Blood in the Archives

Today’s post is an example of how a healthy dose of scholarly wandering can lead to interesting finds and new questions. In a homage to Believer articles, I’ll just say this:

Discussed:

James Madison
Blood
Amalgamation
America’s Historical Newspapers
Spreadsheets
Nullification
Gothic Novels

In my research, I’ve been thinking about a small but important question that is difficult to answer: did Americans (and specifically – abolitionists) use “blood” to speak about “race” more often during the Civil War than in the antebellum period? Of course, “blood” and “race” had been used interchangeably for centuries, but I had this completely unfounded gut feeling that abolitionists used “color” more often than “blood” before the Civil War. Blood was particularly relevant during the war, and its rich religious and patriotic meaning lent significance to discussions of race and nationalism in a way that “color” did not. Yet before the CIvil War, I suspected (gut feeling!) that abolitionists’ would avoid associating “race” with “blood” except when they quoted the famous “of one blood” verse from Acts. Why? Many abolitionists subscribed to a kind of early (and inconsistent) critical race theory that would have made them loathe to connect race to something biological and permanent.

In thinking about this question of race and blood, I read an article in the experimental online religious studies project, Frequencies: “a collaborative genealogy of spirituality.” In “Blood,” Columbia Religion professor Gil Anidjar quotes from James Madison’s Federalist 14:

James Madison, for his part, reminded his listeners of “the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies.”

I’d read and taught this particular Federalist Paper before, of course, but since Madison lives a few decades before my usual nineteenth-century haunts, and I haven’t taught the US Survey in a couple of years, it was a fresh insight. It made perfect sense that Madison would have used “mingled blood” and “kindred blood” in his call for national unity. I looked it up, read the complete document, and filed this away in my brain and laptop.

Even though the question of blood/race to be tangentially related to my actual article, I couldn’t resist thinking about how to go about finding evidence to support my hypothesis. I thought about some of the recent scholarship on searching databases, and how other historians have used the results from several sets of keyword searches of digital archives to establish quantitative results. Patrick O’Neil’s ”Bosses and Broomsticks” does this with jumping-the-broom ceremonies, as I wrote about here, and Caleb McDaniel has a more extensive list of articles using digitized databases as well as an analysis of the complexities and lack of uniformity in this still newish research technique.

I decided to do a few exploratory searches and see what turned up. Warning: this search was by no means scientific – I didn’t count the results or try the results on multiple databases. At this point, I’m not planning on using this particular search as evidence in my current project, I was just curious to see if anything striking would turn up. If I do proceed, I will obviously have to come up with some kind of methodology: a spreadsheet documenting each hit, perhaps even some kind of political or geographical mapping. (Perhaps a future post?)

Using Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers (Series 1-7), I checked off three historical eras: the Jacksonian Era, the Antebellum Period, and U.S. Civil War. I searched for “mingled blood” (just like that – in quotations, no Boolean terms) in the “Full Text.” There were 97 results. As I scanned through them, I discovered multiple articles citing Madison’s words (which I recognized because I had just read Gil’s “Blood” article the day before). Huh. I hadn’t expected that, but it made sense. They appeared in newspapers in the 1830s:

1. Northern and southern newspapers reprinted Madison’s call for national unity, kindred blood, and mingled blood during the Nullification Crisis in 1832.

2. They also appeared (quoted) in a speech/statement delivered at the 1835 Democratic Convention in Baltimore in support of the pro-Union Martin Van Buren’s candidacy.

This generated new thoughts and questions:

• The phrase (and the Madison excerpt) do not appear in 1850, another moment of intense sectionalism, nor did Madison’s quote appear during the Civil War. Was this a reference that only appealed to an earlier generation of Americans? Did northerners reject the southerner Madison as sectional tensions grew?
• I had been expecting to see “mingled blood” associated with “amalgamation” and interracial sex, perhaps used in newspaper articles warning against the abolitionist fanatics in Boston. Instead, “mingled blood” and specifically the quote from Madison were being used to draw together white northerners and southerners who the abolitionist fanatics and South Carolina nullifiers threatened to divide. This was interesting and unexpected. “Mingled blood” spoke to white nationalism, while in the Civil War, it was used to disparage abolitionists as supporters of interracial marriage.
• Did “mingled blood” continue to have this positive and patriotic connotation during and after the Civil War, and have I just missed it? At what point did “mingled blood” come to be associated with interracial sex, or am I wrong in assuming that this became its primary meaning?

