In the last few years, I’ve noticed a certain kind of job ad appearing with more and more frequency. I think of it as the “make digital humanities happen” postdoctoral fellowship. Often based in a library, these positions’ descriptions include some combination of “liaison,” “catalyst,” and “hub,” with a heavy dose of coordinator syndrome thrown in. The person is meant to generate enthusiasm for DH among faculty, perhaps serve as a consultant, and head up a new DH initiative. I do understand why a postdoc is attractive to institutions.

1. They know that faculty like talking to people with Ph.D.s.
2. They’re not sure they want to go all-in on DH, and thus the built-in term limits of the postdoc make sense.
3. They want someone young and hungry, willing to take direction, with a lot of ideas and energy.
4. Often, the source of funding for this position is insecure; perhaps it’s provided by a grant.

I’d like to suggest that this particular kind of postdoc, except under very special circumstances, is not, in fact, a postdoc, but a temporary staff position. A postdoc, I maintain, should be characterized by some combination of generous mentorship and/or the freedom to do one’s own research. Many of these postdocs provide neither; indeed, in some cases, the hiring institution has not even worked out who this person will report to.

Who gets to say what a postdoc is? I do. We all do. A “postdoctoral fellowship” is what we collectively agree that it is, and I say that we should hold employers to some standards. For whatever reason, a “postdoc” sounds more prestigious than “employee with no job security.” Let’s call it what it is.

There are good DH postdocs out there, definitely, but they do not involve being dropped, resource-less, to serve as a “catalyst” in an institution with no DH activity.

Institutions considering hiring a “make DH happen” postdoc, should I think, reconsider. Not because it ain’t right, which it ain’t, but because it won’t work. A postdoc, no matter how committed, ingenious, and entrepreneurial, cannot just make digital humanities happen at any institution. This piece, by Stephen Ramsay, mirrors my feelings on the subject very well.

If you yourself are offered this kind of postdoc; well, that’s complicated. The job market is what it is, and one doesn’t always have the luxury of haranguing one’s hiring institution. Here’s what I recently advised someone who emailed me with this question:

If you do decide to pursue this job, I recommend, first of all, that you read this piece, by Bethany Nowviskie. I can attest to the truth of everything she says. In addition, given the particulars of the job you describe, I would:

Here’s what I just said about graduate student training at a workshop (with Daniel Chamberlain, Mary Francis, Tara McPherson, Leslie Mitchner, and Patrice Petro) on “the changing profession” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual meeting:

As we watch the academy change around us, I think it’s becoming clear to us that the way we prepare grad students has some inadequacies. We talk about preparing them for the job market, but I think we’re all aware that calling this crisis a “market” — implying that there’s some basic equity between supply and demand — is becoming increasingly perverse. I know you’ve seen good, smart, hardworking people washed up on the rocks. I know I have.

What can we do, as the ground shifts underneath us, to prepare these people whom we care so much about? By now, it should be obvious that it is no longer humane or sufficient to tell ourselves that our best students will get jobs. This is a fiction that helps us sleep at night.

But neither is it humane or sufficient to simply despair. So I offer four suggestions:

We need to get serious about tracking statistics about our students once they graduate. What kind of labor are they doing, how secure is it, where is it happening? Entering students need to be able to make better-informed decisions about the programs they choose.

We need to start seeing that caring about our grad students requires caring about the issue of adjuncts and other casualized labor in the academy. We need to see that this is part of mentoring, too.

We need to start countenancing the possibility that not all students will want to be professors. I want to be careful here, because I know not all students will want to follow a path like mine. But you might be surprised at how many grad students are quietly curious about other kinds of jobs. We need to help graduate students see that these paths are OK, too, and part of helping them to see this is visibly taking seriously the intellectual labor of other academic professionals in our orbit — the librarians, archivists, technologists and others.

Finally, I would like to see a reconsideration of methodological training for our students. Students are highly aware that they need different kinds of skills — digital skills, collaborative skills, administrative skills, budgeting skills — and we should see it as our job to meet these needs. For reference, I offer the example of the Praxis Program, at the University of Virginia, where graduate students work in teams alongside developers and administrators to accomplish projects collectively.

