About the scratchpad
This is a blog, of sorts, although I do not think of it as a blog. It is intended not a diary in the strictest sense, but rather a place to experiment, struggle, question, and play with whatever research I am currently working on. The themes will thus change over time as my projects change, and the entries may be quotations that strike my fancy, attempts to puzzle through hairy problems, notes on sources, experiments, musings, dead ends, odd angles of looking at things. It is a voice to my frustrations, discoveries, curiosities, and confusions. It is thinking out loud. It is a scratchpad.
I have been warned by wide-eyed colleagues that a public blog about my work—with my real name on it, no less!—is a terrible idea, career suicide, the sort of thing my intellectual enemies will delight in showing around. I do not share their fears. If this scratchpad were intended as a place to demean my fellow colleagues or play politics, perhaps they would be right to express concern for my safety. But I do not find those conversations productive, and this blog, above all, is meant to help me be productive. There are few, if any, academics who have not with time discovered the utility in writing. Writing is not something you sit down and do once you have synthesized all your data and are ready to simply spill it back into the world. Writing is something you do in order to synthesize your data. To that end, my thoughts here are often messy, unconnected, experimental, bizarre, erroneous, contradictory, or frustrated, but I suspect that, in spite of our tendency to put on a competent face for others, this is true of everyone, and I therefore see no shame in it.
I have been asked, too, by less concerned but more curious colleagues why I make this public and do not simply keep a research journal on paper. To this I have two answers. One is simply that I have worked with the web for many years now and it is, for whatever reason, a medium that I find immensely comfortable and satisfying. I am old enough not to have grown up with it, but young enough to find a natural and very easy affinity for it. It just "clicks." The other is that I have received just as many helpful recommendations from friends and colleagues over the course of keeping this blog as I have received private e-mails thanking me for making someone realize they are not alone in struggling to wrap their head around their data. On a purely selfish level, it is immensely useful for me because it puts me in conversation with others. But I am also always delighted to hear when other people receive some of the same benefits from it.*
I hope you might get something approaching the same. Or at least a good laugh.
* The secret third answer is that I do actually keep a paper journal. But that's for the really crazy shit.