šŸ“š Reflecting on Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility"

Please note: Robin DiAngelo says she’s writing for a white audience, and I’m white, so my perspective on this book will likewise be more about its usefulness for white people. Author and scholar Lauren Michele Jackson states that for her (a Black woman, I think), “much of the material felt intuitive.” I don’t feel remotely qualified to tell any BIPOC if this would be a valuable book for them to read.

I read White Fragility over the weekend, only reading it so quickly because my university library limits checkouts of the eBook to a 24 hour loan period. The book reinforced a lot of the things I learned as I was working on Project READY.

I would especially recommend it if you need an introduction to the concept of racism as a systemic force rather than a personal failing. Whether it will be helpful for you will depend on where you are in your journey. If you have done some Racial Equity Institute training, a lot of the concepts will feel familiar, I think. (It’s been a few years since I did mine, and I think they’ve changed a bit, but certainly some of the ideas are related.)

I’ll share some quotes in a bit, but as a person who has been (slowly) increasing my awareness in this area for a few years, the most valuable part for me was when DiAngelo offered a specific example of a time when she made an unintentionally racist joke in front of a Black colleague who had only just met her and later worked to repair the breach this caused. I don’t want to summarize because I don’t want this to be seen as a set of tips, tricks, best practices, or lifehacks. I’ll just say that much of the book is introductory concepts and it’s all leading to the discussion DiAngelo offers of what to do next.

One of the articles about the end of the girlboss that I mentioned last week in my post about Naomi Alderman’s The Power critiques the book as “the Lean In of the 2020s, a book by a white woman, for white women, that says: See this big systemic problem? Start by working on yourself.” I think this is a well-made point, one that I’d like to unpack in the future so I will keep thinking about it. The article’s author, Leigh Stein, then points out that “White Fragility is social justice through the lens of self-improvement and, as is always the case with self-improvement programs marketed to white women, thereā€™s money to be made here.” Stein cites DiAngelo’s speaker’s fee of $30,000 - $40,000. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for more people writing about this but haven’t tracked it down yet. But, as a point of comparison, see Ijeoma Oluo’s Twitter thread about the pay gap between white speakers on race and BIPOC speakers on race; Oluo’s fees are $0 - $12K+, depending on who’s asking. I’ve just bookmarked a Slate article about “White Fragility” to read for later.

What I think both Stein, and Lauren Michele Jackson, author of the Slate article, worry about is that people will read this book and think, “Cool. I am antiracist now. I did it, I read this one book, I’m done.” It’s a reasonable fear. I urge you not to be the person who says that to yourself. This book is a fine introduction to systemic racism. I don’t think it can begin to touch on the larger project of dismantling that, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in improving your own day to day interactions and working to be more conscious of the ways you can’t help but be influenced by a system centuries in the making.

That said: here are some bits I found especially noteworthy. All page numbers are from my ePub edition.

“…we don’t have to intend to exclude for the results of our actions to be exclusion.” (p. 14)

I did not set this system up, but it does unfairly benefit me. I do use it to my advantage, and I am responsible for interrupting it." (p. 126)

“…stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them.” (p. 129)

As I continue to read and work through Project READY at my own (very slow) pace (because working on a project is not the same as actually trying its outcome), I hope to write more about why this is work for white people, the tricky balance of honoring BIPOC knowledge without demanding BIPOC labor (pro-tip, lots of BIPOC scholars and thinkers share their work in easily accessible spaces, so you can learn a lot without asking anyone you actually know to do this work for you), and why (unfortunately) white people seem to receive this kind of thing better from other white people than from BIPOC.

School and Life goals for 2020 Q3

Here are my goals for 2020 Q3:

School goals

  • Complete my dissertation data collection.
  • Write two chapters of my dissertation: Ch. 2 Information Horizon Maps and Ch. 3 Information Literacy Practices.

Life goals

I’m keeping it light. I had many more goals in mind but these are the most important things right now.

šŸ“š Dr. Kelly J. Baker's "Grace Period" resonated strongly with me.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading Dr. Kelly J. Baker’s book, Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces. I read it very quickly, over the course of maybe two or three days. I would stay up late reading it and walk around the house in a bit of a daze, squinting at my phone (I read it via Kindle Unlimited and have no Kindle, so).

I read the book hoping it might illuminate post-ac options for me, particularly the path of a freelance writer. I found that it struck me on a much more visceral level than that.

It’s interesting that it touched me so deeply, because Dr. Baker and I are very different. Dr. Baker came into academia with a dream of being a tenure track professor. She worked as a contingent instructor and a full-time lecturer, spending six years on the academic job market before determining she needed to take her “grace period.” I came into the PhD program focused on getting good at both conducting and understanding research, without my heart set on a specific professional outcome. I assumed there would be no tenure track job for me, and as I watched my tenure track, highly respected advisor deal with all that this professional life entails, I determined that it wasn’t something I was interested in.

AND YET.

In spite of that, so much of this book resonated with me.

Baker talks a lot about love, the way we are supposed to love our work, discipline, scholarship. She says,

I both adored and loathed my training. I see-sawed from romantic highs (seminar discussions, research, theory) to tortured lows (self-doubt, impostor syndrome, research). I almost quit multiple times. Yet I trudged through, because love is about compromise, or so they say. (p. 28, Kindle edition)

This resonated with me so strongly. I had my first PhD meltdown, as I call them, in the first week of my program. I remember it well. I was working on my back deck, enjoying some unseasonably tolerable weather on our hammock, and I realized that in the first week I had already fallen dreadfully behind. “I can’t do this,” I thought. I even told W. that maybe I should quit.

“Maybe I should quit” and “I’m going to get kicked out” were constant refrains from me that first year.

And yet. When people ask me if they should do a PhD, I say “YES TOTALLY!” followed by “No, definitely not.” Because you totally should; when else are you going to have time to prioritize deep learning? But you totally shouldn’t; it’s almost impossible financially without a supporting partner. (Two of my fellow SILS PhDs that I can think of and I myself have lawyer husbands, and I don’t imagine any of those three could do this otherwise.)

The love we feel for this deep learning, as Baker points out, allows us to be exploited. The minimum graduate stipend in my program is about $7000 below the minimum cost-of-living for one person in the town where the university is located. That exploitation, Baker says, “doesnā€™t make us love our work less. Instead, it often pushes us to love that work moreā€”to consider it something deeper, a vocation instead of just a job.” (p. 30) I’ve fought against this sense, pretty successfully, but I suspect that’s because I’ve already experienced that vibe as a K-12 educator and I’m so burned out from it that I won’t let it happen again.

Baker writes about how most years, her birthday was a day to mark all the ways in which she failed in the past year, but after she began her grace period, “My birthday became a day that showed I made it through another year. For once, that was enough. It always should have been.” (p. 78)

My birthday is two weeks from now. I do use it to reflect on the past year often, but mostly, I celebrate it with great fanfare, because it is worth celebrating that I made it through another year. Both Dr. Baker and myself live with mental illness; sometimes I feel that I’m connected to life by a very fragile thread. For that thread to hold up for a whole year is always a cause for celebration.

I’m working from my Kindle notes and highlights here, so things are getting a bit fragmented and disjointed.

As I mentioned earlier, the chapter “Writing Advice” as a whole felt worth noting to me. In particular, how no one had suggested to her that writing could be a career. Me either, no one who I trusted on career matters, anyway. Baker writes,

At 18, 19, or 20, I wished someone took the time to tell me that my perspective was unique. That the only person who could write like me was me. That I shouldnā€™t try to be someone I wasnā€™t. That background, the place where I landed, made me who I was. That this place that birthed me might not be New York City or San Francisco or Boston and that was okay. That this place, that no one had ever heard of, created me and pushed me to be a writer. That I shouldnā€™t try to be someone I wasnā€™t. That I could emulate other peopleā€™s writing styles on the way to finding my own. That there was something about my voice that needed to be heard. That writing would give me the chance to speak and be heard. That my voice mattered. That my writing mattered to me and that was enough.

Finally, Baker says some things that remind me of my favorite Kitty Pryde quote from Astonishing X-Men. Baker notes:

Maybe Iā€™m seeking something big when I should focus on something smaller, like a chubby toddler hand in mine.

I used to hate waiting, but now, I wonder if waiting is where living resides.

Life is about how we weather our transitions.

Reading all those bits inspired me to reply to her in this Twitter thread:

So. This is a book that shifted a lot for me. I highly recommend it to anyone at all connected to academia or just trying to figure out what’s next.

šŸ“š Naomi Alderman's "The Power" and the end of the #girlboss era

I read Naomi Alderman’s The Power very quickly (well, what passes for quickly now that I’m a mom) over the past week or so. I found it riveting; it was the first fiction book in a while that actually kept me from going to bed at a reasonable time.