I know you’re here because you care about your students, and I know we’ve all been doing everything we can to prepare them for this new landscape. What I hope to say, more than anything, is that truly advocating for grad students requires understanding and intervening in the larger academic ecosystem.

This print, by Jen Renninger, hangs in my office. (Click the image to get one of your own!)

So, that post. I’ve never written anything that’s gotten much attention before, and the experience has been strangely, intensely stressful. Is it too divisive?, I wonder. Too hastily written? When I wrote the post, to be honest with you, I was livid about job-market news from friends, not to mention the latest VIDA stats. Should I have been more constructive? I was short with people in the comments, and I regret that. (Sorry, Ben.) Should I have said more about how much I love the community of DH? Because I do, because it’s been life-changing for me, because I love spending time with you. Am I now Gender Lady? I hope not, because I really don’t want to talk about this all the time.

I was glad to see the post gain traction — and I prodded it along — because I want the conversation to take place. But I’m extremely self-conscious about being near the center of it.

On Sunday, it felt like time to shut down the computer and dig out my sewing machine, which is something that consoles me. I first learned to sew from my mom, but I was too impatient to stick with it. It wasn’t until college that I picked it back up again. I really came of age too late to be a riot grrl. But this was in Portland, where, as we all know, the dream of the ’90s lives on, and stuff like sewing and crafting was part of DIY feminist culture. (Just as it was for Jacqueline Wermont!) We taught each other to sew and knit, and, yes, we put many a bird on it.

Back in college, sewing

I got older and sold my record collection, but I kept the sewing machine. Later on, miserable in grad school, I sought out stich-n-bitches, where I found community with other women. Instead of writing my dissertation, I read the message boards at craftster.org, where crafters — mostly women — posted tutorials and congratulated each other on what they’d accomplished. (Motto: “No tea cozies without irony.”) Back home, my mom helped me figure stuff out, too. (I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to follow a sewing pattern, but those things are like hieroglyphics.)

Maybe this is all too twee for you, too redolent of a particular cultural moment. But I love, and I’ll always love, the way that women talk to each other through the things we make together. I even love the stern, chiding voice of sewing patterns, unchanged for decades.

For a while I was really into embroidering turn-of-the-century entertainers. I give you Sandow!

So when you talk to me about a community of practice, I get that. When you talk about making as a way of knowing, I understand that, too. I hear you about building things together, about the pleasure of craftsmanship, about the quiet thrill of untangling tacit knowledge with other practitioners.

I don’t think we’re quite there yet. Or, rather, I don’t think all of us are there yet. We’re not at a place where we can share knowledge generously and with joy, and the trouble feels pressing to me. This thing, this gender and diversity thing, is a problem, even in this wonderful community that we’ve built. (Or that you’ve built, and to which I’m a callow latecomer.)

"Gentleman" Jim Corbett!

Here’s what I think, though. Digital humanities, as a community, has been almost scarily good at jettisoning old saws. Old publishing models suck, we said. Let’s not do that. Academic conferences are boring. Let’s not do those, either. The staff-faculty divide? Screw it. Crusty, irrelevant journals? Out the window. And while we’re at it, fuck academic hierarchies.

Let’s make inequities of power something else we decide to abandon. Let’s say to each other, yes, this is a thing, but it doesn’t mean that we’re bad people, and this is our opportunity to show everyone else how it’s done. We are truly, frighteningly good at dismantling and reassembling the levers of incentive and disincentive that steer academic decision-making. Why not turn this knowledge to gender and race, too?

I am no organizational mastermind, but here are some things I think might help:

Woodgrain vinyl messenger bag!

1. Let’s think about ways to build communities of underrepresented people. We have some great models here, in women’s development groups, in the Praxis Program, in MATRIX, in the Crunk Feminist Collective, and, yes, even though it might not be your bag, in groups like Craftster. Women and people of color are really, really good at building and maintaining supportive communities. Let’s make sure that they (we) have spaces to do that, and that they (we) know we value these communities, even when they say things we don’t totally want to hear.
2. Let’s acknowledge that we all do racist and sexist stuff sometimes. I should know. I do it all the time. All. The. Time. I don’t mean to, and I’m not a bad person, but I do. Let’s just figure out together how we can stop doing this when it counts, when we’re depriving someone of an opportunity to learn or do something important.
3. Let’s talk about when our niceness could be shutting down important conversations. As anyone who doesn’t know me very well will tell you, I am a Nice Person. I instinctively recoil at unpleasantness. But sometimes — not always, but sometimes — it might be necessary to have these really uncomfortable conversations.
4. Let’s believe people when they tell us they feel uncomfortable. It’s so easy to correct someone when she tells you she feels slighted because of race or gender. I’ve done it many times. But I’m trying, really trying, to take a minute or two to think: She’s probably the expert on her own experience.