The term also popped up in other contexts as well: in poetry, in articles rejecting the Know-Nothings’ anti-immigration policies, in regard to the blood ties binding the British and German monarchies, and, interestingly, (something for cultural historians to consider?) the term “mingled blood” can also be found in a gloomy excerpt from Charles Whitehead’s gothic novel, The Autobiography of Jack Ketch. (Ketch was apparently an executioner employed by King Charles II).

As I go forward, I will expand the search terms (mingled blood, kindred blood, blood AND amalgamation, blood AND negro, etc.), and I’m also tentatively planning to start some kind of spreadsheet file keeping track of the hits I get for various search terms in different newspaper databases. There are challenges: it’s difficult to track subtle shifts in cultural history and language through newspapers alone, and I find myself very hesitant to make any definitive claims about how or why language changed over time. Yet I am also really intrigued in both the historical findings and the methodological challenges of doing this kind of cultural history work!

A sample of my findings: the excerpts from Jack Ketch and the speech to the Democrats:

“We have different languages for what the truth means.” – Mike Daisey

In January, I started to write a post about objectivity, “bias,” fact-checking, and the differences between journalism and history. (Phew).  I was inspired in part by the now-infamous “This American Life” episode featuring Mike Daisey’s visit to electronics factories in China – particularly the last 15 minutes when Ira Glass fact-checked the story with other journalists. While this final segment of the original episode hinted at some exaggerations on the part of Daisey, it struck me as an illustrative example for students. When I heard that Glass retracted the story this past Friday, I decided to revisit my post. While comparisons to other recent-ish fact/fiction debacles (Michael Bellesiles, James Frey, Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, etc.) may be apt, I’m not getting into those here.

Then: What I Wrote in January

My high school journalism teacher showed us All the President’s Men in order to teach us how dogged and determined journalists like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman had to get two sources to confirm every piece of information they printed. We learned that they weren’t biased, and they didn’t report unsubstantiated information. They reported the facts.

[Fact Check! (All the President's Men)]

More recently, I listened to the “This American Life” episode adapting Mike Daisey’s one-man show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” about Apple’s Chinese factories and suppliers. I found Daisey’s performance to be somewhere between effectively moving and over-the-top. But, of particular interest was the last portion of the show — a fact-checking exercise in which Ira Glass interviewed several other journalists and writers who had also covered the story. Was Daisey’s story sound? Was he a biased observer? He didn’t pretend to be a real journalist, after all. It turns out that his story did hold up, although his claims about the amount of child labor at Foxconn appear to be somewhat exaggerated.

I’ve been thinking about assigning this episode to my classes to spark a conversation about sources. As I’ve taught research seminars, I’ve thought more about the differences between journalistic research and historical research, and my sense is that students don’t always understand the distinction. If one of the Chinese workers whom Daisey interviewed lied to him, and he reported it as truth, what does this mean? What kinds of evidence do we trust, and which do we question, and why?

I find that students often have this backwards. When they read scholarly articles and books, they will accuse the authors of being “biased” because they are pursuing an argument instead of “just presenting the evidence.” Well, yes. She is “biased” because her article has an argument. While quick to find “bias” in scholarly articles and books, students sometimes have a very hard time identifying “biases” when they read primary sources. If the source said it, and the source lived in 1745, then it must be true!

My pedagogical strategy at the moment is to point out examples of evidence and analysis in every reading we do in class. I also use lots of primary sources, and I have students write short analyses throughout the semester so they become used to the language of introducing and analyzing quotations. Even with these exercises in place, I still find that learning how to gauge evidence is often the hardest skill to teach and to learn. It requires a breadth of knowledge that students’ frankly don’t have. How do they know that the New York Herald was a Democratic newspaper during the Civil War when it just pops up as another article in a keyword search? They don’t. The best I can do is teach them that they should always inquire and always ask: is this source “biased?”

Rethinking all of this after the Retraction . . .

Finding Patterns in the Wilderness

While recently re-reading Chandra Manning’s terrific book, What This Cruel War Was Over (Vintage Civil War Library, 2007), I was delighted to find the detailed discussion of her research methods in the book’s introduction. Manning’s ambitious book seeks to examine what Confederate and Union soldiers thought about slavery, and she concludes that the slavery question was indeed at the “center of soldiers’ views of the struggle” (11). She uses the letters and diaries of over 1,000 soldiers — that’s 1,000 distinct characters, and many, many more documents.

Rather than delving into Manning’s nuanced argument about what Confederates and black and white Union soldiers thought and how their thoughts changed over time, I wanted to highlight two of the passages where she writes about her methods.