The framing device is that one writer, a man living 5000 years from now, has written a historical novel set in roughly our time, and has asked his colleague, a woman and another writer, to read it and give him feedback. A quick bit of epistolary writing introduces that set up; the book then immediately jumps into the novel proper. In the history of this world, sometime around our time, teenage girls began to discover that they had the power to discharge electricity from their bodies similar to the power electric eels have. They are also able to awaken the same ability in adult women. And, as you might imagine, this changes the world a fair amount.

It’s an interesting book to read in the middle of a pandemic and widespread protests; each step of the way you see how the world is changing due to this new power, how a paradigm shift happens. It often felt like I was reading about right now, though of course the details are different.

What’s more interesting to me, though, is how it begins as a bit of a power fantasy.

I mean, just imagine. Imagine being able to walk down a dark street alone and not fear for your safety.

I didn’t realize until I had read this book that I never feel safe doing that. (What a privilege to have this fear at the back of mind than at the front, I know.)

As I read it more, this seemed more and more like a power I would like to have. Oh, I wouldn’t use it except in self-defense, I would tell myself.

I don’t want to spoil much, but as you might imagine, a lot of things that currently are things we expect of men become, in this book, things that women do. (What’s that saying about absolute power? Oh yeah, it corrupts absolutely. Though maybe it doesn’t, according to the study described in the linked article. But in this book, it definitely does.)

Layer upon layer of recognition settled in as I read the book, even close to the very end, constantly saying “Oh, THAT is a parallel to THIS thing that happened in our world…” and as I read, it reminded me of a recent Atlantic article, The Girlboss Has Left the Building (as well as The End of the Girlboss Is Here in the Medium publication Gen).

When I read the Atlantic piece, I highlighted this quote:

…when women center their worldview around their own office hustle, it just re-creates the power structures built by men, but with women conveniently on top.

And that’s what we watch happen again and again in The Power. It begins as a fantasy and ends as a dystopia.

More quotes from the Atlantic article:

Slotting mostly white women into the power structures usually occupied by men does not de facto change workplaces, let alone the world, for the better, if the structures themselves go untouched.

Being belittled, harassed, or denied fair pay by a woman doesnā€™t make the experience instructive instead of traumatic.

Making women the new men within corporations was never going to be enough to address systemic racism and sexism, the erosion of labor rights, or the accumulation of wealth in just a few of the countryā€™s millions of handsā€”the broad abuses of power that afflict the daily lives of most people.

And Amanda Mull, the author of the article, concludes:

Disasters disrupt the future people expected to have, but they also give those people the space to imagine a better one. Those who seek power most zealously might not be the leaders people need. As Americans survey a nation torn apart and make plans to stitch it back together, admitting this, at the very least, can be an easy first step in the much harder process of doing the things that actually work. Structural change is a thing that happens to structures, not within them.

I have never been all in on the hustle, but I’ve had a waxing and waning admiration for girlboss behavior. The idea of making your way to the top appeals to me; the idea of treating your employs poorly - of firing them for becoming pregnant, harassing them, berating them - that appalls me. The Power is entertaining as can be, and also a reminder to watch myself. Watch myself for the ways that, when I want to dismantle a structure, I might end up reinforcing it instead. Watch myself for the ways I can use what power I have to help rather than to hurt.

Still would love to walk down the street at night with no fear. I don’t think the dismantling of the structure that prevents that will be finished in my lifetime.

Looking back at the first half of 2020

Weā€™re coming up on Q3 of 2020 and I donā€™t know how the year is going for you (except to the extent that I totally do), but 2020 has gone differently than I thought it would back in December 2020. Most years, I buy Leonie Dawsonā€™s My Shining Year Life Goals Workbook, and indeed I did at the end of 2019. If Iā€™m remembering correctly, it was my gift to myself for finishing writing my dissertation proposal.

I never get all the way through the workbook, and thatā€™s fine. This year, I set myself a goal of finishing it by March 21 in time for the astrological New Year but, guess what, it didnā€™t work out. I still got pretty far though, and today Iā€™ve been looking at it and noticing where Iā€™ve been sticking to these even though, due to the pandemic and the vibe itā€™s given me, I havenā€™t looked back at the workbook since I last worked on it in early March.

I wrote in the workbook that this year, I want to feel creative and connected. Iā€™m moving in those directions, but only recently recommitted myself to both of those desired feelings, even though I didnā€™t remember that Iā€™d put it in the workbook. I said, 2020 will be the year that I defend my dissertation proposal and itā€™s possible I wrote that down after Iā€™d scheduled the defense for early February. (By the way, I finished writing the proposal at the end of November but didnā€™t get to defend it until February. THANKS FOR NOTHING, HOLIDAYS. j/k, holidays can be great.)

I said I wanted to learn more about web development and build a foundation for my own business. These are both things Iā€™ve been taking steps toward and will keep working on.

I brilliantly didnā€™t have any conferences or workshops in mind to go to, so thatā€™s worked out fine. (I did get to travel to Charleston in February, which was lovely.)

I said I wanted to invest in Leonieā€™s Money, Manifesting + Multiple Streams of Income ecourse and that was my reward to myself for defending my proposal successfully. I havenā€™t completed it yet, but just working on the first parts has helped me save a lot of money and be a more responsible financial custodian.

I also said Iā€™d like to read books that Dr. Katie Linder and Dr. Sara Langworthy recommend on their podcast Make Your Way, and Iā€™m doing that. Again - without looking back over the workbook.

I wanted to reuse or buy used instead of new more, and Iā€™ve done that. (Ask me about the $17 Nook battery I got on eBay rather than replacing my Nook with a $170 Kobo eReader.)

Hilariously, I said I wanted to do Zoom calls with friends. And guess what? I HAVE.

And I said I wanted to do my dissertation research, on which Iā€™m making good progress.

Is there a bunch of stuff I havenā€™t gotten to yet? Of course. Am I going to get to everything I wrote down? Probably not, and thatā€™s okay.

Iā€™m still really impressed with what Iā€™ve done so far this year. What about you? What things that you wanted to do this year have you already done?

Move Slowly and Mend Things šŸ“š

Iā€™m re-reading Jeff Goinsā€™s book, You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) and I came upon a bit that I highlighted and made a note on. Goins, writing about legacy, quotes Steve Jobs:

we all long to ā€œput a dent in the universeā€

And in my annotation I respond:

I would rather have a legacy of having added something to the world rather than damaging it. Is Jobs’s language here reflective of the tech industry as a whole? Disrupt. Move fast and break things? How is that working out for us? What if instead we moved gently and restored things? Pretty sure I’m stealing this idea from Jenny Odell.

Jenny Odell writes in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy about how our current American society values growth over maintenance. She writes about the value of restoration and care. Her writing makes me want to mend and tend and fix.

Iā€™m going to keep thinking about this. I think if I keep reading and thinking, I can connect it to visible mending, Kintsugi, the idea that women respond to stress with a ā€œtend and befriendā€ approach, and the New Domesticity. Stay tuned.

Hands can blog today, but brain won't, so have some stuff from other people that's great. šŸ“š šŸ––

  1. Kelly J. Baker’s book Grace Period, which I devoured over the course of 2 days. I want to say so much about it, but my brain just won’t get it all together right now. For now, I’ll point you to the post that is the source of the chapter about which my only note/highlight was highlighting the title with the note, “This whole chapter”: “Writing Advice.”

  2. Max Temkin’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 Hours.” The best of the show selected for you. As Temkin suggests, if you like these 40 hours, go ahead and watch the rest. I watched the show as it aired, so after about 8 of Temkin’s recommendations I felt confident that I still love the show now as much as I did then and went back to the beginning and am slowly making my way through. Great crafting TV, as well as incredibly soothing and full of delightful characters and truly, if you ever need to understand me, imagine if Data had the big feelings of a toddler and the empathic abilities of Deanna Troi.

  3. Dr. Olivia Rissland’s thread about learning from reading a paper a day. I’m going to start this today (though I’ll be mixing in book, thesis, and dissertation chapters) with my key areas of interest: where information science and learning sciences intersect and where LIS and fan studies intersect. (And then I’ll keep researching and writing at the intersections of those, I hope.)

  4. Alexandra Rowland’s thread about growing and caring for super long hair, written right before Alex got a haircut that is short and very cute. (Alexandra Rowland is probably my favorite Internet person discovery of the past couple of years; I maybe ought to write Aja Romano a thank you note for this.)

Okay, that’s all for today, I can now use the restroom and get back to data analysis. (SO INTERESTING! Like, no sarcasm, it’s really cool finding out where cosplayers go to find and share information!)

Which characters feel like friends to you?

A little over a year ago, M. and I were in Atlanta to accompany W., who was attending an organizational meeting there. On our second full day in the city, we visited the Center for Puppetry Arts and their Worlds of Puppetry museum. They have a Jim Henson gallery there, and there’s a video tour of it on their Facebook page.