XKCD, "How It Works"

Oh, how I hate being the bearer of bad news. Yet I feel I have to tell you something about the frustration I’m hearing, in whispers and on the backchannel, from early-career women involved in digital humanities.

Here, there, and everywhere, we’re being told: A DHer should code! Don’t know how? Learn! The work that’s getting noticed, one can’t help but see, is code. As digital humanities winds its way into academic departments, it seems reasonable to predict that the work that will get people jobs — the work that marks a real digital humanist — will be work that shows that you can code.

And that work is overwhelmingly by men. There are some important exceptions, but the pattern is pretty clear.

In principle, I have no particular problem with getting everyone to code. I’m learning to do it myself. (And a million thank yous to those of you who are helping me.) But I wanted to talk here about why men are the ones who code, so that we can speak openly about the fact that programming knowledge is not a neutral thing, but something men will tend to have more often than women.

This matter is of no small concern to me. It is breaking my damn heart to see how many women I know have earnestly committed themselves to codeacademy because they want to be good citizens, to prove they have what it takes. These are my friends, and this is their livelihood, and this is the career we’ve chosen.

First, men — middle-class white men, to be specific — are far more likely to have been given access to a computer and encouraged to use it at a young age. I love that you learned BASIC at age ten. But please realize that this has not been the case for all of us.

Second, the “culture of code,” the inside jokes and joshing that you enjoy, may not be equally appealing to everyone who encounters it. This should be, but apparently isn’t, obvious.

But Miriam, you’re thinking, there are lots of examples of DH coders who started late and are now well-respected and proficient! This is true! And they inspire me all the time. But this is also why I wanted to talk a little bit about what it’s like for a woman to learn to program.

Should you choose to learn in a group setting, you will immediately be conspicuous. It might be hard to see why this is a problem; after all, everyone wants more women in programming. Surely people are glad you’re there. Well, that’s true, as far as it goes. But it also makes you extremely conscious of your mistakes, confusion, and skill level. You are there as a representative of every woman. If you mess up or need extra clarification, it’s because you really shouldn’t — you suspected this anyway — you shouldn’t be there in the first place. I have sat through entire workshops that were clearly pitched beyond my skill level because I just didn’t want to make us look bad. It’s more awkward when you break for lunch, because where are you supposed to sit? It’s uncomfortable. I am not known for being shy, and let me tell you: It is awkward.

But there are all these online communities where you can learn to code. There are! But if you are under the impression that online communities are any friendlier to women’s participation, then you, my friend, have not looked lately at Wikipedia.

Well, just practice! I did the work — so should you! Here is the real point I’m trying to make here: It is not about “should.” What women should do has nothing to do with it. The point is, women aren’t. And neither, for that matter, are people of color. And unless you believe (and you don’t, do you?) that some biological explanation prevents us from excelling at programming, then you must see that there is a structural problem.

So I am saying to you: If you want women and people of color in your community, if it is important to you to have a diverse discipline, you need to do something besides exhort us to code.

“What the modern movie lacks is beauty,” said D.W. Griffith, melancholy at the end of the a long career, “the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.”

At film’s inception, it’s said that viewers didn’t necessarily know where to rest their eyes. Film hadn’t organized itself into the streamlined patterns of cause-and-effect that we recognize as narrative. Why not let the eyes wander to the wind in the trees?

An unspoken truth about early silent film is that it’s really hard for most people to watch for any length of time. At class screenings in grad school, we students would settle in with the best of intentions. But after an hour or so, having exchanged complicit looks, one of us would sidle up to the DVD player and press fast-foward. The damn things are silent, after all. We got the gist, even at double-speed.

