thanks for not being a zombie

A piece of advice I've received about writing a scholarly monograph is that your imagined audience should include those who are likely to oppose your argument. So I'm trying to understand what that counterargument to my project would look like, and I'd appreciate any suggestions. You can come at this from whatever angle your expertise makes most convenient.

Here's a point I'm trying to hone:

Scholars and theorists of oral culture, manuscript culture, and print culture tend to focus on these subjects in isolation from one another. What is needed is more work that seeks to understand the neglected reciprocities of oral and literate practices, the dynamic interactions of speech, manuscript, and print.¹ My work investigages a number of these reciprocities in eighteenth-century Methodism: the importance of letter-writing campaigns in promoting preaching tours; the role of preachers in distributing print matter; the influence of print over the habits of diary keeping and public speaking. If we study these practices alone, we will fail to understand them fully.

Okay, that's not too pretty, I admit. What does it need? Does it seem like an obvious and uninteresting point? What kinds of objections am I likely to encounter? Is there a big body of scholarly work I'm overlooking?

1. You could add "digital culture" and "digital practices" to this list if you weren't, like me, writing about the 18th century, in which these phrases would probably be interpreted as being related to masturbation. I'm just speculating, here.

Posted by at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

When I first began to plan turning my dissertation into a publishable book, I clung stubbornly to the chronological boundaries I had started with. Then I gradually realized that there was a wealth of relevant information available for the years that begin right at the end point of my dissertation. At first, I was totally Oh, that's too bad. If only that information were available for the earlier years. Then I was all, Duh! Why don't you just extend the end point by about thirty years, loser? And then I went, Oh, no, you di'in't! And I said, Well, bring it, beyotch! And I was like, Oh, snap! And then...

Wait...what was I talking about?

Oh, right. I've come across some really great archival material here at Magnolia University (which is the pseudonymous name I'm giving this place). Sometimes I fear that I must be mistaken to think this material is so important. Why haven't any scholars made good use of it before? At other times I believe I'm on to something really big.

In other news, I've been invited to present a paper on someone's panel at ASECS 2006, which saves me the trouble of writing up paper proposals. Yay!

Posted by at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The last time I bought a new car was 1990. I sold it in 1994 to pay for my first year of grad school. L and I have shared one car for half the time we've been together, but now that we'll be living in two different cities (and I'll be making some regional research trips) we need two cars.

"Now is a good time to get a great deal on a new car." The 2006 models are or will be coming out, and dealers are trying to get rid of the 2005 models. Luckily for me, my bank will do the negotiating for me. (I know! Crazy, isn't it?) So last weekend I did a bunch of research online, printed out various spreadsheets, put them all in my clipboard and went to the closest dealership. The salesman who dealt with me was very nice and very young, maybe 24 at the oldest. We bonded over a few things -- he's from Rhode Island / my grandma was from Rhode Island; he's a army brat / I'm an army brat -- I took a test drive, and two days later, I was driving my new car home.

Things that make buying a new car easier:

• Research all the online information about options and pricing.
• Never underestimate the power of a printed spreadsheet.
• Never underestimate the power of a clipboard.
• Ask your bank if they will negotiate the price for you.

Based on my research, I know I paid an average price for this make and model. I may not have gotten the absolute, rock bottom, lowest price, but I don't care because the salesman seemed like a decent fellow trying to succeed in his new job at the dealership, and if paying a bit more means he got a slightly higher commission and made a good impression on his boss, then I'm happy.

Now here's the best part about the car (yeah, yeah, warranty, gas mileage, reliability, customer satisfaction, yadda yadda yadda): the stereo will hold 6 CDs and will play mp3s off of those CDs. This means that if I load it up with 6 700-megabyte CDs full of music, I essentially have the equivalent of an iPod mini in my dashboard. How cool is that?!

Oh yeah, I'm off on a 3-day research trip this morning to one of the best American libraries for my project.

Posted by at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

From the Book of Common Prayer (1770):

The Order how the Psalter is appointed to be read.

The Psalter shall be read through once every Month, as it is there appointed, both for Morning and Evening Prayer. But in February it shall be read only to the Twenty-eighth, or Twenty-ninth day of the Month

And whereas January, March, May, July, August, October and December, have One-and-thirty days apiece; it is ordered, that the same Psalms shall be read the last day of the said Months, which were read the day before: So that the Psalter may begin again the first day of the next month ensuing.

And whereas the 119 Psalm is divided into 22 Portions, and is overlong to be read at one time; it is so ordered, that at one time shall not be read above four or five of the said Portions.