You enter through a lovely entrance and move through spaces dedicated to Jim’s early life, his office and earliest work, and Sesame Street. There’s a really cool Sesame Street-style set that you can actually work on yourself, with monitors so other people with you can watch your performance. And then leaving that space, you turn a corner and directly in front of you is…

Kermit the Frog

Yes, Kermit.

M. and I turned that corner and my breath caught in my throat. “Hello, friend!” I wanted to say. It felt like seeing a dear friend you hadn’t seen in a long time, which was something I had done the day before, so I had a very recent memory to draw on. I wish I could have hugged Kermit, but you can’t really, through that plexiglass or whatever it is box. But I could look at him and smile. It was such a feeling of homecoming. Somehow, though he is but felt and foam, I feel like Kermit gets me.

Lately, I’ve been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. It also feels like visiting with old friends, in the moments when I’m not amazed by my own new middle-aged-woman lust for Jean-Luc Picard. (And that’s all I’ll say about that.)

Geordi. Riker. Troi. Not Data, because I am Data. Data knows so much and always shares more than is useful. Why wouldn’t you want to know the intricacies of how this ship is constructed, or the details of that culture’s expectations surrounding honor? Oh, right, because we’re all about to die, or at least one of us has been abducted, and you probably would rather only have the information you need to handle the situation. Oops.

Yes. Data and I are one.

But the others, they feel like my friends, in the same way Kermit does. When Jonathan Frakes showed up on Patrick Stewart’s Sonnet-a-Day video, I was like, “YES! FRIENDS! Let’s all sit outside and read Shakespeare, MY FRIENDS!” (And also know, I was not imagining them as Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes. Sorry, my dudes. You inhabit those other guys in my heart forever. And reading Shakespeare together is totally a thing your characters would do.)

I’ve been wondering about why I feel this way about these imaginary people/frog, and why I don’t feel quite the same way anymore. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite show, and I wrote a Self-Insertion Mary Sue expressly so I could imagine what it would be like to be friends with the characters on it, but when I watch it, it doesn’t feel like visiting old friends, or even seeing people I visit with daily. It feels like watching a TV show I love. Same thing with 30 Rock, New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, Difficult People, and Happy Endings. Is the difference that I encountered The Muppets and ST:TNG as a kid? I don’t know.

Was I a lonely kid? I’m not sure. I changed schools about every two years until high school, when I stayed at the same school the whole time. I had good friends from 6th grade on. I was verbally bullied and came home crying almost every day in 5th grade. I don’t know. Maybe these characters feel like my friends because they were there for me in those times?

Regardless of why, I think I’m just going to lean into it and embrace it. As I’ve mentioned before, our family is all-in on Muppets these days, and I’m loving TNG. It’s nice to visit old friends.

I'm done being hard on myself (for today).

I saw this tweet today:

This is excellent advice.

BUT.

It might not be for every PhD student.

For the past year or so, Iā€™ve been reading and re-reading Karen Kelskyā€™s The Professor Is In. Most of the book is about what you need to do if you want to be competitive in the academic job search (in a pre-COVID world, mind you). I have done very few of these things, and thatā€™s okay.

I came into this hoping to get really good at research - especially qualitative research. I have started doing this and will be lucky enough to get to do it for another year, working on both my own project and someone elseā€™s.

In my interview for the doctoral program, the admissions committee asked me, ā€œWhat do you want to do after you graduate?ā€

I said to them - honestly, but calculatedly - ā€œI would love to be in a situation where I could research and teach, but of course Iā€™m realistic about the job market.ā€

One of the committee members said, ā€œYou might have to move to get a job.ā€

My once-and-future advisor said, ā€œYou might have to go wherever W.ā€™s job is.ā€

Wā€™s job is here, where we already are.

I wonā€™t say we definitely will never move. But I will say that itā€™s very unlikely any job offer I might receive would draw us away.

I came into this program already attached to this particular geographic area - which is saturated with both higher education institutions and scholars. And I came in viewing it much more as continuing education than as job training, which I think has only benefitted my mental health.

I say all this to let you know that I really donā€™t need to do all the things Karen Kelsky says to do for the academic job market. And yet I would look at her lists and think, ā€œOH NO! I HAVE DONE NONE OF THESE THINGS!ā€ Likeā€¦ It doesnā€™t matter. Those arenā€™t the things that will get me a job I want. But I still worried about not having done them.

I came in from an alt-ac job, and had every intention of returning to a (different, because my department was dismantled) alt-ac job after graduation. Now, alt-ac is probably not going to be much of a thing, so I am turning my attention to post-ac possibilities. The advice in the tweet above applies equally, I think, to both alt-ac and post-ac. But itā€™s another list of things I havenā€™t done, with the exception of having taken on one metadata analysis contract gig.

I didnā€™t disappear into the academic bubble, though. For the first year of my PhD I disappeared into improv, but after that I disappeared into my family.

I got pregnant in my second semester of the PhD program, and while it was not expected (because I was dealing with PCOS-driven infertility and had only pursued minimal interventions thus far) it was very much desired. My son was born in October of my second year.

I started to make a list of all of the things that have happened with my family in the time between when I started my PhD program and now, but giving specifics felt too much like violating privacy, so I will alternate between specifics and being vague, depending on the level of disclosure I feel okay about.

Here are things that happened in my household or family of origin during my time in the PhD program:

  • My adult autistic brother tried living on his own for much of the summer that I was pregnant, with only myself and my sister as support. A mile from my house, and more than a few miles from my sisterā€™s house. In the end, my mom moved in with him, and now he and both of my parents live in the house we bought right before he was born.
  • I had a baby who grew into a toddler who grew into a preschooler, for whom I have been the primary caregiver in terms of weekday care and invisible labor (though I will say Iā€™ve had amazing support from my partner, who often gives me long stretches to myself on weekends, and our extended family; weā€™ve also had part-time childcare either from family or at a Montessori since he was about 12 weeks old).
  • Two family members were rushed to the ER with chest pain on the same day, several states away from each other. (Theyā€™re both alive still, thank goodness.)
  • One of those family members has had five surgeries, four of which happened while living in close proximity to me. More than one of these made that family member unable to drive, and I became the driver of choice for this family member.
  • A different family member was diagnosed with cancer and had surgery to remove the cancerous organ. That seems to have gone well, but you know, recovery from that is not nothing, and required a little support from me.
  • One of the aforementioned family members was hospitalized on suicide watch for a few days, and has since taken on a lot more medical appointments in response to that.
  • Another family member has dealt with mysterious digestive issues and only in the past year has figured out the reason; this family member hasnā€™t needed much from me in material or physical care but thereā€™s still a toll that providing emotional support takes.
  • I myself have had mysterious fatigue and pain that persisted even when my diagnosed conditions were well-controlled.
  • I spent about 8 months figuring out how to get my kid settled at his Montessori school, because his body would not conform to their schedule. (In the end, we switched from afternoons to mornings, and it made everything easier immediately.)

And also, until the past year or so, my husband traveled for work A LOT, which was only a problem in that I was so focused on child caregiving during those times that I couldnā€™t get much PhD work done.

I essentially became a member of a sandwich generation 5 - 10 years before I expected to have to do so. This period of my life is inextricable from caregiving for other members of my family.

So I look at those things and consider that my childcare was devoted at first exclusively to attending class (thatā€™s right, I worked the writing around the baby), then to attending class and writing, then to writing. I consider that often by the time my childcare hours came around, I didnā€™t have the spoons left to do good work for my PhD, much less the time for extra jobs, volunteer opportunities, or networking. And I ask myself, when? When on earth would I do those things?

And the answer is, I donā€™t know. If I wanted to devote more energy to finding fault with myself, I could answer that question. But for today, anyway, Iā€™m over it. Iā€™m over blaming myself for life being what it is. I take control where I can, and do well with what Iā€™m given; I have an internal locus of control and rarely feel powerless about micro-level life stuff. But Iā€™m done being harsh to myself about it.

Iā€™m done.

Addendum: the author of the above quoted tweet followed it up with this tweet:

So like I said - good advice that you can use if it works for you, but don’t need to feel pressure to take on.

I should also add that it’s easy for me to say I’m done, because I have had some of the uncertainty around settling the next year resolved for me. Details on that to come later.

My (Remote) Interview Workflow, from Recruitment to Member Checking (Dissertating in the Open)

Last Friday, I finished correcting the AI-provided transcripts for my dissertation interviews. This process didnā€™t go as Iā€™d originally imagined it would. When I wrote my proposal, I expected to conduct these interviews over the course of the entire summer, at various fan conventions. I expected to first explore online to find where cosplayers hangout and only then recruit participants. But then COVID-19 happened, and face-to-face research was no longer an option. (It was prohibited by my university. Cons were cancelled. Iā€™m at high risk of severe complications, so even if there had been cons, I wouldnā€™t have been able to go to them.) So I changed my plan significantly, starting with sampling and recruitment.