First, how did she keep track of those 1000+ soldiers?

p. 8: “For every soldier whose writings I read, and for whom I could obtain sufficient biographical detail, I created a data sheet that recorded such information as birth date, home, occupation, marital status, regiment, rank, battle participation, and experiences, such as capture, wounding, or death. These 477 Confederate data sheets and 657 Union soldier data sheets helped place soldiers’ words in appropriate social and demographic context, and also helped ensure that my cross section of soldiers resembled the actual makeup of the enlisted ranks as closely as possible.”

Second, and this is most interesting to me at the moment, how did she organize the topics discussed in the letters and diaries? If you’ve ever read or written a letter, you’ll know that people’s thoughts jump around quite a bit. When you excerpt a quotation, you need to think about a) the content of the quote, b) the context of the quotation within the document, and c) the relation of that quotation to other larger events in the person’s life and in the world. As any professor who has graded research papers can tell you, an uninformed researcher can more or less find “evidence” for anything. Without keeping context and tone in the mix, a sarcastic comment in a letter can become genuine, a parody in a newspaper can become heartfelt.

Manning’s solution:

p. 10-11: “To determine the direction of prevailing winds, I built a series of gauges in the form of long complilations on each of the topics that soldiers themselves identified as important, including patriotism, politics, slavery, and race. Each compilation was organized chronologically. For instance, every time a soldier made a remark about politics, I made a new entry in the politics compilation. If the letter dated from May 5, 1863, I transcribed the relevant portion into the politics compilation between any remarks made by any other soldiers on May 4 and May 6, 1863.”

I’ve done something similar – enormous Word documents – but usually I don’t start these until I begin writing. I’ve never processed my sources this way during the first encounter, but this is something to think about.

She continues:

p. 11: “I used one font for Union soldiers and another font for Confederate troops, which permitted me to compare men from the two armies and still distinguish between them at a glance. The chronological organization of these gauges allowed me to chart change over time, while the topical nature of each compilation enabled me to measure the relative strength of each position taken on an issue.”

And to keep the context of the letters in the mix:

p. 11: “As I used quotations to write chapters, I reread each soldier’s excerpt in the context of the entire letter, diary entry, or camp paper article in which it appeared, which helped adjust for any unusual stimuli or circumstances. In order to conclude that any one position dominated among Union or Confederate soldiers at a particular time, I stipulated that expressions of the prevalent view had to outnumber expressions of the dissenting view by a ratio of at least three to one.”

I really appreciate how Manning incorporated her research methods into the text of her book instead of pushing it into an appendix or a long footnote. Reading her book reminded me of how different topics and sources require particular methods (notecards or Zotero do not fit all!), as well as how much methods shape the arguments of the final project. I know that this book is a frequently assigned text in undergraduate classes, and in addition to teaching students about the Civil War and social history, it would be an ideal way to enter into a discussion about creativity and functionality in research methods.

Needles and Geese

In the process of revising an article on the “miscegenation controversy” of 1864, I found myself on an archival goose chase. In November 1863, the anti-abolitionist New York Herald printed an article accusing its rival paper, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, of publishing ads in which black volunteers in Arkansas sought white abolitionist women as correspondents who would become their wives. Unfortunately, the Herald couldn’t be more specific than saying that these appeared “the other day” (“The Tribune Philosophers Promoting the Amalgamation of the Races,” New York Herald, 27 Nov. 1863).

My instinct was that this was a fake story about made-up advertisements. Throughout 1863 and 1864, the Herald published rumors about race mixing with a particular focus on black soldiers, and this seems like another iteration. But unlike the usually unsubstantiated rumors, this article included quotations from the supposed ads published in the Tribune.

Using the America’s Historical Newspapers database, and focusing my search on October and November 1863, I did some searches for those quoted phrases that seemed most likely to have appeared in the Tribune: “matrimony,” “Arkansas,” “correspondence,” etc. After about an hour of this, I had yet to find the original ads in the Tribune or any other paper included in the database except for the original Herald article. I feel confident enough to include this incident in my article as a rumor rather than a reality, at least with the proper qualifying words in a footnote.

A page from the New York Herald, 1/28/1863

But — and here’s where the delight of the research goose chase comes in — in the process of seeking out those specific phases, I stumbled upon the fascinating world of the want-ads from the 1860s. So many “Strangers to the city,” “respectable gentleman,” and soldiers looking for potential wives! Like personal ads today, nineteenth-century folk also tended to be very specific when it came to age, as the last ad above (“not over 19 years old”). I wonder what the story behind this southerner in search of a Yankee wife might have been.