And at the end of every Psalm, and of every such part of the 119 Psalm, shall be repeated this Hymn,

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen

Note, That the Psalter followeth the Division of the Hebrews, and the Translation of the great English Bible, set forth and used in the time of King Henry VIII. and Edward VI.

Posted by at 3:13 PM | Permalink

So after you've contracted document OCD, how do you manage all the information you collect on your hard drive? Here are some useful software tools:

1. LaunchBar: This is an affordable Mac application. [I don't know what an equivalent app for Windows might be.] I have so many documents full of notes (as well as full text documents of primary and secondary materials) that there is no way I can remember everything saved on my hard drive. I need something to access these documents easily, without having to hunt and click my way through different directories. LaunchBar, which Ian recommended to me, indexes all of my documents and allows me to launch them with a few taps on the keyboard. It also pays attention to which ones I open most often, so that it presents the most frequently used ones at the top of any list it creates. I have begun to change the way I title my documents because this makes it easier for LaunchBar to get to the document I'm looking for. See item 2 here. LaunchBar will open my Greenblatt notes for me if I type "Greenblatt," and if I've been using that document often recently then typing the letter "G" is enough to call it up.


2. Spotlight: This search feature comes with the new Mac OS, Tiger. [Those of you using Windows might try out Google Desktop.] The really powerful thing about Spotlight is that it will search the contents of all of my documents, which is great for finding all the references to, say, Elizabeth Eisenstein in all of my reading notes, my course syllabi, and the articles I've downloaded from places like J-STOR and Project Muse. It will also do what Launchbar does, described above, but it doesn't do it as quickly, which is why I'm still using LaunchBar. For example, if I want to launch Firefox, I just type "f" into LaunchBar, because it remembers that I use Firefox every day. Spotlight will just list everything that begins with an "f." Perhaps there's a way to customize Spotlight to change this behavior, but if so I haven't learned how yet.


3. OmniOutliner: Another Mac application [I don't know of a Windows equivalent.] I've been using this to sketch out my writing and to manage my task lists, and so far I like it. I've tried the outline function in MS Word and have found it awkward by comparison. I've tried to figure out how to outline using OpenOffice (well, Neo-Office, actually) but have had not luck. OmniOutliner it is. See these two entries by Scott, and this one by Kathleen.


4. EndNote: My university recently decided to get a campus-wide license for this bibliographical software, but I haven't yet acquired a copy. It seems to be the gold standard of such applications, though. And it's available for both Windows and Mac.

In sum, as any scholar of writing, reading, and publishing will tell you, the tools we use to read and write matter a great deal.

Addendum: I really wish that more academic books were available as e-books. This would not only make it easier for me to carry them around with me wherever I take my laptop (thus reducing the strain on my shoulder), but it would also pull them into what is now essentially a fulltext database on my laptop.

[composed and posted with Ecto.]

Posted by at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A couple of grad students at my alma mater recently wrote entries that got me thinking about tools and practices for keeping track of your research, writing, and thinking.

A few months ago, Steven Johnson wrote about the ways in which technology facilitates not only his writing, but his thinking. Now that I've started to use--in addition to a word processor--some tools for searching, organizing, and outlining, I'm really beginning to experience what he's getting at.

Below are some obsessive-compulsive suggestions for maximizing the accessibilty of your notes and documents. You should only adopt as many of these (if any) as you think might be helpful. They are only meant to be the means to help you in your research and teaching. Do not let them become an end in themselves.

1. If you can, take notes on your computer (or a handheld device that can sync with your computer), rather than by hand in a notebook or in the margins of your books. Why? Because digital versions of notes will be much more accessible and more portable. Trust me: you will need those reading notes later, either when you are writing something or when you are preparing to teach.


2. I read a very good suggestion some time ago on one of these blogs (I think). Give your documents filenames that will make it easy for you, or someone else (you never know), to determine what is in the document just by looking at the filename. For example, if you've taken notes on Stephen Greenblatt's essay "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion," which the journal Glyph published in 1981, then give your notes a filename like greenblatt_invisible.bullets_glyph.1981.doc (I've also started giving my syllabi ridiculously long names like 2004.spring.english.550.syl.doc.)


3. Reading on paper is still quite useful and allows you to spread your information out over a much greater two-dimensional space than even the largest computer monitor. However, when reading something printed you'll want to know where on your hard drive a particular printed document is to be found. So, for reading notes or for other things you are writing, open the document in your word processor, and insert the filename on the first page somewhere. If you can, insert the "field" "filename" so that if you change the filename of the document, it will automatically change in your document. Now, when you look at the printed document, you'll know what it's known by to your computer. You can probably create a macro so that this is done automatically on every document you create.