I originally was going to use purposive sampling, identifying cosplayers through my online exploration who were local to me and might be able to provide valuable insight into their information literacy practices. Once I was in quarantine, it became clear that this wasnā€™t going to be an option. In my revised IRB proposal, I stated that I would use convenience sampling, recruiting cosplayers with whom I had contact in the past, either because I met them in the cosplay area of the con where they were guests, or because I attended their panels. I reached out to cosplayers from two local cons I attended last year. I also used snowball sampling, asking the first several cosplayers I interviewed to recommend other people for me to talk to. At first, they were all recommending the other people I had already invited to participate, but later participants introduced me to more cosplayers I hadnā€™t known before, and I rapidly ended up with a group of about 12 or 13 confirmed participants, of whom 10 actually scheduled interviews.

So how did I do it? Let me take you through the processā€¦

Recruitment

All of the cosplayers I met at the two cons I attended last year were on Instagram. I have a dedicated cosplay Instagram account that I use both for personal and research purposes. Using this account, I DMed several cosplayers with a message similar to the following:

Hi [Cosplayer Name as Listed on Instagram],

My name is Kimberly Hirsh and I am a doctoral student from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I also go by Luna Wednesday Cosplay. I am writing to invite you to participate in my research study about how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information. You’re eligible to be in this study because you are a cosplayer I encountered at [Name and Year of Con] when I attended your panel, [Title of Panel]. To be eligible to participate, you must have cosplayed at least once since 2012 or be currently working on a cosplay project; you must also be over 18 years old.

If you decide to participate in this study, you will draw a diagram and participate in an interview that will take about one hour. We will conduct the interview using Microsoft Zoom. I would like to record your interview and then we’ll use the recording to ensure I understood your answers to my interview questions correctly.

Remember, this is completely voluntary. You can choose to be in the study or not. If you’d like to participate or have any questions about the study, please email or contact me at kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu or @lunawednesdaycosplay.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Kimberly Hirsh

kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu

@lunawednesdaycosplay

The text of this recruitment message was approved by my universityā€™s Institutional Review Board.

If the cosplayer responded that they were interested, I would say something like,

Great! The next step is to schedule a time for an interview. You can do that here:

And provide them with a link to a special type of event using the scheduling service Calendly. This was useful because I gave Calendly access to my Google Calendar, and participants could see what times I had available and sign up directly. In most cases, we didnā€™t have to back and forth. A few participants werenā€™t available during the times on the calendar, so I worked with them to set up special times. (The limitations on my time were about childcare, and it was easy to leave M. alone with W. for an extra hour on a Saturday or Sunday to do an interview.)

If youā€™re curious, you can read about Calendlyā€™s security and privacy policies and practices. Calendly is a black-owned business, though I did not know that when I selected the service for my scheduling. I am happy to know it now and plan to continue using Calendly to schedule meetings.

The Calendly event description included the following text:

For our interview, you’ll need to have paper and something to write with, and the ability to take a picture of your diagram and send it to me via DM, text, or email. You’ll also need to have the Zoom app installed; if you’ve never worked with it before, it’s probably easiest to install on a phone. If none of the times on this calendar work, message me or email kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu and I’ll find a custom time for you.

Feel free to use your cosplay name rather than your real name when signing up for an interview slot.

Once we settled on a time, I would schedule a Zoom meeting in my Universityā€™s Zoom instance and send the details to the participant by email if they had signed up for a meeting in Calendly, or by DM if they hadnā€™t. Calendly does have Zoom integration, but I chose to do this manually because I wanted to fine-tune the security settings in Zoom. I used Zoom not because it is my favorite service of this type, but because it has integrated recording and is supported by my university.

I made sure to use the following security features to prevent Zoombombing:

  • Password-protected
  • Waiting room
  • Locked room after the participant arrived

Conducting the Interview

The day before or the day of the interview, I would contact the participant either by email or DM to remind them that they would need paper and a writing utensil for the interview. I would also include a link to the consent document and release form, so I would know what name to call them in our communications, what name to call them in my writing, and what information I collected was okay to share. I created this consent document and release form in Qualtrics, another piece of software supported by my university.

This was the text of the consent document:

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research Information Sheet
IRB Study #: 20-0351 **Principal Investigator: Kimberly Hirsh **

The purpose of this research study is to explore how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information. You are being asked to take part in a research study because you are a cosplayer over the age of 18 who has cosplayed at least once since 2012 or is currently working on a cosplay project.

Being in a research study is completely voluntary. You can choose not to be in this research study. You can also say yes now and change your mind later.

If you agree to take part in this research, you will be asked to draw a diagram of the sources you use for finding, evaluating, using, and sharing cosplay-related information and participate in an interview about your diagram and experiences. Your participation in this study will take about one hour. If you choose, I may contact you with follow up questions sometime in the next 6 months. Each follow up question should not take more than 15 minutes of your time and I will not ask you more than 3 follow up questions. We expect that at least 10 people will take part in this research study.

The possible risks to you in taking part in this research are:

  • Feeling uncomfortable discussing your information process
  • Having someone else find out that you were in a research study
  • Potential loss of confidentiality of data

The possible benefits to society from this research are:

  • Making it easier for cosplayers to find, use, share, and evaluate information in the future
  • Helping information literacy educators understand how people work with information when they pursue their own interests

To protect your identity as a research subject, the researcher(s) will not share your information with anyone unless you choose. In any publication about this research, your name or other private information will not be used unless you request that it be. If you have any questions about this research, please contact the Investigator named at the top of this form by calling [my phone number] or emailing kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu. If you have questions or concerns about your rights as a research subject, you may contact the UNC Institutional Review Board at 919-966-3113 or by email to IRB_subjects@unc.edu.

The release form included the following questions:

Please state your initial requests regarding the use of your name and the information you provide, as well as any media I collect. You can change your requests at any time! If you agree to be recorded, you can tell me to turn on and off the recorder at will. If you permit me, I may record your interview. You may choose whether I use your information horizon map as an example in my final dissertation report or not.

All recordings and photographs will be stored on secure UNC servers, password-protected, and accessed only through a Virtual Private Network.

What name should the researcher call you? Is it okay to identify you in the project? (This included a space to write the name that should be used for identification in the project.) Is it okay to record you for the project? Is it okay to use videos of you in the project? Is it okay to use photographs of you in the project? Is it okay to publish your information horizon map, the diagram you will be creating in our interview?

About fifteen minutes before the interview, I would get set up in the space I was using, either my home office or my bedroom depending on what W.ā€™s schedule was that day and whether he needed a more private space (the bedroom) to give a presentation. I would plug in my headphones. I would load up Firefox with the following tabs:

The Qualtrics survey was so I could refer to it and make sure I used the correct name for the participant and that it was okay to record. Instagram and email were open so that I could see if the participant needed to communicate with me last minute (this happened at least once, when we ended up delaying the interview by an hour or two because of the participantā€™s work schedule) as well as so participants could send me their information horizon maps.

We began each interview with greetings and introductions, followed by the information horizon maps. Iā€™m really excited to share with the world how different they all are from each other. Theyā€™re so cool, and while my participants have many shared practices, each of them represented those practices in a unique way.

Then I would ask several questions, depending on what the think-aloud process alongside the drawing of the information horizon map revealed.

At the end, participants had a chance to revise their maps. My original intention was to allow them to do this only if they chose to do so, but I found that most participants tended to be general in their map and specific in their interview, so I often took notes on resources they mentioned in the interview and then asked them to add those resources to their map. Iā€™m not sure how this is going to affect the trustworthiness of this research method, but I thought it was worth doing this to make sure I had the richest data possible and could understand not only what resources they used, but the relationships between those resources.

The end of the interview consisted of demographic questions.

A note on pronouns, gender identity, and demographic data more broadly

I asked the participants to identify their gender in the demographic questions, but failed to ask most participants if they would like me to use specific pronouns. Some participants voluntarily offered pronoun possibilities along with their gender, especially if their gender and the pronouns that might go with it werenā€™t the only pronouns with which they were comfortable.

I had one genderfluid participant who prefers different pronouns at different times. I asked this participant, given the fact that the dissertation will be published a long time from now and this participant might be using different pronouns at that point, what would be the best way to handle this. The participant told me that using he/him pronouns would probably be fine, because he tends to be using those consistently lately, but we both agreed that I could also simply refer to the participant by name, just in case the participantā€™s pronouns have changed by that time.

Asking a person to give their pronouns in a classroom setting can be fraught; sharing your own and making them option to share can mitigate this some. I donā€™t know if much work has been done with this for studying research group demographics. (I had a disagreement once with some other researchers who created a survey and only offered two gender options.) If you know of any, Iā€™d love to look at it.

My goal is always to respect participantsā€™ wishes with respect to their identity, but at the same time there is value in disclosing the ratio of participants in different groups. To try and straddle the line between these two things, I offered all participants the option to skip any demographic question they wished, skipping to the next question with no further discussion of the skipped one.

