Or, how I’ve adapted the old to fit with the new.
"Amanuensis," Scribes in the Abbey of Echternach (Luxembourg), Manuscript from the 11th century.
When I’m at an archive, I transcribe and I take copious notes. I recreate documents in huge Word documents that I can “find and search” later. I also keep a separate document for commentary — my notes, my research questions, and leads for future research.
On a recent trip to the New-York Historical Society, my confidence faded when one of the archivists tentatively told me that the speech I was reading and transcribing was also online. “You know . . . you can actually read this on archive.org . . .” she trailed off. Here I was, typing as fast as I could when everything I was entering into my laptop could be accessed at any time from my couch. A crisis of archival faith.
(An aside: this wasn’t the first time I experienced this. In Boston last spring, a very kind and helpful archivist boasted about how many abolitionists’ letters they had digitized. She told me that I could just look at those letters online. Pause. Yes, I said, but I’m here. In Boston. I could understand that she wanted to protect the documents from being handled too much, but what was I supposed to do now? Did she want me to sit in the reading room and read the letters on my computer? Did that even count as research? Historians are still supposed to go to archives, right? To paraphrase Mindy Kaling: was everyone else going online without me? (Seriously: what is everyone else doing? I know many archives aren’t online, but as so many become digitized, is this the way of the future? Is it naïve to still want to see and handle documents in person?))
After learning that the speeches I was reading at the New-York Historical Society were online, I debated whether I should just finish up early and go home. But. During the past few hours, I’d had more productive thoughts than I’d had in the past two weeks. I wasn’t just reading these speeches from 1864 — I was thinking about them, making connections, and my article’s outline had started to come together. The quiet room, the time crunch (. . . have to finish this speech before lunch), and the coffee I’d had earlier in the morning had created the ideal conditions for inspiration.
Later in the day, it hit me: this is what I need in my digital research! I need to find a way to create these conditions when I’m reading the 45 PDFs from the New York Tribune or the Google Book I’ve downloaded to my iPad.
So, to conclude this series of posts: how do I institute slowness in a research environment where speed and quantity rule? I’ve started to transcribe again. I organize the many newspaper articles I’ve been collecting in folders in DropBox, each titled with the date, the newspaper, and something of the headline or topic. I can then access them via my iPad with iAnnotate or Good Reader, programs that allows me to zoom in and out so that I can see the entire article or page. I also store Google Books (I’ve been reading nineteenth-century memoirs of dead missionaries most recently) on my iPad. The key is to treat these documents as if they aren’t digital. When I’m reading them, I open a Word document on my computer and I read through the documents as if I’m in a reading room at an archive. I transcribe long passages, I take notes, and I write out my thoughts.
This felt like unnecessary labor at first because it’s counterintuitive to the promise of accessibility. I don’t need to transcribe these documents. I have them with me basically all of the time. But this was beside the point. For me, the transcribed passages themselves are less important than the time I spend transcribing and taking notes. The process puts slowness back into my process and sets aside time to think.
How is market?
