Dissertation

Earlier this week, I took out my keys and discovered that one key inexplicably had become wedged in the ring of another one such that I could not for the life of me untangle them. It was like one of these mechanical disentanglement puzzles that I was never very good at solving. All week I wrestled with them every time I took them out, alternating between reasoned calculation and frustrated acts of force, but with no success.

Yesterday morning after finishing a rather unproductive session of dissertation writing at the coffee shop, I put the pointy ball of keys in my pocket for the ride to work. When I arrived and took them out to lock up, I noticed with some amazement that they were no longer tangled. Apparently, my peddling for 25 minutes was smarter than days of conscious effort, but at this point I wasn't complaining.

I took it as a metaphor for writing, reminding me that sometimes writing happens best when I'm trying the least. Of course, a good deal of writing happens with deliberate, focused attention on the task, but I should never discount the subconscious work of writing that often gets me through the knottier periods when I can't seem to untangle a particular ball of thoughts. Quite regularly the real writing of the morning happens either on the ride to work when the ideas are still warm from a couple hours of writing or on the ride home when thoughts re-animate themselves once I've relaxed my white-knuckled grip on them.

Writing is not a brain-in-a-vat activity; it is as embodied as anything else, even though it's easy to forget when I'm in the mode of writing that involves putting words on the page. Biking is my favorite way to write when I'm not at the computer, but running or walking or taking a shower often can work just as well--whatever method let's the body do some of the heavy lifting for a while so the mind get the sweat out of its eyes and tie its shoes before making its next sentence.

It's one thing to not follow your own advice; it's even worse when you've forgotten what that advice was in the first place. I used to dispense insights about writing to my freshman writing students; now I feel like getting back in touch to see if I can borrow their notes (yes, let's pretend they took notes, just for the sake of illustration).

It appears that not only has being a graduate student in English squelched my love of literature, but it also has undermined my ability to write, which is a problem when you're supposed to hand in a large, dissertation-shaped document in order to graduate.

A couple weeks ago I woke up one morning and did a little math. This isn't normally my strong suit but this calculation wasn't too hard to figure out: 1998 = when I started the program; 2008 = now. What I came away with was "10 years = I've become one of those guys."

It's not quite fair to be hard on myself, I guess, since I've been working at real job that enjoy for a couple of years, and I'm not planning to look for academic positions. But it did bring on an existential crisis of sorts, one that helped me realize that I need to either finish this thing or move on with my life.

I realized that I did have a choice. Plenty of good friends have decided not to finish and have been better people for it. I finally allowed myself to imagine who I would be if I stopped, and I decided could live with that person.

So now I've given myself a small window in which either to give this one last college try or to graduate with a masters and move on. Which means I've had to begin remembering how to write, and write quickly. Not to take notes, or find a better way to organize my notes. To write.

I've dusted off Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, and Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers for old time sake, and it was good to find some inspiration, however basic the principles might be. Two quotes from Elbow have provided the basis for my writing mantras:

1) No thinking without writing.

"Think of writing not as a way to transmit a message but as a way to grow and cook a message. Writing is a way to end up thinking something you couldn't have started out thinking. Writing is in fact a way to free yourself from what you presently think, feel, and perceive."

2) "You have to be a big spender. Not a tightass."

"I know perfectly well that the more I utter, the more I'll be able to utter and--other things being equal--the better I'll be able to utter. I know I can. Noam Chomsky knows I can. But it doesn't feel that way. I feels like the more I utter, especially the more I write, the more I'll use up my supply of meaningful utterances, and as the source dries up, they will get worse."

I've spent all day today writing, more than I've done for a very long time. And I have one big document where I've been making sentences and putting them into paragraphs. And I think I might still have a story to tell about place blogging, about Fred and the Ecotone gang, about finding our sense of place in digital networks.

So there it is. I'm putting myself out there. My last stand. Either way, it will all be over soon and that's something I won't let myself forget.