There are some identity markers that may have been relevant that I didnā€™t include. In my next study, I will probably include more varied demographic questions.

Transcription

I used the service otter.ai to transcribe the interviews, uploading the video files, correcting the transcripts on the website, and downloading PDFs to share with participants. (I downloaded .docx files for the purpose of importing them for data analysis, but Iā€™ll talk about data analysis another time.) Otter.ai offers a generous student discount (50% off I think?) so be sure to look for that.

Member Checking

The final step I took in the interview process was member checking, in which I gave each participant a chance to review the transcript of their interview and add or correct anything they wish. I emailed them a PDF; this meant that for the participants who hadnā€™t used Calendly to sign up, I had to DM them and ask for their email address. So far, no participant has requested major changes; one participant noticed filler words in her own speech patterns and asked me to mitigate that, which I will certainly do when quoting her.

The End!

Whew! This was a long post! Thanks for reading. Iā€™ll give you the same thing I give anyone who reads something lengthy that I write: Neil Patrick Harris riding a unicorn (on the Harold & Kumar 2 poster, the poster for a film I have not seen). Also, please feel free to ask me questions about my process. I love talking about process!

Neil Patrick Harris riding a unicorn

100 Days of #bluemind, Day 4: Aquarium Playlist

In November 2018, I had respiratory inflammation that was on its way to becoming pneumonia when I traveled to Charleston with my husband and then 2-year-old son. (He’s 3 now.) My husband was presenting at a conference, so my son and I touristed about; I was exhausted and stressed caring for a toddler alone for much of the day, away from home, while dealing with respiratory trouble. One of my favorite places to visit in Charleston is the South Carolina Aquarium. As I sat in front of their Great Ocean Tank and my son climbed up and down the steps that double as stadium seating, I felt an immense sense of calm come over me. Dr. Wallace J. Nichols would attribute this to what he calls “Blue Mind,” and he’s not wrong, but in that moment, I felt that Blue Mind was enhanced by the beautiful soundtrack playing in that exhibit.

So I sought out aquarium music. I don’t know what the soundtrack was there, but I learned that Douglas Morton composes music for aquariums, and put together all of his aquarium music on Spotify in a single playlist. (He has other ocean-themed music as well that you may wish to check out.) Enjoy!

This is not a polished blog.

I’m still in a mostly flow, very little stock place.

I’m coming up with ideas for blog posts all the time, and keeping a list of them in Notion:

A list of blog post draft titles

Most of these blog post ideas are for helping people, for sharing ideas related to work. I do tend to and intend to blog about everything, and work is part of everything. But I never feel like writing these posts, even though I have all these ideas. And I think it’s because I mostly conceive of this as a personal blog. And those topics all feel only personal-adjacent. Not impersonal, mind you, but they’re just not where I’m at right now. Maybe I’ll get to them later.

My friend @tiff_frye posted her first substantive post here on Micro.blog yesterday, saying

I guess this is a personal blog, and through it I want to explore the things I think about every day in an effort to clarify and examine my thoughts.

That’s what I mean to be doing here, but instead I’ve been coming up with lists of things like I was trying to create an SEO-optimized, super pro, Darren Rowse-approved (let’s be clear, I love Darren Rowse, I think he’s great) blog. And that’s NOT what I’m doing. I’m trying to create an old-fashioned, late ’90s/early ’00s online diary. Jennicam, but with words.

Maybe clearly stating my intentions in that fashion will help me stay where I mean to be.

Maybe this is an impromptu manifesto.

šŸ“š Reading Notes, Having Trouble Reading, and a Read What You Own Challenge

I added a page to the index section of my Bullet Journal that tracks Reading Notes. I don’t like to use collections; I inevitably end up ignoring them. So Reading Notes get stuck in my notebook on the day that I did the reading, and then I add the book title to the Reading Notes bit of the index, along with the numbers of pages where I’ve taken notes on that book.

Here are all the books that one might consider me to be “currently” reading right now:

  • Getting Started in Consulting
  • Dracula - a gorgeous edition illustrated by [Edward Gorey]
  • Ghostlands
  • Moby Dick
  • Writing with Power
  • A Choir of Lies
  • How to Do Nothing
  • Jim Henson: The Biography
  • The Artist’s Way
  • Steal Like an Artist

I’ve actually finished reading at least 5 books in the past couple of months, which is impressive, I think. But I’m really having trouble deciding which one to read at any given time. So I still count this as having trouble reading.

Austin Kleon has some advice for if you are having trouble reading. I think I will pay attention to it. I’ve been doing some of these things, but I might benefit from doing even more.

Leonie Dawson challenged herself to only read books she had in her home before buying any new ones. I’ve been flirting with this challenge but I think it might not be right for the current moment. I don’t know. I do have a lot of awesome books lying around.

Settling In

My son is registered to start at a Quaker school in August. I donā€™t know what that will end up looking like, but one practice that they (and Quaker meetings) have that Iā€™m thinking about today is settling in. I first encountered this practice when my advisor, whose son attends the same school that my son will attend, introduced it to a class for which I was serving as teaching assistant. This is time at the beginning of a gathering to settle in silence, to transition from the world to the meeting. Itā€™s a practice that I have done without realizing it at the times that I consider most sacred.

Usually before getting ready to perform. I like to get to the theater early. Preferably before everyone else. (For my first community theater show, I got there so early that the company ended up being charged for extra time in the theater. Whoops.) I need this time to transition between spaces.

Early in my teaching career, the only teaching job I could find was part-time - 30% I think? I taught two Latin III classes in the afternoon. I needed more money than that paid to pay my bills, so I took a customer service representative job. I was a CSR in the morning and a teacher in the afternoon. I had a 15 - 20 minute drive between my two workplaces that served as the beginning to a transition, and then lunchtime in the teacher workroom to complete the transition. I needed that time to shift my headspace.

I have 2 - 3 jobs now, too. I spend about half the work day momming and the other half the day scholaring. Which one Iā€™m doing when varies depending on the day, but either way, I need to transition from one to the other. And thereā€™s no physical space where I can transition, because everyone who can works from home right now. So I need time.

I get frustrated at myself for taking the time. Why oh why, I think to myself, canā€™t I just hand my kid off to another caring adult, then plop in front of my laptop and jump into my research?

Because I need time to settle in.

So Iā€™m giving myself permission to settle in. Today, Iā€™m writing this blog post, and thatā€™s how Iā€™m settling in. Do you need transition time? How do you settle in?

Life update: How things are going for me

How’s your day going? Aside from the continuing world situation + its impact on higher ed (and thus my possibility of being funded for next year) and an ongoing I-think-it’s-fibromyalgia flare-up, things are going well from where I’m sitting.

Yesterday was W’s birthday. He’s 42 but not a Douglas Adams fan, so it was not as thrilling a birthday for him as it might have been otherwise. He doesn’t seem more enlightened than he was on Monday but he might be keeping the reason why 42 is the answer to the life, the universe, and everything to himself. I made him his favorite casserole for dinner and he ended up with two cakes (this is the advantage of having the mom who gave birth to you and the mom your dad married after the one who gave birth to you both in town).

We’ve been experimenting with standing in the driveway talking to local family members. We try to keep the 6 feet between us. I fear we don’t always succeed, but we try. It feels so nice to see them in person instead of through a screen. It’s just more jovial.

There are some lovely cardinals that have been courting in our yard. I just saw the female hop down some stone steps. Apparently bird watching has become a huge hobby since folks started staying at home, and I get it. I was already noticing birds (and other wildlife) more after reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, but I’ve started noticing them a lot more lately. Birds and bunnies. And bees. I really paid attention to a bumblebee for the first time the other day. It flew like a hummingbird does, zooming and stopping to hover. I watched it eat some clover. I noticed how whenever anyone walked by it on the trail, it would get up and fly away and seem to lose its place before returning to the same bit of clover after they had passed. If you’re looking to learn more about birdwatching, DCist has an article about How to Get Really into Birdwatching While You’re Stuck at Home.

We propagated some rosemary from a plant in our front yard. I took three cuttings and put them in water, changing it every day, for several weeks. Eventually the cuttings grew roots and this week we planted them in 6-inch pots. I’m planning to do this with mint next.

I’ve been crocheting my first sweater. It’s the Sailor’s Moon Cropped Sweater. I’m hoping to wear it over camisoles once it’s finished. I’m also creating a bundle of all the size-inclusive crochet sweaters I can find on Ravelry. KatieBea’s Sweaters for All group inspired me. I tend to be a uniform dresser, wearing a black dress or t-shirt with black or more interesting leggings. I’m adding black bike shorts to the mix for summer. My hope is that if I crochet a bunch of sweaters and cardigans for myself, I can wear those to make my wardrobe a bit more interesting.

I’ll save what I’m reading, watching, playing, and listening to for another post. Let me know how life is looking for you!