The problem is that early silent film counts on a kind of attention that we didn’t have: an open-eyed fascination with the appearance of moving photographic images, and the ability to grasp allusions to any number of turn-of-the-century pop-culture references.

Having watched enough of these films, I can now, with a great deal of concentration, summon up a reverie that I imagine to be like the kind of attention early viewers brought to film. When I can, I do see things that I don’t usually see — my own equivalents of the wind in the trees.

I thought of all this because I’ve been following some of the talk around the blogosphere about concentration in the digital age:

• Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It, which refutes the widely held notion that digital pedagogy panders to millennials’ attention deficit disorder
• Gary Olson’s “How Not to Reform Humanities Scholarship,” which rails against such pedagogical changes
• Mark Sample’s “Serial Concentration is Deep Concentration,” which takes Olson to task for his refusal to see rigor in the complex digital work we do.

In broad strokes, I agree with Sample. Having now done this digital work a bit, I can promise you that it does indeed require deep focus and intellectual energy. (And, let it be said, I think Olson’s piece is an example of the worst kind of academic concern trolling.)

I like the melancholy Griffith quote, too, though, for its reminder that we’re at a transitional moment in our mode of apprehending the world — far from the first, and assuredly not the last, but an important one. There’s beauty to be found in the new regime of attention (we couldn’t have had Vertigo without narrative), but there was beauty in the last one, too. I know Sample and Davidson would be the first to agree with this; I’m not actually disputing anything they propose.

This is just to say: I was drawn to silent film because its difficulty rewards a viewer with an unfamiliar kind of beauty. I probably won’t stop assigning longer papers and books, not because I think they’ll somehow prepare students better for the workplace or some such nonsense, but because there’s beauty in them, of the kind that comes from immersion in a different regime of attention.

"Digital Reflections," by seriykotik1970

This year, the American Historical Association’s annual meeting included a THATCamp, which I was happy to attend. Andrew Hartman, a professor at Illinois State University, published an interesting response, which I wanted to take a moment to address.

Hartman enjoyed himself but wondered if the scholars attending THATCamp evinced an unwarranted utopianism about the prospects of technology to transform the practice of history. It’s a good question, and an understandable reaction, but I don’t think it’s altogether accurate. First, I think that what Hartman understood as utopianism may in fact have been an attempt by the participants to make newcomers like Hartman feel welcome. If there’s a utopianism present at THATCamp, I think it’s more about the possibilities of new forms of interacting with each other, not the technology itself.

(As an aside, I think that for women this may hit a particular nerve. Digital humanities’ vaunted niceness is an aspect of the field I love, but for women in particular being “nice” is often read as an admission of intellectual inferiority. Some people can easily afford to be nice; for others, the cost is higher.)

In fact, as I’ve written before, technological utopianism bothers me a great deal for very personal reasons, and it’s a stance digital humanists have been quite active in countering.

More substantively, I’d like to respond to another of Hartman’s points: that while digital history is “an important new tool … it does not change the way we conceptualize the past.” I’d like to argue that it does, and in ways that directly counter the characterization of digital history as utopian. In fact, much of it has an activist project that, like Hartman, draws on Marxist theory.

Anyone who’s been to an archive understands that no arrangement of material is ideologically neutral. (Archivists understand this best of all.) The arrangement of folders, the classification of documents, and the institutional placement of material all entail thousands of tiny decisions, each of which has consequences. A good historian responds to this by accounting for absences, comparing sources, and adjusting interpretations to compensate for inherent biases.

Digital archives are no different. If you’ve done a keyword search in ProQuest’s historical newspapers database, you understand that the results you see are skewed by the newspapers the database contains, the peculiarities of the digitization process, and the options you’ve checked (or forgotten to check). One way that “digital history” can help historians to compensate for these biases is to help us understand what they are, how they work, and which methods might begin to fill in the gaps. To fail to do so would be — not utopian, exactly, but certainly naive.

Some of the most ambitious digital history presses beyond these cognitive compensations and toward digital methods of repairing some of the gaps in the historical record. In fact, we saw a number of examples of this work at the same AHA that Hartman attended. Chad Black, at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, identified the absence of indigenous people in the records of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Quito. Turning to jail records, Black used textual analysis to recover a history of indigenous people that would otherwise be invisible.