Yesterday I spend the day "Sustainable Waters in a Changing World " conference at UMass Amherst where I gave a presentation on "Blogging Places: Using Social Media to Foster Place Identification and Share Local Knowledge," my standard place blogging spiel revised for audience of scientists and environmentalists. Here's the abstract:

If Henry David Thoreau were alive today, would he keep a blog? Greg Perry’s site, “The Blog of Henry David Thoreau,” helps us picture what this might look like by posting daily entries from Thoreau’s journal. While Thoreau would likely feel ambivalence toward blogging for technological and political reasons, it is not difficult to imagine him finding affinity with those who today identify themselves as “place bloggers.” In much the same way that Thoreau grounded his daily journal writing in his local surroundings, so also place bloggers use the genre as a way to explore the relationship between where they are and who they are. When blogging was first gaining widespread popularity, one group of bloggers created a wiki called “Ecotone: Writing about Place” that served as a portal for those interested in discussing both place and blogging. Between 2003-2005, more than 50 bloggers from around the world contributed 350 posts on a variety of shared topics that encouraged participants to construct a deeper sense of place. More recently, the launch of such sites as placeblogger.com reflects a growing interest in place blogging as a form of citizen journalism designed to enable people to share vital local knowledge with geographically proximate audiences. While the web has often been viewed as a disembedding mechanism that attenuates social relationships and undermines place identification, these sites suggest that place blogging can serve as a tool for re-inhabitation, creating what the Ecotone bloggers describe as an “edge effect” that blurs the real and virtual in productive ways. Place blogging can empower ordinary people to think of themselves as creators of local knowledge, whether as citizen scientists, citizen journalists, nature writers, or urban flâneurs. Because our environments are being shaped by digital networks whether we like it or not, it is incumbent upon those concerned with the health and sustainability of places to examine critically how new communication technologies might reconnect people to where they are and enable like-minded people to create and share vital local knowledge.

Also presenting in this session on "Place, Season, and Landscape Perceptions":

The Citizen Scientist: an Emerging Scientific, Social and Economic Voice in Discussions about Water Resources, Wildlife Habitats, and the Impact of Climate Change
Glorianna Davenport, The Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Hudson River Almanac: Creating a Electronic Network of Phenologists
Steve Stanne, New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation and Cornell University

Our session was one of three sessions in a track called "Scientific and Watershed Community Collaborations" which also included panelists presenting on a interesting range of projects incorporating everything from handheld gps devices to Googlemaps and Flicker:

The Wildlife Inventory Project: Citizens Combining the Ancient Skills of Animal Tracking with Modern Data Collection Methods to Monitor Wildlife Activity within the Watershed
Bob Metcalfe, New England Discovery

Engaging Citizen Scientists in a Digital World: The Life on the Purple Loosestrife Project
Jennifer Forman Orth, Electronic Field Guide Project, Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Boston

Disseminating Wetlands Restoration Planning Information via an Online Document with Interactive Mapping Capabilities
Beth Suedmeyer, Wetlands Restoration Program, Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management

The final session gave use time to share ideas about how we could use information technologies to help people connect with their environments and contribute useful data to larger projects to improve the health of ecosystems. It was exciting to how much my research intersected with the work of those in other fields, and it was fun to share ideas with those trying to solve real world problems using many of the same tools I've been working with and writing about for a while now.

If Henry David Thoreau were around today, do you think he would blog?

I began thinking about this after reading an interview with Greg Perry, editor of The Blog of Henry David Thoreau. The article leaves that impression that there's a kind of natural correspondence between the Journals and the blog format:

Thoreau’s journal seems particularly well-suited to the blogging format. What similarities and differences do you see between his 19th-century paper journal and our 21st-century electronic blogs?

The similarities are obvious. Daily entries. Personal notes. Natural observations. Runs the gamut really. I don’t think there are any differences except the obvious one. Thoreau wrote his journal as if others would read it eventually. So other than the immediacy of a blog, there isn’t that much different.

One of the joys of reading The Blog of Henry David Thoreau is realizing that some things haven’t changed since his time. What continuities do you see between his era and ours?

Actually, that’s the thing. Most things are the same. He is living in a technological age as well as we are. The railroad and the telegraph are changing the world he knows. The country that he lives in has changed from the primeval days of his ancestors. There is a buried past there as well. And people are people. Politicians are especially politicians. Commerce is commerce. Even farmers are joining that business.

But I wanted to get a few other thoughts on the subject, so I posed the question to a few of my friends who have spent time with Thoreau. Their initial responses are below.

George:

Great question, Tim!