I know how to do stuff. Impostor syndrome is nonsense.

Are you at loose ends? Iā€™m at loose ends. I have a number of projects on the go but I am not doing a good job of organizing them. I am steeped deep in impostor syndrome as I try to figure out how I will contribute to my family and my community in both the immediate and distant future. Since beginning my doctoral program I have felt that all Iā€™m good for is literature searches and giving presentations, and that nobody would want to hire me for those things.

As I consider what to do next, I find myself wishing that my last full-time job were still a thing. Of course if it were, I might be in it. It was my dream job, an alt-ac position as Managing Editor/Public Communications Specialist for a web-based university outreach program serving K-12 and, later, B-16 educators. It was a great hybrid example of what Emilie Wapnick calls a ā€œgroup hugā€ job, which leverages several of a personā€™s interests, and a ā€œgood enoughā€ job, which still leaves a person time and energy to pursue interests outside of work. I ended up leaving it to go to grad school, after institutional priorities shifted and all of my immediate colleagues were either laid off or transferred to a different department. But had it stayed the same, I expect I would still be there now.

As Iā€™ve asked myself who has a career path that I admire, I find myself looking to people with alt-ac careers who have started their own businesses. Some maintain their on-campus alt-ac positions while others go full-time with their own business. Examples include Dr. Katie Linder and Dr. Margy Thomas. Theyā€™re both incredibly generous about sharing their experiences and advice. And at first I thought, ā€œI gotta get that alt-ac job before I can move into my own thing.ā€ Then I remembered: I already had an alt-ac job, and that job is exactly the kind of work I want to have again. So the next step seemed to be nailing down what the activities associated with that job were, so that I can position myself to build a career that involves them again.

Fortunately, I have a Google Drive folder full of documents from that time, so I was able to go back and look at what I did. When I learned at those documents, I realized:

Impostor syndrome is nonsense. I know how to do many different things. I am a person with skills who can complete projects and collaborate with others. I am not just a literature search robot.

Here are the kinds of things I did in that job:

  • develop new content for the web: digital books, articles, lesson plans, other large-scale web publications, blogs, webinars
  • edited that content from initial development through final proofreading
  • published that content using a custom content management system, HTML, iBooks Author, WordPress, and Blackboard Collaborate
  • maintain a huge collection of over 10K digital objects, both handling metadata and coding the objects themselves, using a custom content management system, custom taxonomy, and HTML
  • present on a wide variety of topics at individual schools or organizations as well as large conferences
  • maintain and implement an editorial calendar across multiple channels, including press releases, a monthly newsletter, 3 blogs, a website, social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, Edmodo, and Google+), a podcast, and videos
  • collaborate with subject matter experts both on campus and in the community to develop the aforementioned content

Those are all things I would love to do again, and I have no professional commitments this summer and am on the market for positions that fit that description right now. If you need a person who does those things, I can consult for you; if you have a job for a person that does those things, please feel free to email me at kimberlyhirsh (at) kimberlyhirsh (dot) com and let me know.

In the meantime, I’m going to approach my current projects with this renewed sense of my own competence and by implementing some of the tools I used to use. I’m Managing Editor of my own personal organization now, and I’m going to start acting like it.

A (self)diagnosis

For the past couple of years, I’ve felt like I was having a Hashimoto’s thyroiditis flare. But aside from a small dip in my thyroid hormones which was easily corrected by L-tyrosine and iodine supplementation, there hasn’t been any evidence that that’s what was making me feel like garbage. When I asked my doctor about it, almost a year ago I think, she said that maybe it was a food sensitivity or a new autoimmune disease, and asked me to track my symptoms and things that might be triggering them. That tracking got very overwhelming, very quickly, because I was trying to track food and sleep and and and.

I’ve been feeling even more flarey recently, especially since I started sheltering in place, and the other day had extra terrible pain. I’ve also had laughably frequent urination, like, more frequent than when I was pregnant, and in the past I thought maybe that was a sign of diabetes but I wasn’t diabetic. So I started Googling around and discovered that frequent urination can be a symptom of fibromyalgia. (Hi yeah if you don’t believe fibromyalgia is a thing, kindly see yourself away from my comments/replies, because I don’t want to hear it.)

My doctor is also my sister’s doctor, and told her a while back that she probably had fibromyalgia.

So I started talking to my sister about it and researching more. A while back I installed a sleep app on my phone to track my sleep, and it showed that even when I was “asleep,” my movements and breathing indicated that my brain activity was similar to that of an awake person and that I was only getting about 15 minutes of deep sleep on a given night, even if I slept for 7+ hours. My kid only wakes me up maybe once a night anymore, and sometimes not even that, so this isn’t a parent thing. Guess what that sort of sleep pattern is a symptom of?

Did you guess fibromyalgia?

It’s fibromyalgia.

Now is a terrible time to try and get a new diagnosis of a chronic illness if you don’t need pharmaceuticals for it, so I’m not pursuing one right now, even though I’ve got a bit of a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend “A Diagnosis” vibe:

The main thing that is valuable about focusing on treating fibromyalgia over autoimmune stuff is that the books I trust for autoimmune focus on food first, but I’ve been so exhausted I can’t even deal with food prep most of the time. Which, guess what? Is a problem a lot of people with fibromyalgia have. The autoimmune protocol I have has four steps: 1. Food 2. Stress and rest 3. Digestion 4. Detox. Whereas the fibromyalgia one from the book my sister recommended has four similar steps but in a different order: 1. Rest (Stress included) 2. Repair (Digestion + Food combined) 3. Restore (I think this might be the detox one, not sure yet?) 4. Reduce (taking care of lingering symptoms). This re-ordering of things is a revelation for me. Of course if I am not sleeping I don’t have energy to meal plan and shop and cook. OF COURSE.

I feel silly writing it all out, but whatever.

Anyway, I’m acting like a person who’s trying to do as much for her fibromyalgia as she can on her own. First thing, biofeedback via Hearthmath.

#100DaysOfCode Round 1, 1/100

Today’s #100DaysOfCode progress:

I completed all of the “Basic HTML and HTML5” challenges at freeCodeCamp.

I also read/watched the following:

I forked the 100 Days of Code repository to make my own 100 Days of Code Log.

I also set up a Dev page in Notion, with subpages to track goals, deadlines, schedules, a reading list, tools and resources, and notes about things I always forget. (Like how to do forms in HTML5. Because I’m very old-fashioned and not used to it being so straightforward.)

But Kimberly, why are you doing this now? Aren’t you getting a PhD in cosplay or something?

I’m getting a PhD in Library and Information Science. Knowing how to code has rarely made anyone’s life worse.

But one of the main reasons is that, though I’ve been developing websites for about 25 years, I have almost never made money off of it. Which is kind of ridiculous, when you think about who gets paid what for what. It occurred to me that perhaps my potentially lucrative hobby might be a thing that could make me money.

And why I’m doing it right now, is that yesterday I started watching the BeyondProf webinar, “3 Things You Should Do Now to Maintain Momentum in Your Job Search.” BeyondProf is always putting out great stuff and this is no exception. Maren got real about what higher ed might look like in terms of hiring in the near future. And sure, the likelihood of getting a tenure track has been tiny for years.

But until recently, alt-ac seemed like a very good option. A preferable option, even, in my case maybe.

And in this webinar, Maren confirmed what I began to suspect when I heard about hiring freezes at local institutions: that Plan B (or, again, in my case, probably Plan A) well is about to dry up. She talked about having to take odd jobs while you figure stuff out.

And I asked myself in what industry I could be content taking an entry-level position at age 40, with a PhD in LIS and 9 years of experience in education, aside from the cough number of years I’ve spent in grad school. (When I graduate, it will be 9. I will have spent half of my post-grad time in full-time work, and half of it in full-time school.)

The answer was immediately apparent: tech. The nice thing, too, about gaining web development skills is that it doesn’t actually chain you to the tech industry. Lots of library vendors, socially conscious businesses, and non-profits need web developers. And pay them better than they pay librarians. (I know money shouldn’t be a thing or whatever but I have a lot of loans and health care expenses and a 30+ year old house that needs maintaining, so. Also, hi there, we live in late stage capitalism, it means we need money to survive.)

Anyway.

My goal is to have all the skills needed to be a full stack developer by the time I graduate in May 2021, so that if necessary, I’ll have my pick of front end, back end, and full stack jobs.

My deadline for some kind of employment is November 2021, when my student loan deferment grace period will end.

Is it ambitious? Yes, but I’m not starting from scratch.

Thank you, Reviewer 2! (No sarcasm!)

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been sitting on an accepted-with-revisions paper for well over a year. (I know. I know. Okay?) The paper needs major revision, which I will do.

I’m actually kind of glad I let it sit for so long, because it gave me the opportunity to look at the reviews again with fresh eyes. I went through this thing when I first got the decision where I was very excited to be accepted with revisions. Then I read Reviewer 2’s comments.

