Skip to main content

The Allure of Research

I haven't posted in a while. One, because the job that is paying for my PhD suddenly jumped the bounds of its original job description, and I lost my marbles. Two, because life itself jumped the tracks there for a little while as we lost our car to the bureaucracy of road safety, and all other activities came to a screeching halt as we tried to replace it (tried to go without - not feasible in our situation. Sorry, Earth).

Anyway, I am now a week behind my self-set schedule for writing a paper that I need to submit by the end of the year. I have spent my weekend furiously flipping through pages and web journals (BTW, if anyone from the BU library is reading this, your journal selection BLOWS), then tap-tap-tapping the info into some semblance of cohesion for the paper.

I find myself drawn to the topics in the books I've checked out, repeatedly distracted by their applicability not to this particular paper, but to my PhD as a whole. Ideas about what draws an audience to a multimedia project, what form collaboration takes, structures that work in hypertext environments, how to transition from print to digital. I have to constantly police my own excitement, restricting it to the subject of the paper: online communities formed in the interaction between author and readers of print novels. They're finite, it's sure, but I think they're a significant step in the evolution toward a mainstream digital literature genre.

It's been a really long time since I wrote anything of an academic nature. The writing itself I don't find difficult. Rather, I'm worried that it's too simplistic, that I'm covering ideas everyone knows like the back of their hands, that they'll be rolling their eyes at such a sophomore effort. Yes, I am aware that my writing will improve, and I will eventually get a better feel for the literature of my area, what level to cover subjects at, what is common knowledge, etc. But as I noticed at the Creating Second Lives Conference, the field is still quite new and I'm not sure there really is a common ground. I guess I'll see.

At any rate, I'm enjoying it all greatly. I love the atmosphere, that ideas are important, that a discourse is being created. I don't feel like I've had that in a really, really long time. I feel like my brain, on some level, was in sleep mode for a very long while. My MPW course at USC didn't ever really make me think about anything; nothing was ever up for debate. We weren't encouraged to contribute to the field - only to write well, get published, and credit the program as much as possible.

But here, I already feel like I'm contributing to some new area of understanding. That what I think about it is helping to shape this new field. My ideas will be challenged, and I'm sure that will deal quite a blow to my intellectual ego the first few times it happens, but hopefully I'll adjust and be able to hold my own.

I like this academia gig.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Take on Specifications Grading (or, How I Learned to Not Spend My Weekends Marking)

I’ve been proselytizing this method for a while now, and have used it in a range of creative writing and publishing modules. It’s been wildly successful for me (though of course I’ll continue tweaking it), and enough people have asked about it that I thought I’d put it together into an overview/summary resource. It should probably be an actual paper one of these days, but that would require time and research and motivation. Natch. My teaching model is based on Linda Nilson’s Specifications Grading  (she’s also got a great intro article on Inside Higher Ed ), just so the original genius can get plenty of credit. My motivations are these: I came a hair’s breadth from burning out entirely. I went from teaching creative writing classes with 7-10 students on them to massive creative writing modules with 80+ students on them. Marking loads were insane, despite the fact that I have a pretty streamlined process with rubrics and QuickMarks and commonly used comments that I can cut and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

In which the Apathy Monster is curtailed

Me, lately I spent my PhD years going to many, many  conferences. When you're in a small department in an isolated part of the world, they're kind of a necessity. You go to meet anyone - anyone  - who is doing similar stuff, and who won't stare at you blankly when you describe your research. You go to try out your ideas, to make sure the academic community you'll be pitching them to don't think you're an absolute waste of space ( imposter syndrome is for real). Also, you go just to go somewhere (though I think I went to Leicester far too often). In the last few years, as I've gained contacts and confidence, I've gone to fewer and fewer conferences. I know the ones that best suit me now, and where I'll get to meet and/or catch up with my peeps. I also know the ones, of course, where I've never made any headway at all. I was pleasantly surprised this week to be wrong about that last one. MIX Digital - Bath Spa University Let me back thi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thoughts on @dreamingmethods Digital Writing Workshop

I'm on the long train(s) ride home from Kent after a one-day digital fiction workshop with Andy Campbell ( Dreaming Methods ).  It's the first time I've met Andy IRL - great to put a face to the name & works. The workshop itself was set up by Peggy at East Kent Live Lit , funded by the Kent Arts Council, and she was graceful enough to let a non-Kent-resident such as me sit in.  Most of the attendees were not necessarily new to digital fiction, but new to building it.  They were writers, musicians, installation artists, and sometimes a combination of the above.  Almost everyone save me and one other had been able to make the Friday evening session, which was an overview of digital fiction and some of Andy's background. The morning session covered a few examples of dig-fic (from the Poole Literary Festival New Media Prize ), recommended software (more on this in a minute), and resources for media files (more...).  The afternoon session was more hands-on building of di...
1 comment
Read more