This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now, finally with some inspiration from David Robinson, I thought I’d give it a try.

For a while I’ve been interested in various ways that people manage their attention, divide their focus, and eventually get stuff done. Given that people have been thinking about this since at least Ancient Rome (e.g. Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, it’s obvious that some progress has been made and it makes sense to learn from the other’s experience.

I’ve been particularly impressed by the flows of work designed in tech development (e.g. Scrum and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development). From the ground up, their organization is designed to be always ready to produce usable results that are always somewhat ready to ship, adding complexity to the by small iterations. This is rather opposite of the model I have come to know in humanities academia. Good work can take years of effort with little public traces and feedback in only small circles. Research itself can leave very little public trace, and the weight of the project can as a result grow proportionally.

For humanities, some effort has been made within Digital Humanities to help with the situation. In a few cases, ideas of Open Research Notebooks have been taken up from other areas of research, and the ideas and practices of Open Science seem to spread. So far I have not heard of instances where fears of sharing work too much or too early has somehow backfired, although it is difficult to fit these together.

Realistically, the community is possibly split on scholars who would happily read up on others half-baked research and respect it in its state, and perhaps others who would still have difficulties finding these ideas. So, joining up the community seeking to open up the process a bit more, I thought to start collecting some past and future effort and thoughts on this blog. The topics can become quite diverse, but hopefully a tagging system can help manage the sets.

As was succinctly put by David Robinson in that blog post.