Reviewer 2 says things like, “This feels like the work of a beginning researcher ‘writing oneā€™s way’ into a topic.” Reviewer 2 is not wrong. I wrote this my first semester of the PhD program, sat on it for 3 years, and revised it minimally before submitting. (I KNOW. I had a baby, okay? And then he turned into a toddler. SHH.) I re-read it before reading the reviews this time, and REVIEWER 2 IS NOT WRONG.

I also took Wendy Belcher’s point that reviewers who take the time to offer detailed comments think something is worth working on until it’s better and can be published; if they thought it was worthless, they would simply say it should be rejected. (The decision recommendation from Reviewer 2 was “Not acceptable as is; needs major revisions as indicated.” There is an option for straightforward rejection; Reviewer 2 did not take it.)

The first time I looked at these reviews, I read Reviewer 2’s comments and got all “BOO you don’t get me, you’re wrong” and now I’m like, “Oh, Reviewer 2, you’re so right, thank you thank you thank you.” Because Reviewer 2 said:

The conclusionā€™s intriguing ideas indicate that perhaps the author, after writing the paper, has discovered a few trends in the review that, if revisited, could reshape the literature review to be more powerful and deliver more impact, finding deeper insights than those that are listed here. I hypothesize that this is one of the first research pieces written by a student doing first forays into scholarly writing, and that now that this preliminary work is done, a second attempt would be more nuanced and in-depth.

And Reviewer 2 also said:

It may be that focusing on three topics meant that all three issues could only be covered in a cursory way within the page limitations. It might be interesting to consider going deep in just one or two of these areas, which might open up more space for that deeper understanding to happen.

This is a brilliant idea. My original audience for this was a professor, who needs to know different things than other researchers and library professionals might.

From now on, I think I’ll think of peer review as getting free editing.

I have a lot to think about. This is going to be a lot of work to rewrite. But it’s going to be really good work to do, and will (I hope) break me of my distaste for/impatience with revision. (As an editor, I’m super into deep revision. As a writer, I’ve already moved onto the next thing…)

Time to be my own developmental editor, I think.

Information and Learning Sciences: Situating my work at the intersection

Since the beginning of my doctoral program, I’ve struggled to situate my work and research interests. The role of libraries in learning. Interest-driven learning in libraries. Connected learning. Information literacy and learning. In particular, geeky interests and their relationship to learning. Nothing felt quite right.

Last year, a new journal called Information and Learning Sciences launched. I noticed. I maybe signed up for table of contents alerts? I don’t know. But I kind of forgot about it for a while.

I remembered it again when I needed to read a couple of chapters from the book Reconceptualizing Libraries: Perspectives from the Information and Learning Sciences for my comps, but then once I was done with that, it slipped out of my mind again.

People have only been embracing the interdisciplinarity of these two particular fields for the past few years; nobody really would have thought to use them together before that. Now, this is a defined interdisciplinary intersection with a growing body of scholarship, and it is a place where I can actually plant a flag for my own work.

It’s funny, because right before I started my PhD program, one of my colleagues at LEARN NC, Joseph Hooper, and I would talk about the intersection of LIS and LS all the time. And if you look at my coursework choices, one of the only courses I’ve taken that was about content rather than theory development and methods is Intoduction to Cognitive Science and Sociocultural Perspectives on Learning. It feels like I should have arrived at the realization that this is where my work sits much earlier.

But it doesn’t really matter. I’m there now, and I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the relatively small body of literature about it and seeing how it relates to my dissertation work and other research plans.

Doing a 15 minute #AcWri challenge

Iā€™m reading Dr. Katie Linderā€™s blog archive. One of her earliest posts is titled 51 Tips to Help Academic Writers Be More Productive. Itā€™s a very different sort of set of tips than the kind I was complaining about yesterday. The latter is all about telling you what kind of work you ought to be doing. Not, here are actual tools to help you get the work done, but justā€¦ remember all this work you could be doing. Donā€™t forget how you could use this time wisely.

(Phrases I hate: ā€œuse your time wiselyā€ and ā€œlive up to your potential.ā€ Blargh. If I want to fritter my life away reading fantasy novels and only be an A- student, thatā€™s my business, middle school teachers. Oops, sorry, went to a dark and distant place there.)

Dr. Linderā€™s post, on the other hand, doesnā€™t remind you that thereā€™s work you could be doing. Instead, it gives you tips for how to tackle the work youā€™ve decided to do.

Her first tip is to start a daily writing practice. Iā€™ve been meaning to do this for a long time, and struggle to build up consistency. So I went beyond Dr. Linderā€™s help, and went to another favorite scholar of mine, Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega. He offers four strategies, both for creating a good container in your schedule for writing, and for deciding what to write when youā€™re making it a point to write daily so you donā€™t just stare at a blank screen for 15 minutes a day.

The first of his tips involves working to deadline like Wendy Belcher suggests in her book, Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks. So I ā€œgot outā€ my ebook copy of that book and looking through the table of contents, discovered that she has a whole chapter dedicated to responding to journal feedback.

Well, Iā€™ve been sitting on an accepted with revisions article for well over a year, and itā€™s pretty embarrassing. The other day I sat down to make the revisions and got overwhelmed quickly. I ordered a print of both the article and the reviewer comments from Staples, so that should be here soon. And now I have this schedule from Belcherā€™s book thatā€™s got me ready to actually get down to it.

So here I am, essentially going to do Dr. Jo Van Everyā€™s 15 minute #acwri challenge, using this revision to launch my daily writing practice. Guess what Internet? Youā€™re my writing buddy and youā€™re going to keep me accountable.

Hereā€™s the schedule:

4/15 - 4/19, Read through p. 298 in the book and follow the instructions for reading the editorā€™s letter and reviewersā€™ reports.
4/20 - 4/26, Identify which journal decision was made and decide how I will respond.
4/27 - 5/2, Prepare a list of recommended changes and how I plan to respond to them.
5/3 - 5/9, Revise the article.
5/10 - 5/16, Draft my revision cover letter and send the article back out.

Basically, a month to turn this thing around. And Iā€™m going to try to have my (sadly at different times of day, thanks coronavirus) work schedule be:

First 15 minutes: Settle in, review to-do list. Second 15 minutes: Write. Remaining time: Work on data collection and other tasks.

Weekly Update: 04/11/20

We just finished up week 4 of staying at home. In one sense, I didnā€™t have much going on before this; grad school and parenting a young child donā€™t really leave much space for doing things. But Iā€™m realizing now how I do have even less going on, because Iā€™m not even going on playdate outings or whatever.

We started watching Animaniacs with M, just in time to get excited for new episodes coming sometime ever.

Like so many other people, Iā€™m growing weary of doing all of my communicating with people who donā€™t live with me via Zoom call. I do like being able to see peopleā€™s faces; I hate phone calls. But itā€™s wearying, right?

I found out that I didnā€™t get a dissertation completion fellowship from my school. That would have covered my tuition, fees, and health insurance, and given me a (very modest) stipend to cover living expenses. Because life, I have missed the deadlines for all similar awards. (Though I only found 4 I was eligible for anyway.) This has prompted a lot of questions for myself about what comes next, specifically in terms of being able to contribute to my familyā€™s financial wellbeing, which is going to need a lot more help because our childcare costs are more than doubling next year. Iā€™m reluctant to take a (eventually) face-to-face full-time job, because I want to be with my kid in the afternoons. Heā€™ll get out of school at 3:15 and I want to be there to pick him up, not put him in aftercare or delegate that to somebody else.

So, what can I do, that will pay me, lets me work from 9 - 3, and is flexible enough to accommodate both dissertating and chronic illness? Iā€™ve landed on freelance editing, which I did for a few months after getting my MSLS. (And maybe a little writing, but it doesnā€™t pay as well.) My current assistantship contract ends on May 15; Iā€™m open to taking on new work any time after that. If you need an editor, get in touch. Iā€™m hoping the university will be able to work with me to at least fund my tuition and fees, but tuition doesnā€™t buy groceries or pay preschool teachers, sooooooā€¦

That was kind of the biggest thing that went down this week. I spent a day moping about it and not feeling like doing much else. But I did read some Internet things. Let me share them with you!

I will be soothed, actually

Why We Turn to Jane Austen in Dark Times I love Jane Austen. This does a great job of explaining how her works are soothing without denying that life is hard sometimes.

I try to check Tumblrā€™s Week in Review most weeks, because I want to know what people are fans of. When I saw #cottagecore pop up, I was intrigued. Itā€™s kind of likeā€¦ hygge with more fairy rings and fawns? And also, from what Iā€™m reading, a queer-friendly aesthetic in a way some other Internet aesthetics arenā€™t.I wanted an explainer, and the Internet gave me one. And then it gave me two more. This has me pondering Internet aesthetics. Iā€™ll let you know what Iā€™m thinking about those as I develop my thoughts further. (But FYI, two of my favorites are vaporwave and [seapunk]aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Seap….)