4. Put a header on every page of every document you print out. The header should contain enough information so that any page will identify what larger document it belongs to. Also, put not only the page number in your header, but also the page count so that as you look at any page, you will know where in the larger document it belongs and how big the larger document is. As above, you can probably automate (some of) this step with a macro. Your header might look something like this: "Greenblatt -- Invisible Bullets -- Reading Notes -- 1/5"


5. If you want to be really obsessive, be sure to include a field that indicates when the document was printed. Doing so will allow you to compare the age of the printed version with the age of the digital version. If you've made changes to the digital version, the printed version will be outdated and might need to be replaced. As above, try to use a macro for this.


6. Punch three holes in your printed documents--or print them out on pre-punched paper--and keep them in 3-ring notebooks organized along roughly the same lines as their digital documents on your hard drive. This is especially useful for teaching, when you need to take your notes with you into class and might need to grab them in a hurry.

Now, do I maintain this OCD system of organization? Well...no. But isn't it lovely to think so?

[composed and posted with Ecto.]

Posted by at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

You know, Phyllis Mack's book Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England is one of the main reasons I became interested in studying religion in early modern Britain.

...Guess who's also doing research here at the Methodist Archives.

Posted by at 2:22 PM | Permalink

Tuesday night we saw Henry IV, Part 2, and while I have no complaints about the production, it's just not as good of a play as 1H4 or Henvy V. Too many scenes drag on with dialogue and exposition; I feel that way when I read the play, and I felt that way watching it. I saw a production in 1995 at the D.C. Shakespeare Theatre where they performed part 1 and part 2 back to back. I wish I remembered enough of that production to compare, but the only thing I can recall is that they cut many of the comic scenes in order to limit the time. Hmm...still and all, I'm glad to have seen these performances. Every good production of Shakespeare is another interpretation worth putting into memory.

Last night William St. Clair lectured on "The Political Economy of Reading," a lecture that was very good and very well attended. St. Clair has written a book (free sample chapter) that is making quite a stir in book history circles, not so much for the conclusions he draws from the evidence he has gathered, but rather for his methodology and for the massive amount of evidence he has gathered. He has modelled an approach that is staggering in its comprehensive survey of the available historical data, and he has also presented his data--in a huge series of appendices--in a way that will be very useful to other book historians. One of the best lines from his introduction is this one:

The history of reading is at the stage of astronomy before telescopes, economics before statistics, heavily reliant on a few commonly repeated traditional narratives and favorite anecdotes, but weak on the spade-work of basic empirical research, quantification, consolidation, and scrutiny of primary information, upon which both narrative history and theory ought to rest.

Something tells me we're going to see that one quoted a good bit in the next few years.

Let me tell you, sometimes it feels like it's a small academic world, as I keep seeing people I know from academic conferences and other venues. I attended last night's lecture with my friend Nancy and Ian Gadd (whom I know from past SHARP conferences), and Ian's friend and collaborator Patrick Wallis. In the audience were probably a half dozen people I recognized from events that have taken place in years past as far away as Lyons, France or Springfield, Missouri. It's really not so hard to believe, I suppose, as

1. the British Library (and environs) is one of the most important places to work if you want to do serious archival research, and
2. if you were a book or literary historian in London yesterday, St. Clair's lecture was the hot ticket.

There was a nice reception after the lecture (open bar! woo-hoo!), during which I was privy to some interesting talk about how St. Clair's argument was going over, and then the four of us went out for Italian food. I am quite allergic to something here, and I had a sneezing fit during dinner, but I managed to recover. After a night cap at a pub, I made it home to my sweltering room by about 11:30 or so.

Research continues to go well, though no stunning finds are presenting themselves lately. Instead, a more complete picture of the publishing scene is now visible to me. I spent some quality time with the English Short Title Catalogue database yesterday morning, searching on titles I have gathered of late eighteenth-century religious periodicals to find out if they're available at the BL or on microfilm. The database is also useful to seeing when, where, and for how long these publications existed, and who was involved with printing and selling them. I used to live on the ESTC when in grad school at a university that subscribed to it. Oh, precious ESTC! How I have missed you!

I'm about to head in for another day's work, but I want to say that one of the most incredible things about working at the BL is that you can get your hands on just about any book you might possibly need. Provided it's not something incredibly rare, like a Gutenberg Bible, they'll pull it up for you and let you read it. Anything.

Amazing. I am extremely lucky.

Posted by at 2:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)