Meanwhile, at the MLA, Lauren Klein of the Georgia Institute of Technology was describing her work to account for a different kind of archival absence; in this case, that of Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved personal chef, James Hemings. Hemings himself isn’t present in the Jefferson papers, because Jefferson didn’t write to him, and he didn’t write to Jefferson. Inspired by Foucauldian critiques of the archive, Klein turned to social-network analysis to visualize correspondence about Hemings, resurrecting a ghostly image of Hemings from the gaps in the Jefferson papers.

Back at the AHA, Jo Guldi of the Harvard Society of Fellows was offering a meditation on the effect of mass-digitization of the history of the longue durée. The new availability of these records, said Guldi, makes possible (and imperative) a different kind of history, one that combines scale and scrutiny across wide swathes of time and space.

Brown University’s Jean Bauer, also present at THATCamp and the AHA, might have told Hartman about her work to design an ideologically and theoretically informed database to trace the movement of social networks and institutions over time and space.

Those at AHA may also have seen a presentation by Tim Sherratt about Invisible Australians, a project to resurrect via digitization, textual analysis, and facial recognition a history of Australians of color living under the White Australia policy.

Would any of these historians argue that their work constitutes a true, full identity between history as-it-happened and our present-day situatedness? Good God, no. No historian would. But I think they might argue the the truly utopian — or naive — move would be to continue believing that any record is perfect or impartial, including those contained in traditional archives. Digital historians are doing what historians do: alerting us to new ways of looking at people, places, and things we might have overlooked.

History has a humility that I love — the reason I insist on calling myself a historian, despite my degrees in film studies and American studies. A historian has a loyalty to and respect for her subjects that evinces itself not only in cautious interpretation but in a doggedness in seeking out every possible dimension of past lives. It’s not naive to search for new ways to do this; it’s a gesture of respect.

Last week I attended the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Chicago. Although I’ve always thought of myself as a historian, I hadn’t been to an AHA meeting since my first year of grad school in 2004. In part, I hadn’t been going because I’m affiliated with so many disciplines that it’s difficult to keep up with all the meetings. But I also hadn’t been going because I wasn’t sure what the AHA would do for me. I won’t be interviewing there, since I’m not applying for teaching jobs, and playing the big-conference game (pretending not to notice the thousands of ways people behave disrespectfully to each other) has started to seem unnecessary to me.

I did go back, though, for a few reasons. First, I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve only recently come to understand how scholarly societies might be important sites of change within the academy. In my mind, AHA, MLA, SCMS, and their ilk were bureaucratic prestige-machines, awarding prizes and manning the gates for the old guard.

At this summer’s Scholarly Communication Institute, I heard from some of these organizations’ leaders and was surprised to discover that many of these organizations actually have agendas that are far more progressive than those of many department chairs (and those of many graduate students, to tell you the truth). Many of them, including the AHA, are interested in changing tenure and promotion, in exploring nontraditional publication models, and in promoting alternative academic careers. Better yet, they have a built-in audience of faculty and a great deal of scholarly credibility — the perfect partner for those of us interested in reform.

Second, the AHA has over the last year or two been a vocal supporter of digital history, and this year’s meeting featured a wealth of panels with a digital focus, and even a THATCamp. It was really exciting to see people whom I’ve generally encountered at digital humanities-specific events in a disciplinary “home.”

Finally, I’ve been impressed by several of the recent stances the AHA has taken toward issues that are important to me. Most personally relevant to me is Jim Grossman’s and Anthony Grafton’s “No More Plan B,” in which the executive director and (now past-) president argue that grad programs need to start seriously preparing students for jobs outside of the professoriate. I can’t tell you what it means to me to be able to show something like this to my graduate school mentors. I’ve also been impressed by the AHA’s work to track employment statistics, advocate for public history, and campaign for archives.

This is not to say that it’s a perfect organization, or that it’s doing everything I’d like it to do. I think we have to keep pushing at the AHA — and the MLA, and SCMS, and the ASA, and the ACLS, and everyone else — so that we can advocate together for the change that we want. That’s really why I showed up at AHA after all these years, and why I made a general pain in the ass of myself at the AHA’s Committee on Graduate and Early Career Professionals forum. We have an opportunity, I think, to press for change, and I think it’s important that those of us who want it make our voices heard.