I think he'd blog, but I think he'd equivocate about why he was doing it.
Much like his famous ambivalence with the train that abutted Walden Pond (he
admired the energy of the industry as human accomplishment, but resented the
intrusion on nature and philosophic solitude for the mere sake of
connectedness), I think he'd find the Web a vexing friend.

And I don't think he'd give up journaling, at all--he might publish his
journals on his blog, in fact, in addition to whatever timely entries he was
making there.

And, of course, he'd be doing all of this on a borrowed computer, using a
DSL connection paid for by his parents.

Matt:

What's a blog?

Ha ha. I'm not that ignorant.

He would not. His journals were reservoirs of material for his polished, longer work. I don't think he'd have made his writing process public. Of course, the blog form could have changed his composition process--maybe he'd still keep a journal, and write "publically" in a blog more often. But I think his informal writing/journaling was important as a place of refuge.

I also think he was fairly class-conscious--a naysayer, and one who loved to tweak the establishment, but I think he liked to do so from within, rather than from without. I would guess that a part of him would see blogging as too democratic: that is, unreferreed, lacking true craft. Of course, there's some good writing online, but he was anal about drafting and language.

Jonathan:

Hmmm, would Thoreau blog. An interesting question.

We know that Thoreau was involved with The Dial for some time, and did publish there, so maybe today he would be a contributor to something like n+1.

But what makes me doubtful that Thoreau would be a blogger is precisely the 'timeliness' of blogging - the genre of rushed thoughts rapidly written down before their shelf life expires is something that would not appeal to him (cf. "Reading").

And yet, Thoreau did give talks at the Lyseum, "A Plea for John Brown," etc., and so perhaps today he would find The Blog to be the successor of the public talk / lecture. I'm not sure.

But if the specific question is: would Thoreau have blogged rather than kept his journal, or would he do his journaling on a blog, I think the answer is no. The journal was a writer's journal (as you know, most of Walden comes out of it), not something that existed for the sake of public perusal. Near the end of his life, however, he was going back to revise portions of the journal, seemingly deciding that they would be worth preserving.

So, in sum, I don't know. But I'd be interested to hear what others have thought.

Their responses offer a more nuanced take on what Thoreau's attitude toward blogging might be.
Anyone else want to weigh in with opinions?

I received a copy of Coming into Contact: New Essays in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (University of Georgia Press, 2007) in the mail early this week, several years after I wrote my contribution, "Composition and the Rhetoric of Eco-Effective Design," an ASLE conference back in 2003. It's bizarre to finally see it published after not thinking about it for so long. The more time I spend publishing content online, the longer the print cycle seems, especially for academic books. But it's good to see the book published, and it looks like an interesting collection. 

Book Description
"A snapshot of ecocriticism in action, Coming into Contact collects sixteen previously unpublished essays that explore some of the most promising new directions in the study of literature and the environment. They look to previously unexamined or underexamined aspects of literature's relationship to the environment, including swamps, internment camps, Asian American environments, the urbanized Northeast, and lynching sites. The authors relate environmental discourse to practice, including the teaching of green design in composition classes, the restoration of damaged landscapes, the persuasive strategies of environmental activists, the practice of urban architecture, and the impact of human technologies on nature.

The essays also put ecocriticism into greater contact with the natural sciences, including elements of evolutionary biology, biological taxonomy, and geology. Engaging both ecocritical theory and practice, these authors more closely align ecocriticism with the physical environment, with the wide range of texts and cultural practices that concern it, and with the growing scholarly conversation that surrounds this concern."

Yesterday Numenius gave me the heads up the Lisa Williams went live with her directory of place blogs at placeblogger.com. Congratulations, Lisa!

It's quite an accomplishment to pull something like this together, an effort I appreciate because I attempted something similar earlier this summer and gave up once I remembered that I hadn't finished my dissertation (funny how that slips my mind sometimes). What I find interesting is that Lisa and I were developing place blogging directories using Drupal at the same time while living a few miles apart in the Boston area but without having met each other. By July I had developed and abandoned my revised Ecotone site at placeblogging.com and by early August Lisa had bet a colleague that she could collect 1000 place blogs from around the country. I don't know if she's reached the 1000 mark yet or not, but she must be close, and placeblogger.com promises to be a useful showcase for this genre of blogging.

