I didn’t exactly mean to stop blogging, but life has a way of getting busy even when there are no major changes happening, and then sometimes you realize it’s been over a year since you posted anything, for no good reason. And then you try to remember everything noteworthy that’s happened in the last year. So here […]
The thing about writing a book (and it feels like “writing a book” now, even though the phase I’m in at the moment is revising an article that will eventually become a chapter) is that it leaves virtually no writing-brain left for blogging. Everything’s getting channeled into the larger project, even if it’s just 15 […]
One of the side effects of working on the Potential Book Project has been that I’ve encountered a whole lot of Victorian and Romantic-era poetry that I would never have bothered to read if I were doing straight-up literary criticism. I’ve written before about how the project has challenged some of my own assumptions about […]
I’ve been slowly and steadily adding to the Potential Book Project database that I wrote about in the previous post, and somewhat to my shock, I realized that I’ve now got entries for over 1500 individual poetry quotations from 24 commonplace books compiled between 1800 and 1900. (And I’m still nowhere near done; I’ve got many […]
I’d been meaning to experiment with social network graphs ever since I read Miriam Posner’s post about visualizing movie industry networks using Cytoscape, a network analysis program designed for scientists but (as Miriam demonstrates) equally useful for humanists who want to visualize a network. I finally got around to it a couple of weeks ago, […]
So now it’s December, and AcWriMo has come and gone. How did it work out? Here are some thoughts: I wrote just over 13,000 words in 30 days. Which is not bad at all, considering that I set a relatively modest goal (half an hour every day). I didn’t write quite every day in November […]
I got wind of AcWriMo (the academic-writing answer to NaNoWriMo) just as I was starting to think “Okay, now that the Potential Book Project has a good chance of turning into my Tenure Book Project, I should start making time to work on it.” It’s high time I got back into the daily writing habit, […]
My Material Cultures paper is coming together at last, with a little over a month and a half to go before I present it. I suspect a lot of the points I’m making have been made at least once or twice before, but I’m working with a body of evidence that doesn’t seem to have […]
So. Instead of being Insanely Productive Writing Month, November has turned into a cage match between my NoNaShoStoWriMo story and my embryonic Material Cultures paper project. The latter has been winning; the former is stalled out and sitting forlornly on my hard drive, waiting for a month when I can give it my undivided attention. […]