The T-shirt says "I survived Yale dissertation boot camp," which is a real thing that exists.

Recently, a much-loved friend asked me for advice on dissertation-writing, not because I’m any paragon of efficiency, but because she knew I’d struggled myself. She wanted to know if I had any words of wisdom about getting through the process with a minimum of pain.

My immediate impulse was to decline to answer, on the grounds that I am utterly unqualified to advise anyone on writing without pain. My next impulse was to solicit advice from my friends via Twitter, and I got some wonderful responses. There were some terrifically helpful practical tips, but one that really got me thinking was from my friend Franky Abbott, who suggested the importance of recognizing “that the dissertation is antiquated process training and not a reflection of your total worth.”

Get to know librarians and archivists. Use a citation management system. Consider using Scrivener instead of Word. Digitize everything you can. Back up your data. Figure out what times of day work for you and write then. Do the 15 minutes thing. Respect the indirect work that contributes to your dissertation — conversations with friends, seemingly unrelated books, long walks.

I don’t have to tell you to work hard, because I know you will. And there are lots of times when hard work is what’s called for. But there are other times when the thing you should do is to go easy on yourself, and the real challenge of the process is figuring out which is which.

The most important thing is, your friends and family know you and love you, and that has nothing at all to do with your dissertation.

Illustration by Carrie of the Here & There Shop, who is a pleasure to work with. Click on the image to commission your own print!

I’m equal parts delighted and heartbroken to say that I’ve accepted a new job. As of February 10, I’ll be the digital humanities program coordinator at the University of California, Los Angeles. January 13 is my last official day at Emory. The decision to accept the job was really difficult — I love being at Emory, I love the library, and I love my colleagues. I’m so proud of what we’ve done together. Still, this new position is a significant opportunity for me: the chance to shape a growing program in California, the state where I grew up and which I care about deeply.

I’ll spare you the weepy theatrics, except to say that I feel really fortunate, both for the opportunities Emory has offered me and for the new opportunity I’ve been afforded.

Photo by pixelhut

I posted recently about tools for managing a research workflow, and one of the points I made is that no set of tools will be right for everyone. I’ve tried and failed to foist my favorite tools on enough people to know that this is true.

Still, after I wrote the post, a few people asked me which tools I use. I do indeed have a number of favored tools, and since I find myself endlessly fascinating, I enjoyed the chance to consider why I use them and what it says about me as a researcher. I’d also really love to hear what you use and why!

Here’s what I use in a nutshell:

• Zotero for collecting and organizing sources (both primary and secondary), taking notes, and citing sources
• Automator and Acrobat Pro for processing photographs I take in archives
• Handbrake for recording video
• Quicktime for editing video
• Audacity for working with sound
• Scrivener for writing
• Microsoft Word for finishing
• Keynote, SlideShare, and WordPress for sharing work

I haven’t used DEVONthink much in the past, but after giving it a more concentrated trial for my last post, I suspect it will make its way into my workflow, too.

Here’s why these tools work for me:

I’m a list-maker.

I generally start a new Zotero folder when I get interested in a new research topic.

In general, the first thing I do when approaching a research topic is to survey it in the secondary literature. I hunt for the most recent, comprehensive relevant source I can find and citation-chain from one work to another. This is a sprawling, idiosyncratic process that takes me unpredictably from Academic Search Premier to Google Scholar to physical books to Wikipedia. So it’s important that I’m capturing references as I go, with a reference manager that can quickly and thoroughly grab the information I need from any source.  Zotero meets these needs. It’s fast, I can access it on multiple computers, it works with my browser, and it can handle pretty much any source.

I’m an erratic reader and have a short attention span.

Some people, I’ve noticed, read in a much more sustained way than I do. They start with one work, read all the way through it, and move on to the next. Not me. When I’m on the trail of a research problem, I jump from source to source quickly and unpredictably as ideas occur to me. Zotero’s note fields allow me to take notes on one source and then quickly move on to the next one, without disrupting the flow of my ideas. And I can easily find the idea again using Zotero’s search feature. Even better, I can reuse my notes for multiple works — a simple thing, but something I haven’t been able to do in the past because I’m too disorganized.

