Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

On June 15th, I finished and turned in my first dissertation chapter to my advisors (it is both the first chapter of the dissertation and the first chapter I have written). On June 16th, I threw some clothes in a bag and jetted off to South America for a week-long vacation. Here are some lessons learned over the past three weeks:

1. It is very difficult to work on two different projects--the dissertation and the blog--while on a deadline. For the past few months, I would blog before diving into writing my chapter. It was a balance: one hour spent on a blog post, then a few hours dedicated to drafting a section of the chapter. That balance fell away as my deadline approached, not because I was scrambling to catch up but because the chapter became the singular focus of my life for those two weeks. I devoted every moment of mental clarity to evaluating the structure and argument of the chapter, keenly attuned to omissions or unsubstantiated claims. There was no space in my thoughts for a blog post. My mind could not let go of the ideas in the chapter for long enough to focus on another set of ideas. I continued to make blog-worthy observations and I have a long list of posts that I want to draft this week, now that I'm phasing back into a routine dominated by research rather than writing. Stay tuned for those. 

2. Vacation is the best deadline. If you have to set an arbitrary date for completion, apparently it is very effective to set it for the day before you leave for a relaxing trip. I knew that I would not, could not work while touring around a city with my partner and in-laws, and so the work had to get done before leaving. Plus, I looked forward to kicking back and relaxing for a few days! I'm contemplating booking a trip in late August to incentivize myself to complete the second chapter. 

3. I miss blogging when I'm pulled away from it! As fulfilling as it is to convey the thoughts that have been rattling around in my head for months about how events in the past played out, most of my daily writing will only be read by my advisors (who will send it back and have me re-write it many more times before it reaches a wider audience). The immediacy of blogging, in addition to the informality and the more expository nature of the form, make it a most lovely addition to my daily writing output. Many scholars blog to share their research or to extend their academic debates beyond the narrow confines of their discipline and the ivory tower, but I think blogging also appeals to scholarly writers in the way an amuse bouche appeals to fine diners. It's a light beginning to a heavier meal, thoughtful and substantive but informal and, importantly, not meant to distract from the main focus. 

I'm now back in New York, and I have several projects I'm balancing: an article draft, my second dissertation chapter, oral history interviews, and the "ghetto" corpus analysis. Not everything will get done in the five weeks I'm here but I feel invigorated by the city's energy... we shall see how far this momentum takes me! 

When the Writing Doesn't Come Easy

I spent all day yesterday trying to write a few short paragraphs about one document. It's a report from October 1946 that Oscar Janowsky gave on the progress of the JWB Survey, and it outlines some of the major questions that arose throughout the process of interviewing staff and Board members at hundreds of JCCs across the country. Several months ago I took extensive notes on the document, and so when I sat down to write yesterday I already knew the gist of the report. I decided to re-read it anyways, because it seemed important and substantial and like it was worth a second look. 

In a sense, that was the correct decision. The progress report represents a pivotal moment when Janowsky realized that the initial, guiding question of the Survey ("what is the objective of Jewish Center work?") should have been "what is Jewish about the Jewish Center?" It's the first moment when Janowsky publicly shared his inclination that the JCC should have an "affirmative" Jewish purpose and should incorporate Jewish content into his program. This ultimately was what he recommended in his final report, and so this progress report is evidence of his evolution towards that belief. 

Re-reading the document was inspiring--what a rich, multifaceted text! I felt like every word should be carefully paraphrased or quoted in my chapter because it so flawlessly articulated why the Jewish Center needed to have an explicitly Jewish purpose. Then I started writing. I wrote a few sentences and deleted them all. I re-read paragraphs of the progress report and tried once more to paraphrase the main points. I deleted all those sentences too. Again and again I attempted to convey the questions that Janowsky raised without cutting and pasting them directly into my narrative. And again and again I became confused.

I finally realized that I had been seduced by discovery. My attempts to summarize Janowsky's arguments revealed a tentativeness--anecdotes stood in for arguments and analysis. My struggle was an extension of Janowsky's own effort to synthesize all of his questions and observations. The complexity that awed me upon my first re-reading was slowly exposed to be perplexity. 

This is not a knock against the author, nor a dismissal of the document. It's a comment on the way that narrative can trick our minds. Hunting for a good story, I perceived coherence where there was inconsistency. I liked Janowsky's anecdotes, I liked the narrative he created to argue for affirmative Jewish content, and I thought that both would support my own narrative explaining this historical event. Ultimately, I used the anecdotes and argument in my own narrative--I just had to moderate my claims to reflect their intricacy and not my own awe.  

Hiccups and Wheezing

While fending off a bout of bronchitis this week, I decided to undertake a major computer upgrade. The logic at the time was "heal the body, heal the hard drive." If I was resting the former, the latter was certainly resting too. And the best time to do work on your computer is when you're not in the midst of actively writing a dissertation chapter. 

I had been having problems with my MacBook Pro for a few months. My database and archival photos and oral history audio files filled up the last remaining storage space on my hard drive and I began getting a regular pop-up message from my OS that my start up drive was full. On a few occasions the entire computer shut down, unprompted, and I was lucky that nothing got lost. I knew I was playing with fire and about to get burned. After two months of research, I decided the most cost-effective solution would be to exchange my 320GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive for a 500 GB Samsung 850 EVO Solid State Drive (SSD). It cost me $200 on Amazon, and I took it to a local computer repair store and paid $170 for the privilege of blaming someone else if the transfer did not go well. 

