It seems like a long time ago that I first ran across the Ecotone Wiki and was first exposed to the notion of place blogging, a topic compelling enough to keep me slogging away on this dissertation for quite some time. I've enjoyed spending time with the folks involved in the wiki, reading their blogs, corresponding in comments and emails, and occasionally enjoying a breakfast in Bodega Bay or Cambridge. The dissertation will be dedicated to them, of course, if it gets done, but until that happens, I at least want to give them a little down payment: in the course of my research I've managed to collect all the posts from Ecotone and put them into a single document, and I'm attaching it here for download if anyone is interested. It's an unedited archive of all the posts and comments from June 2003 to January 2005. There's also an online version here.
Chris Corrigan first propose the form of the Bi-weekly topics back in May of 2003, and at that time he envisioned a book coming out of it:
"So my proposal is this:
We take on a topic (15th is a good date to start) and whoever wants to blogs on that topic. We also post those entries at a page on the wiki and invite anyone who wants to in the wide world to join us for further discussion here. Then the conversation can continue here as long as it needs to.
After a year, we publish the book.
Seriously.
So I'm going to go to the front page and set up the space now, okay?
-- Chris"
The attached file isn't yet a book, but there a lot of fine material there for anyone interested in taking a look back at this fruitful period of place-based writing.
Bravo from Sydney
Lowering expectations
Thanks, Jarrett. It's good to know that others have taken a while to get their dissertations done and then have carried on with life, doing interesting work that is very different from what they studied in grad school. And our lunch back in SF continues to inform the story I'm trying to write.
I've been mulling over an aside from a recent post of yours: "What we learn in graduate school, after all, is not how to deepen our knowledge but how to organize our ignorance." This reminds me to lower my expectations for my dissertation, something I have to learn more deeply if I ever hope to finish.
Tim