I knew that nineteenth-century newspapers had tons of these short ads, but I’d never looked at them closely before except for using runaway slave ads in teaching. Now, I’m filing this away as a source for some future project. Lost items, personal ads, cryptic communications, and even the nineteenth-century version of missed connections. It reminds a bit of Found Magazine: mysterious and intriguing, fleeting, and very human. Some other intriguing samples:

“The sister of Phillip Tynan is Troubled by his silence. Direct to 117 Houston Street, NY.” [NY Herald, 1 Oct. 1863]

“Will the young lady who was last Tuesday in a Twenty-Third Street stage from 11 to 12 o’clock send her address to the gentleman she recognized in another stage? Address E.P. Station D.” [NY Herald, 1 Oct. 1863]

“MATRIMONIAL: Two young ladies wish to make the acquaintance of two Spanish or French gentlemen of wealth with a view to matrimony. Address, enclosing carte des visite, Lorini and Evangeline, Box 123, Herald office.” [NY Herald, 9 January 1863]

“Florence, — Will you give me the opportunity to explain my conduct Monday evening? Yes? When and where? –J. New York Post Office.” [NY Herald, 28 January 1863].

The Art of the Timeline

Somewhere in a file box in a storage unit in Texas lies the master timeline for my dissertation and book manuscript. I wish I had a picture to post on the blog (because it is awesome), but these pens will have to do.

My dissertation/book looked at an American mission in Jamaica from the 1830s through the 1860s. I had a lot of people and a lot of events to track, and I also wanted to keep the local concerns of the mission in the same frame with bigger historical events in the United States, Jamaica, and Britain.

To construct the timeline, I made a vertical line across four sheets of taped-together printer paper. (I can’t remember why I didn’t go and buy a big sheet of art paper which would have made much more sense . . . ). I used different colored pens for each main missionary. I marked their arrival and departure, and I drew a colored line parallel to the timeline for the time each person was on the island. I could easily see when someone was there or when they were back in the United States — for a year or permanently. I also could easily see who overlapped.

Next, I marked the major events within the mission — the personal and public traumas and successes of the mission. All of this “history of ordinary people” is tracked alongside larger events within the abolitionist movement, American history, Jamaican history, and British colonialism, marked with a separate color scheme. My timeline became a visual representation of “ordinary” history blended with the major events of British emancipation, the American Civil War, and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. Just as personal and public history had been woven together in the missionaries’ letters, the supposedly small events of the mission (a land purchase by freedpeople, an excommunication, the birth or death of a child) stood alongside the world-changing events that may or may not have directly affected the men and women up in the Jamaican mountains.

In a way, the timeline is the visual equivalent of my book. I suspect that if a person who had some familiarity to the history of the Jamaica Mission looked at it for long enough, the book’s arguments would be visible. Taped to the wall of my office, it became functional art that I consulted on a daily basis.

But — and this is really important — the timeline wasn’t really for others, it was for me. I think this points to an critical distinction between the kinds of visual work (often in the form of digital humanities) that we consume and have students consume and that which we create ourselves. If I had happened to find this exact timeline in a textbook or online, it wouldn’t have helped me very much. The timeline mattered because I made it myself: I had to make all of the different drafts (spacing is hard), I had to decide what to include and what to leave out. These decisions and the process of putting it together is why it became so dear and so useful.

The timeline took me a long time to make, but it was completely worth it. For one, by the time it was finished, I had a much better sense of the big picture of the mission. It’s often a difficult stage in research when you have to move from the minutiae of hundreds of documents to try and grasp the larger sweep of your time period. The timeline helped me to see everything at once (much like how Scrivener or the Navigation Pane in Word allows you to visualize all of your chapters and sections of chapters).

The visual aspect of the timeline also proved a collegial companion to my chronologically arranged notecard box. When I was revising my dissertation, I would often become immersed in one section of the text for several weeks. Then, when I would need go back to an earlier time — say, the 1840s — I could quickly walk over to the timeline and familiarize myself with who was in Jamaica at that time and what major issues were in play. Just like flipping through the notecards from the missionary letters and newspaper articles in the 1840s section, the timeline would remind me where I was and what I was doing.

The other thing that I really liked about the timeline, and why I’m about to embark on another one for my new research, is that it made writing more fun. In case you can’t tell, I was incredibly proud of my timeline — I would nerdily show it to people when they came over to my house (which is why I’m surprised I didn’t take a picture of it!). It was art! It showed others that I was actually doing something with my time! In contrast, during the early stages of writing, nothing seems very pretty or artistic: there are half-finished paragraphs with bracketed notes –[More here.] or [Fix.], partial footnotes, and arguments are not always evident. To paraphrase sacramental theology: the timeline served as an outward sign of an invisible dissertation.

