impassioned missives I’ve fired off arguing one point or another, not to mention the white paper I wrote in 2008 on NYPL’s Digital Strategy that never really left the nest (but was pretty influential in charting the next two year’s work).
5. Like a lot of folks I know, my sense of how to convey information in written words has been retracting to a 140-character window over the past year; I’ve got Tweetdeck open constantly, and find in it boundless opportunity for inbound information and lazyweb requests, but I’m suddenly very conscious of what’s been happening to me cognitively. When I first started blogging, I found that when an idea occurred to me I’d start to mentally construct a post; even if it never got “to paper” (and most didn’t), the blog as a structure/genre to think with was a useful tool. Twitter’s appealing in its haiku-like economy, but at this point I do believe that it’s no good for the kind of modern, Enlightment, literate, rational argumentation that I still value immensely (hold the gasps from the back of the room).

So, all this adds up to two intertwined problems: my thinking’s been getting lazier/sloppier/less rigorous, and what I do have to contribute to the discussion isn’t getting out in a productive way that’s useful at scale to the various communities that I want to engage. Ironically, I’ve spent the past two years arguing that the smartest strategy for a cultural heritage organization is to leverage its staff’s expertise by getting them to author knowledge that’s discoverable online, and my own thoughts have been warrened away in spoken words and private emails.

With that in mind, I’m resurrecting this blog, knowing that it’s going to be a painful and lurching process to get my writing (and discipline) back into shape. As I look around, there are two bloggers who particularly inspire me right now; my old friend and colleague Dan Cohen, and my friend Chris Dixon. Both are doing great writing that’s on point for their respective communities, and both blogs are rich with ideas and provocative discussion. At the same time, I’ll see if I can start exposing more of the information-trawling I do every day in a more raw form, with the hope of providing something of use for whoever might be interested (check out the right sidebars for more of that coming online in the next few weeks).

1) In mid-April, I’ll be leaving the Center for History and New Media to take a newly-created job as the Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at the New York Public Library. While I’m incredibly sad to be leaving the amazing team at CHNM, this is a ridiculously amazing opportunity, and I’m looking forward to continued work on the intersection of scholarship, education and information technology.

2) My first book, From Betamax to Blockbuster, has been officially launched by the MIT Press and should drop in early 2008 (was hoping for sooner, but they’re pitching it as a trade press and we missed the window for an early Fall 2007 release.

3) Jenny and I will be moving up to NYC sometime in late April / early May (I’ll be commuting back and forth for my first few weeks at NYPL). Right now, we’re looking to sell our place in DC; if interested, (or you know of anyone who might be) please do get in touch. And if you know of any good 2.5-3BR apts opening up in the general Park Slope area, we’re looking for a rental.

4) Yeah, I said we’re ideally looking for a 3BR apt. We’ll need the extra room(s), ’cause come September-ish, there’ll be three of us. More on that to come…

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.

1. I do think of blogging as a very public thing. A coworker here at the Center said today that it’s more like a broadcast than a conversation, and I sort of didn’t feel like broadcasting for the last month. No real reason; just was “in my own head” for a few weeks, and am just feeling an outward pull now.

2. I’m struck by the extent to which I think of my blog (and blogs in general) in terms of feeds, rather than as a tangible site, with design and an actual presence. RSS has become my dominant paradigm for online information, and it was almost a shock to see my blank blog index page – almost like the way that catching the flu reminds us that as much as we think of ourselves as minds, soaring across information landscapes, we’re still rooted in physical, fallible bodies.

Anyhow, I’m back.