Blogging a Book so Far

I recently published the third in a series of excerpts on my ongoing book project. This third piece closes out the first section of the first chapter, which introduces the principle argument of the book: institutions have pedagogies embedded within them that we can work to change in our teaching and administration. This first section also introduces the structure of the book, which draws upon what I see as the five components of the institutional narratives neoliberal universities tell about themselves. Universities aspire to be:

• Knowable
• Neutral
• Intellectual
• Prestigious
• Forward-looking

Each chapter takes one of these values, critiques its relationship to teaching and learning, and offers pedagogical and administrative ways to push back from the stance of the digital humanities practitioner. The material so far comes from the first chapter on knowability. Normally, I would push ahead and post the next excerpt from the project, but that material has actually already been published as “The Pedagogy of Digital Humanities Budgets” by The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. So please check out that article if you want to see what comes next in the project. You can find a full listing of current material from the book here. Since what would otherwise be the next pieces are already out there, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on the process so far, what it’s been like to blog the book in public and what comes next.

Structure - Thinking about the book as a thing that would live online first has helped the drafting process feel a lot more doable. The structure of the completed project unfolded fairly naturally out of its component parts. The book has five chapters. Each of these chapters has three sections. And each section has three subsections. These subsections are roughly the length and shape of blog posts. I can write a blog post. And, if I can write a lot of them, I can write a book. While things will undoubtedly change, this framing makes things feel possible for now.

Continuity - One challenge in presenting this work online in this particular way, piecemeal over many months, is that the sections appear to the public in disconnected ways. At the end of the day, the book is not the only thing I am working on. I started teaching a new course this semester, and people immediately wrote to me asking for reflections on it as I went. I have other general reflections on DH that I want to share. I could really only focus on the one project if I wanted to keep the conversation here consistent, and I opted not to do so. This meant that some weeks on my blog I talked about my course while others I wrote about my book project. Connecting these various threads and managing these conversations is a challenge, but I am happy with the choice I made because it encouraged me to keep writing. After all, the main person reading all this is…me. It’s got to serve this audience first before it reaches anyone else. And this plan is consistent with my general approach to blogging, which recognizes my writing here as primarily about building out the things I needed to read during the previous months and years. Letters to the past, as it were.

Tempo - Instead of a consistent topic, I aimed to prioritize the mere fact of writing. At all. In some form. About whatever felt the most doable that day. I sacrificed a steady subject in favor of weekly posts, and I think this has been a worthwhile exchange. Writing is a muscle. Blogging, similarly, becomes easier the more you do it. It’s like cross-training. Words will come a bit easier to the book project when I turn back to it if I am regularly practicing writing on a range of topics, genres, and contexts. A steady stream of writing is the thing for me, even if not always going in the same direction.

Blogging as editing - I’ve found blogging to be helpful as a final stage in the preliminary drafting process. I wrote the whole first chapter at once before the fall semester, and various circumstances pulled me away from it in the following months. Returning to blogging has meant revisiting material with fresh eyes what I haven’t looked at in a while. It’s been a welcome opportunity to polish pieces up for readers in a way that I would not otherwise do while working on a larger project. Even if no one reads them the blog posts are still worth sharing. They’re a sign to myself that the project is moving forward. Personal accountability.

What Will Change - Now that I’m several posts in I’ve started thinking about how the material will need to be changed and reframed as part of a larger project instead of as a series of posts. Most immediately, I’m struck by how different the section published in JITP on budget pedagogy feels. It was polished into—and feels like—a standalone piece of work. At the very least, I will need to do some thinking about how to make the structure of that section feel in keeping with the rest of the material in other chapters. That’s good work to do, but it is still labor. Something that I can only do later when the whole thing is in view.

That’s it for now. Thanks to folks who have offered feedback thus far—always happy to hear what people have to say. I’m looking forward to sharing more of the book as it comes together in the coming weeks and to having more time for writing this summer.