One of the advantages of digital humanities is that tools now exist for scholars to create visual representations of scholarly argument. I’m not very well-informed in what all is out there, and I’d be curious to know what artistic and visually helpful versions of digital archives and digital scholarship exist. The example that leaps to my mind is the Valley of the Shadow Civil War history project. Looking at and interpreting other people’s timelines, maps (of geography and ideas), diagrams, and word clouds can be useful, but I would argue that researchers gain much more when they create these projects themselves. While never a complete substitute for written work (at least in my opinion), creating visual representations of research can shake you out of a rut and give you a new tool to think about old material in different ways.

If you’ve used visually oriented techniques to think through your research or you know of innovative digital humanities things along these lines, please share!

Writing About Letters

In my Defining Marriage seminar this week, we are reading two collections of letters: Theresa Strouth Gaul’s To Marry An Indian, an edited collection of the letters concerning the marriage between Cherokee Elias Boudinot and the white New Englander, Harriett Gold, and selections form the Barnes and Dumond edited collection of the letters between Theodore Weld and Angelina and Sarah Grimké.

In my experience, students who are not well-practiced in history writing (and even some who are) can become lost when they approach primary sources like this. There’s a lot to take in: the historical context, entering into lives already in progress, the inside jokes and intimations, the language, and in the case of the Weld-Grimké letters, the Quakers’ use of “thee” and “thou.” The students in my seminar this semester have a well-developed set of skills for reading literary texts, and they all wrote wonderful analyses of passages from Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok last week. I’m curious to see how they approach these letters, and what questions and arguments they bring to the table. I hope to have a discussion with them about the different kinds of questions literary critics, religion scholars, and historians ask of these sources, and how these questions turn into theses and essays.

What I used to do, Part III

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.

Part I and Part II

What I used to do, Part II

Words I never thought I would say: I miss microfilm.

Not the faint chemical odor or the kind of sea sickness that inevitably results, of course, but the time it required of me. I came to this realization during a recent visit to the New-York Historical Society. I had to look at a few things on microfilm, and it felt like returning to an old friend. (More on this visit in a later post).

With a few exceptions (including my day at the NYHS), I haven’t used microfilm since my dissertation research because most of what I need has been digitized. Digitization has allowed more people to access historical documents, and the ability to do keyword searches of an entire run of a newspaper has led to new kinds of research questions, as Caleb McDaniel has discussed on his excellent Offprints blog.

At first, I didn’t put a lot of thought into how digital research differed from what I did before. When I began my first post-dissertation research project, I turned to databases like America’s Historical Newspapers to collect dozens of articles on a topic in a 30-minute break between classes. I saved the articles that seemed relevant, and, if I had time, I created an entry in Zotero. ”Search/scan/save” became my new research process by default. I rarely had time to read and take notes on the articles as I found them; nor did I read through complete issues of newspapers anymore. But I did have several brand new folders on my laptop’s desktop filled with PDFs. I would read through them later, I told myself — when I had time.

While this looked like research, it didn’t feel that way.

In the old days – the early 2000s – I lived in the microfilm room. I spent hours each week sitting in the basement of the library. The microfilm reader and the ten-cent charge for printing a page forced me to progress slowly. I read every handwritten letter then and there. Using the old notecard system, I wrote out an index card for each one – author, date, a few notes about the content. The already glacially slow process would ground to a halt when I decided to print. Later in the day, I would sort and staple the day’s stack of documents, at which time I had to re-read each letter again in order to make more detailed notes on the letter’s card.

I do not mean to romanticize microfilm. The microfilm room could feel like an over-air-conditioned prison. There were no windows, and time seemed to stand still. To make matters worse, while I had sentenced myself to this machine for three or four hours, I watched the editorial assistants for the Journal of Southern History come and go, fact-checking their one item, merrily rewinding their reel, and returning to the light.

Yet now I understand how vital this experience was to my work. The process of reading and printing from microfilm forced me to move slowly. It carved out a quiet portion of my day when I was alone with my thoughts and unable to multitask. I had to focus on each letter at that moment. I can’t remember this time in the library’s basement leading to any particular breakthrough – for me that happens when I write and revise – but I think this time away from books, my own writing, and, of course, the Internet was essential. It was a researcher’s version of what Pico Iyer describes in a recent New York Times piece about the importance of quiet and solitude to creative thinking.

One of running topics here will be to consider how the means of research shapes our process and the relationship we have to our sources. If you have any similar experiences or thoughts on this matter in your own research, please share!

Part III will examine how I’ve tried to reinsert slowness into my research process and to blend the good aspects of my old practices with the advantages offered by new technology.