Overall, I'm very happy with my decision. I decided to do a "clean install" of OS X Yosemite onto the new SSD and then move over my files. The benefit of this method, as opposed to "cloning" the old HD onto the new one, seems to be that you leave behind a lot of the small files and programs and metadata that invisibly begin to clog up your storage over the years. My computer now boots up faster and I am not experiencing the lags (spinning rainbow pinwheels) that I used to have each time I opened up an app. I've transferred every photo, audio track, movie file, and document that was on the old HD, and I still have 196 GB free! And I had no problems moving DEVONthink or Scrivener over--the dissertation re-appeared completely intact. 

The ONE problem I did have was with Zotero, my bibliography/citation management database. I'm confident that this was 100% user error. In my recent attempts to empty out the old hard drive, I may have unwittingly deleted the destination folder that stored that program's content. I was under the impression that it was being backed up both on the Zotero website and in my cloud backups. I somehow failed to implement either of those processes over the past year, and now it is too late. I'm bummed, but relative to the disaster that would have been losing my DEVONthink database (which has all of the archival documents and sources for my dissertation) I can't get too upset. It's a reminder to not make big computer decisions when you're too sick to triple check your backups. It's also an opportunity to re-build the bibliography with the insight gleaned over a year of dissertating. I'm using the tool differently and curating what I include to better suit my process. 

In summary, here is my Pro/Con list for why someone with a pre-2012 MacBook Pro should consider swapping in a new SSD:

Pro: For only $200 in parts, you can have a computer with the same specs as a new MacBook Pro retailing for around $1800. I also believe that my computer feels a little lighter to carry around, but I have no proof for this.

Con: You won't have a retina screen, and the place you take your computer to do the switch probably won't be able to replace those little bumps on the bottom of the chassis that you knocked off two years ago. They'll clean out the fan with the little can of air, but you'll still have a machine that has experienced wear and tear. I have also noticed that my battery life does not last as long.

#dayofdh

Coincidentally, I am spending this year's Day of Digital Humanities at Carnegie Mellon's inaugural DH Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty. I thought I'd take this opportunity to round-up the ways that I use digital technologies on a regular basis to write my dissertation and network with other historians. I define DH as: the use of digital technologies to further research and debate on questions that help us understand what it means to be human. The following tools help me accomplish humanistic research and to then share my findings with other historians.

1. DEVONthink Pro Office

The scope of my project is only possible because of the capabilities of my database. In a single dissertation I examine three neighborhoods and three community institutions over 35 years, from the perspective of single individuals all the way up to a national organization. The amount and range of sources required to cover all of this space and time is overwhelming without a way to organize and search documents by topic, by year, by author, by archival collection, or by keyword. Even though assembling a database was a significant time commitment, I can now easily sort and find all of my documents as I write. Every time I move to a new topic I can pull up all of the documents that I tagged with related dates and keywords--for example, when I was writing about Jewish social group work yesterday I reviewed all of the documents I had previously tagged with "group work," "adjustment," and "Jewish social work." Without the database, I would be reading through pages of archival notes to identify relevant documents and then navigating through folders on my hard drive to find the corresponding PDF file. A digital database is more efficient and more effectively aids in historical discovery. 

2. Scrivener

I don't think writing on a laptop qualifies as practicing digital humanities, but I do have a digital tool that allows me to do a better job at writing history--with Scrivener I can better structure my argument than I could with Microsoft Word (practically an analog tool at this point). While others have reviewed Scrivener far better than I ever could, it's been an invaluable tool for wrangling a large, multi-chapter writing project. 

3. Google N-gram Viewer

I recently began teaching myself how to do corpus analysis, a methodology used to analyze bodies of texts in order to understand how the usage of words changes over time--in frequency and in meaning. Until I finish learning how to use some of the more sophisticated tools, I've been playing around with Google N-gram viewer. 

This line graph visually represents the frequency with which the phrase "Jewish social work" was used out of the total words published in each year between 1900 and the present. It helps me better understand when this professional subspecialty emerged (it confirmed what I saw in my sources) and in what years it was most popular. It provides a simple way to observe the rise and fall of a profession, in so far as written discussion correlates with the popularity or relevance of the occupation. 

4. Digital Archives

The bulk of my sources come from physical, paper documents that I find in the archive. I have to go and find them, searching by hand through boxes and folders. I'm never quite sure what I'm going to find. It's hard, fun work, but it's a process that's limited by time and energy. Digital archives provide a precise, easy, and convenient way to supplement these documents. With keyword or author searches, I can access digitized documents related to my dissertation. It's not perfect--I still have to go through the results and pick out what's not relevant--but it expands my source base without having to leave the house. More sources means more diversity of perspectives, and that makes for better interpretations of past events. The digital archives I most often consult are the Berman Jewish Policy Archive, the Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project, and Google Books. 

5. Blog

I blog several days per week about my dissertation and about the experience of being a doctoral candidate. I value the opportunity to share my findings and offer advice about being a novice historian. It's a delightful break from work that is independent and isolating. It provides a forum for debate and collaboration, which contributes to a more thoughtful interpretation of past events.

6. Twitter

I've used Twitter for many years, but recently I've committed to using it more regularly for professional purposes. It's the perfect venue to observe trending interests amongst historians, discover new publications, and ask and answer colleague's questions. 

In the coming year, I aspire to master two more digital tools. As I mentioned before, I want to improve my corpus analysis skills. The second methodology I want to explore is historical mapping, so I can visually represent changes in the neighborhoods I study. I look forward to blogging about the process of learning these new techniques and digital humanities tools!