Lisa's definition of place blogs is a useful one:

A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time
It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution
It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism
It’s about the lived experience of a place

Lisa has spoken a couple of times at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and you can listen to her discuss the project by visiting the Berkman archives.

A couple weeks ago, my piece "Blogging Places: Locating Pedagogy in the Whereness of Weblogs" in the journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedoagogy. I wouldn't have been able to do this without all the generous input I received from numerous place bloggers, especially the Ecotone folks. So thanks everyone for your feedback and interest during the process of writing this.

I'm now in the process of filling out sections of this as I plow ahead with the larger dissertation process. So some of you will likely be hearing from me again...

While I was in San Francisco, Pica contacted me to let me know she and Numenius would be in Berkeley on Saturday and wondered if I would have time to get together. I was glad they took the initiative because it turned out the conference was winding down and I was looking for an excuse to visit Berkeley for the first time. I had a paper to give in the morning, but after that I jumped on the BART with a few others from the conference and met up with Pica and Numenius in front of Games of Berkeley.

From there we strolled to a café/music store called The Musical Offering just south of the Berkeley campus to find a quiet place to chat. And of course there was much to chat about. It wasn't long before we were sketching design ideas for a new Ecotone logo on napkins and brainstorming about where the site might go in the future. Once again, it was great to meet the people behind the blog, in person and in place, and our conversation helped infuse energy into the dissertation project in ways that I hadn't expected.

Indeed, I didn't plan to work on my dissertation that day, but I was happy to credit it all as research. After Pica and Numenius headed back to Davis, I walked over to Cody's bookstore where I found a great little book called Place: A Short Introduction, exactly the overview of critical geography that I was looking for. It gave me hope that might still find ways to nourish my inner geographer without having to start another degree program.

As the afternoon waned, I met up with Derek and Co. at Becket's pub for drinks—which I didn't count as dissertation research.

Berkeley might not be the countercultural hotbed it once was (there's a Starbucks cross from the university's main gate), but I still found myself stimulated by the place and the company and was glad that blogging (and bloggers) once again gave me an excuse to explore.

Sometimes a place just fits, like it was custom-designed for a particular moment and state of mind. Yesterday morning this place was the basement of City Lights bookstore in a section entitled “Topo/Graphies” where I found myself during my last few hours in San Francisco, a city where I’ve come to feel at home in the last few days. Sunday morning I got up early to wander around for a while before catching an afternoon flight back to Boston.

After grabbing a coffee and bagel, I walked up Grant through Chinatown and before long a familiar voice hollered my name from across the street. There stood Lad Tobin, my dissertation chair from BC, waiting for a ride to stay with relatives in another part of the city. Our chance encounter gave the city a familiar feel, and we chatted for a while as if we were standing between Carney Hall and McElroy at BC, as if the tourists jostling past us were students rushing between classes.

After parting ways with Lad, I made my way to City Lights with the intention of picking up a copy of Lefevre’s Production of Space, but when I couldn’t find a copy in the basement philosophy section, I began browsing other shelves nearby. As I turned around, the first shelf I encountered as called “Topo/graphies” and it didn’t take me long to realize that this shelf was designed just for me. To my amazement, it was full of books on technology and place, a hand-picked reading list for my dissertation that I began to transcribe furiously into my notebook in the few minutes I had before heading back to my hotel. Next time I’m in San Francisco I want to find out who designed this shelf so I can thank him or her in my dissertation acknowledgements page.

Of course there's great irony in the fact that just as I'm writing an article on place blogging, I'm spending very little time either blogging or venturing very far beyond the space in front of my computer screen. In my darker moments, I fear that this is just an inherent part of academic work, the necessary divide between theory and practice that has infected scholarship in the humanities.

This is certainly part of it, but it's also true that I'm just too busy and I can't spread myself any thinner. In time I'll figure out again how to write my dissertation and blog regularly, to walk and chew gum at the same time.

I will say that I've enjoyed my interviews with Fred, Lorianne, and Pica over the last month or so, and as long as they're still blogging, all is still right in the blogosphere.

For now, I'm just glad I've made it to Cafenation in Brighton Center fairly early. The Christmas music is playing (Elvis as the moment) and I've must got my usual small cup of light roast. It's time to get back to writing about place blogs.