Working
Yesterday morning Jeff hit some of the things I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately as I’ve considered my work habits, the research I’m interested in, and the publications I’m currently working on. This reflection is motivated by survival, for lack of a better word: I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for quite some time now and there’s no sign of letup until the summer break. Why? Part is teaching three different courses and learning how to be a father. There’s no question I overbooked myself, at least given my new duties as Madelyn’s daddy. But those things don’t explain all of my recent inefficiency. Even if there wasn’t a problem, there’s no reason not to step back every now and then and ask, “What am I really doing?”
Lately I’ve realized how much I’ve been missing the nerd culture I was embedded in at Florida. Doubtless, that was one of the reasons I stayed there for my PhD after earning my MA: my programming-heavy approach to understanding writing and English studies was not only acceptable to but encouraged by my adviser and other folks in the Department of English. They had no problem seeing the things I was interested in as part of English studies, though of course I did get the occasional “What you’re doing isn’t teaching” when evaluated by a professor whose vision of writing was a bit more quaint than mine. Outside English I was able to work with some very talented support folks who were as interested in pushing the envelope as I was. They put tremendous faith in me and other graduate students and helped us do really interesting things. Suffice it to say that’s not how the culture of IT works here at Western. (Frankly, to even say we have a culture of IT is a stretch.) Anyway, immersion in Florida’s nerd culture meant less code-switching: I didn’t have to jump in and out of nerdery, just in and out of English studies. At Western I feel like I work in about four different disciplines, quite often flying solo. Moving between these spheres takes a lot of time and energy.
Of course, some of the spheres are in my own field. I don’t feel sorry for myself when I open CCC and read Jay Wooten making a straw man out of visual literacy. And as Collin recently reminded us, there’s been enough anti-technology sentiment on the so-called technology email lists in composition studies that it’s no longer surprising. And here “computers and writing” is a synedoche for composition studies (is a synedoche for English studies): as we resist or ignore the cultural changes in reading and writing, and continue to see most networked writing as too far out there (or anything remotely practical or pragmatic as mere vocational education), we continue to bleed students to other disciplines who aren’t still partying like it’s 1899. This is nothing new. Still, it gets old to have to fight these battles, and at times I think I’ve spent too much intellectual effort doing so. In response, I’ve kept cranking out conference presentations and other work which is undoubtedly part of composition studies “proper.” I don’t think this is a mistake; I’m not uninterested in that work (for example, writing workshops, style, accountability and testing, and critical pedagogy). But I should not sacrifice attention to my central research focus for work in other areas.
Also, over the last month I’ve finally figured out just how significant the shift in my scholarship has been as I’ve become much more heavily involved in web accessibility. This hit me like a brick when I looked at my del.icio.us, where “accessibility” blows away everything except “toread.” I’ve read a bunch in this area, on the web and otherwise, and spent a lot of time coding and recoding web sites to learn more about it. Building the theoretical and practical knowledge in that area has taken a lot of time which hasn’t converted into very many entries on the ole CV (a few conference presentations, but no articles). This isn’t actually inefficiency, but it was easy to mistake my lack of writing for inaction.
How to respond? A few ways. The first is saying no to new projects and putting my energies toward existing ones like Composition Forum and the OSS task force, with the assumption that those projects will bear fruit and be interesting (and, dare I say, fun) even if NCTE doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them. CF, in particular, deserves more of my energy; I want to build on the work Collin and Derek have done with CCCO; given that CF offers full text online there are strong possibilities. Also, I have two projects on campus which deal with web accessibility and I am just going to have faith they will provide exigence for writing before too long.
The second is reading. By overbooking myself on writing and other projects I’ve cut back the amount of time I have to spend on just plain reading. This summer my office partner David Banash and I have planned to tackle two Big Texts together: Aristotle’s Poetics and Heidegger’s Being and Time. I’ll complement this with frequent excursions into my toread pile.
The third is doing whatever I can to build a nerd culture here (and by that I mean here too). This is already starting as quite a few students interested in technology and English studies are starting to move through my office on a pretty regular basis. I’ve started an email list for the independent study students I’m working with this semester as a way to get a daily dose of nerdery. On the writing side, I’m going to assume that my work will make its disciplinary case for itself. For example, I think the article I recently finished with Bill Thompson shows the importance of cataloging for English studies just as much as it argues that library catalog maintainers can learn from Web 2.0. At least for now, I’m not going to worry that folks “get” that.
As I wrote Jeff the other day, these “realizations” probably seem obvious, even silly. I guess I think that because it’s taken me so long to come to this point. Now we’ll see how long it takes me to move past it.
