hopes for july

Lots of stuff is happening this month. I have a number of writing commitments that I need to get going on honoring, and two will dominate July. The first is a conference paper (ISHR in Montreal) that will also be the foray into my book. Ideally I would have liked to be culling that paper from a chapter draft, but moving has intervened, and I will instead be posing questions and positing theories more than I will be offering any fully-formed set of research results. Even so, it's exciting to have my head in that next book, albeit preliminarily.

The second is a piece for a collection on Burke in the Archives called (tentatively) "Historiography by Incongruity." This piece is kind of the underbelly of my recent book--stuff that I've been thinking about, like how so much fascinating archival material doesn't make it into histories we write because that material documents a darker story or some sort of failure or a research "dead end." I want to do a little reading on archive theory to get myself going on that one, and maybe poke around in some new archival material, since I am now within a mile from the KB papers.  

Then there's a course that I'm directing, a really cool new honors course that combines oral, written, visual, and digital communication. I met with the technology folks on campus to talk about the technology piece, instructional support they can offer, and available resources, and they BLEW ME AWAY. As in, they are assembling a team of technology specialists (one from the digital commons group, another from instructional design, and more) to help with this course. The its guys told me about these "whispering booths" (podcasting studios) that they have installed in labs around campus, and how some of them are mobile. Crazy. I left that meeting a) thinking I need to amp up (even more) the technology ambitions of the course, and b) knowing how glad I am to be here.

There's some other stuff I've committed to for the fall, but I can't think about that right now. Draft of conference paper in 8-10 days, and a sizable chunk of the collection contribution in 21 so that I can take it with me to Montreal, these are my hopes.

Comments

[Nels P. Highberg]

Love the idea of the archival piece! Doing archival research myself now, I'm finding that it's an odd beast, and I think you're ideas are what I'm experiencing.

[lisa nakamura]

Debbie: we are in Montreal on week 3 of being here, and it is glorious, even though it has rained a lot. Let us know if you want recs. about restaurants and such. Street fashions are cool, everyone has tattoos good and bad, French food with American portions, etc. I've been taking yoga most days and found a good one, though it is not air conditioned and feels like Bikram at all times.

I can see that you've hit the ground running! that's my full professor!

[David Beard]

Is this a double post?

I'm reading and recommend these readings in archival theory:
The journal Archival Science talks a lot about evidentiary claims for archival materials as well as institutional critique of archives.

The book _From Polders to Postmodernism_ has been helpful to me as well:
http://litwinbooks.com/archivaltheory.php

Finally, Richard Cox is my ideal library scholar: accessible to the humanist while clearly the top of his field, in terms of archival studies. I found him when he wrote a reply to Nicholson Baker's book on archives and stuck with him since.

Fascinating stuff; a good seminar at RSA, Dr. H (and Dr. G), too.

[Aspasia]

Dang! You obviously practice the Pat Summit theory of scholarship--one book barely out of the printer and the next well under way. You go, girl.

Aspasia