I’m not particularly disciplined about organizing my files.

I’ve experimented with a lot of organizational schemes. For me, the breaking point comes when there’s too high a burden of manually recording and organizing data. For example, it would be nice to maintain nested hierarchical folder trees, but in real life, I won’t do that. I just won’t. I also won’t diligently create consistent filenames or enter proper metadata for my files. Now that I’ve acknowledged these hard truths about myself, I’ve turned to tools that automate this process by grabbing good metadata, batch-editing file names and formats, and optimizing files for searchability: Zotero, Automator, and DEVONthink.

I’m a transcriber.

When I'm reading something complicated, like Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter, I tend to write down a lot of what I read.

I’ve never been great at concentrating single-mindedly on a complicated work. One technique I’ve developed to keep my mind focused is to transcribe important quotes as I read. I’m a fast typist and the effort of entering the quote keeps me focused on the page in front of me. Zotero’s notes feature is a great place to record important quotes, since it keeps the quotes tied to the works they come from. And my transcription habit makes it easy to search for and drop in relevant quotes as I write.

I’m an archive rat.

It’s rare that I write something without doing original research in some archive somewhere. My tools of choice for capturing archival finds are a digital camera, a tripod, and (as I’ve written elsewhere) Automator, Acrobat Pro, and Zotero.

Anything can be a primary source.

DEVONthink allows me to retrieve and preview all kinds of media in situ.

I’m a cultural historian who works a lot with film, so my workflow has to be able to accommodate video as well as any number of other artifacts: photographs, three-dimensional objects, oral histories. To make research copies of DVDs, I use Handbrake. I break things up into clips using Quicktime, because it’s easy and lightweight. I like Audacity for dealing with sound clips. And, since Zotero’s strength isn’t really multimedia files, I’ve begun using DEVONthink to retrieve these files when I need them.

I am a slow, painstaking, procrastination-prone writer.

Scrivener allows me to tackle my writing in manageable chunks.

A lot of us have trouble getting words on the page, for reasons that vary from person to person. Some people are frustrated by the disjunct between the ideas in their head and the way things flow on the page; others need to feel that an argument is perfectly organized mentally before they can write their ideas down. In my case, the problem is a combination of impostor syndrome and perfectionism. I’ll reliably choose to do almost anything other than write, even though the act is important to me and, when it’s going well, makes me happy.

Scrivener is the best tool I’ve found for helping me overcome this aversion to committing words to page. It allows me to focus on one small, manageable chunk at a time, leaving the more ambitious work for later. So, for example, as I’m slaloming through secondary sources, I can quickly jot down a few summary sentences in Scrivener. As an idea occurs to me I can note it briefly, along with a few supporting sentences. By the time I get to the point where my writing would ordinarily begin, I’ve already got a good chunk of text to work with, and it’s easy to move these pieces around. Sure, I could do this in MS Word, but to me, the blank page in Word demands to be filled with a coherent narrative. The interface of Scrivener reassures me that it’s OK to deal in scraps and fragments of ideas.

Scrivener is great for assembling a piece of writing, but for fine-tuning transitions and adjusting formatting, I switch to Microsoft Word, because I own it and it’s powerful.

My one pressing issue with Scrivener is that it doesn’t (really) work with Zotero. This is a major problem for me, since I like both tools very much. You can theoretically use a feature called the RTF Scan with Scrivener and Zotero, but in my experience this doesn’t really work. The scan misses many of the citations. So once I’ve exported something from Scrivener to Word, I’ll comb through it again, adding the references that Zotero’s RTF scan didn’t pick up. It’s far from ideal, but in my mind it’s better than not using either tool.

I’m a visual thinker.

Arranging images into presentations has become an important way for me to work through my ideas.

I often sign up to present my work at conferences, and not just because this gives me a deadline and a chance to share ideas. I also enjoy the opportunity to create visual narratives of my work; it’s become an important step in my own process of synthesizing an argument. My favorite tool for this is Keynote, because it’s easy to use, offers a fairly chrome-free interface, and handles images and video well. Because I invest a lot of energy in creating these narratives, I like to use SlideShare to record a voice track and then embed them in my blog. (I’ve also created video versions and posted them on the Internet Archive, which is fun because I happen to like the Internet Archive.)