Also, Iā€™m fairly certain the appeal of cottagecore/farmcore is related to phenomena like the Joy of Missing Out and the general consumerist move toward coziness more broadly. (I even briefly thought, ā€œMaybe I should crochet big cozy blankets and sell them for exorbitant sums.ā€ None of us are immune to this sort of thinking, I fearā€¦) Also I got a little grouchy reading about grandmillenials, who I guess seem to me to be wee babes rediscovering the New Domesticity and sharing it online as though Gen X didnā€™t already do that over 15 years ago…

Currently

šŸ“–: Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols, A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland
šŸŽ¬: ST:TNG in 40 Hours
šŸ¦øā€ā™€ļø: The Power of X
šŸŽ®: Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, Lego Marvel Superheroes 2

Sesame Street is a great comedy school.

My preferred comedy format, though I’ve not really performed it, is sketch. Yes, I did improv for years, but basically because a sketch teacher was like “It’s like sketch if you didn’t write it first.” It was only recently in conversation with my mother-in-law and W that I realized that this love of sketch dates from when I was around 3 years old (like so many things!), and that aside from my parents' churchy sketch parody show “Sunday Night Live” (which was one of my favorite things my parents ever did when I was a kid), this love of sketch also came from Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.

(A friend signed my high school yearbook, “Maybe you will become a writer for Saturday Night Live and then I can start watching it again.")

Now that M is deep into Muppets and I’m more familiar with comedic structure, I’m noticing how good Sesame Street and The Muppets are at these things. This sketch with The Martians is a great example of a fish-out-of-water situation, playing the game of the scene, the rule of threes, and breaking the pattern.

Kind of makes sense that Muppets would be the source of solid comedy, given their background on SNL and everything.

Changing my research design

I submitted proposed changes to my research design to my committee today. I had to make these changes in light of COVID-19 eliminating the possibility of in-person fieldwork and the fact that my work has been both delayed and slowed due to not having my regular childcare/daily rhythm.

Here are the changes I’m making:

CONSENT

The consent document will be distributed to participants as a form in Qualtrics; they will certify that by submitting the form, they are consenting to participate in the research.

SUMMARY

  1. Information horizon interviews will be conducted remotely via Microsoft Zoom, rather than in person. Participants will draw their information horizon maps, photograph them, and send them to the researcher via email or text.
  2. The interview protocol will include a question about the anticipated impact of COVID-19 on the cosplayer’s future information practices.
  3. Instead of inviting broad participation from the cosplay community, the research will use convenience sampling, inviting participation from cosplayers that she met at a con in 2019 and use snowball sampling to find additional participants to invite. She will only open up broad participation if she is unable to meet the minimum number of participants (10) through these methods.
  4. Artifacts for the artifact analysis component will be selected, not based on the sustained, systematic observation of affinity space ethnography as originally described, but based on the responses of participants during the information horizon interview. Historical artifacts may be more prevalent than current artifacts, as most conventions are being postponed or canceled and cosplayers may not be working as intensely to meet cosplay deadlines.
  5. There will be no participant observation.

Weekly Update: 04/03/20

First, some cute things my kid said.

He was talking about flushing the toilet and said that the contents go to the ā€œwater landfill.ā€

Also, I donā€™t like poop jokes, but he does. He asked if he could tell me a pee joke. I said, ā€œNo, I donā€™t like those either.ā€ He said, ā€œWhy donā€™t you like waste jokes?ā€

So cute.

Itā€™s the end of week three of social distancing over here, and weā€™re still relatively okay with each other as a family. M. is doing normal three-year-old stuff, W. and I arenā€™t sleeping well but at different times of night (he stays up late, I wake up and canā€™t get back to sleep). Iā€™ve moved from anxiety into depression but am combatting it with as much sunlight as I can and it seems to be helping.

I had a week full of video calls: one with some Bronzer friends (the first two guests on my still-not-available-yet Buffy podcast, not especially coincidentally), with my BFF from middle and high school (thatā€™s a link to her photography portfolio with a picture she took of M. when he was 6 days old). It was so lovely to see her face and chat, and I hope to do it again soon. I did Quarantine Book Club with Austin Kleon. I used Marco Polo to wish another friendā€™s cat well and was rewarded with a video of said cat making amazing cat sounds.

Today I did a video call with my advisor and another committee member, and we made a game plan that has soothed my concerns about being able to complete my research. It involves revising my methods some and scaling back the scope of the study. As my advisor said, ā€œWould it be cool to do what you said you were going to do? Yes. But you canā€™t.ā€ Eyes on the prize: me graduated in 2021.

Iā€™ve been reading a lot online (I always read more articles when I spend less time on social media), adding to my ever growing pile of books Iā€™m reading, enjoying watching Picard, and often having chocolate oatmeal for breakfast with a bit of peanut butter added. (Itā€™s like having a no-bake cookie for breakfast; highly recommend.)

With that, let me recommend some online reading you might find fun or valuable.

Supporting Independent Bookstores

McSweeneyā€™s has some thoughts and some advice on how you can help independent bookstores. I donā€™t have a ton of money to throw around, but I did buy myself and my kid books from our local independent bookstore, which is having their distributor ship the books directly to me.

One way you can support those independent bookstores is by buying books for your book clubs, which are apparently flourishing right now.

Funny Stuff

Speaking of McSweeneyā€™s, their funny stuff often hits exactly the right spot for me. Witness:

  • I Know There Is a Pandemic, but I Am Leaving You for Bob Ross - A friend told me that ASMR videos always help her when she has a migraine. They didnā€™t do anything for me, but when I started poking around in the broader ASMR world I found the suggestion of watching Bob Ross, and he DOES help my migraines. Iā€™m not leaving W. for him, but if I had a partner like the (I sure hope imaginary) narrator of this does, I might, in spite of his being dead.
  • Self-Isolation or Graduate School? - In case you missed it when I shared it earlier. Comedy gold, if you are in its very narrow target audience.
  • Frog and Toad Are Self-Quarantined Friends is perfect and beautiful, and now M. doesnā€™t want to play regular Frog and Toad, he wants to play Quarantine!Frog and Toad.

But they arenā€™t the only ones! Vulture brings it with If I Wrote a Coronavirus Episode. The 30 Rock, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, andYouā€™re the Worst offerings are perfect and oh my goodness Jane the Virgin actually filmed part of theirs. Will this prompt me to write fanfiction? Very possibly, because Iā€™m sad that New Girl wasnā€™t in there.

Scary Stuff

Skip this section if you donā€™t want to read scary pandemic thoughts, but I found these pieces really helpful.

Cut Yourself a Break

Okay, thatā€™s enough scary, hereā€™s some posts to convince you to give yourself some grace.

  • I Canā€™t Write About the Pandemic, But I Canā€™t Write About Anything Else ā€œ…avoid thinking like a careeristā€¦ Use your creative time to escape the zeitgeistā€¦ write the book that you most need to write.ā€
  • Against Productivity in a Pandemic ā€œThis is not a time to optimize or stoically pretend nothing has changedā€¦ This is a time to sustain.ā€ ā€œWe do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive…ā€ - Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing Iā€™ve been thinking more about maintenance and care since I read How to Do Nothing last summer, and I think right now especially it is where our focus should be. Which brings me toā€¦
  • Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure This is a brilliant map, especially for academics, for how to get through this time. I am taking it to heart fully; once I get my revised research plans in place, Iā€™m going to get some of my home stuff sorted out before trying to get back to work. I will be reading and re-reading and re-reading again this piece over the coming weeks.
  • Now Is the Perfect Time to Lower the Parenting Bar Sometimes I do elaborate activities with my kid. Itā€™s usually to keep me from being bored. The rest of the time, weā€™re reading or heā€™s playing while I rest. Sometimes we watch TV, but I try to save it for when I need it. ā€œUnlike the running joke that every working parent, single parent, or stay-at-home parent has uttered at some point, that ā€˜everyone was aliveā€™ at the end of the day, that is actually the real job we all have right now. Trying to keep people alive. Even people we donā€™t know and canā€™t see, at the end of the day, every day, until this thing is done.ā€

Poetry

April is National Poetry Month. I highly recommend signing up for the Poem-a-Day newsletter from Poets.org. Iā€™ll probably start listening to The Slowdown and watching Patrick Stewart read sonnets, too.

  • The Function of Humor in the Neighborhood ā€œI wrote this poem in response to criticism that my work is ā€˜too funny to be taken seriously.ā€™ I wanted to explain that I am writing in a Jewish tradition where nothing is more serious than humor.ā€ - Allison Pitinii Davis This resonated so strongly with me. It also reminded me of that old Mel Brooks quote: ā€œTragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.ā€
  • Things to Do in the Belly of the Whaleā€Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope, where you can rest and wait.ā€œ This is a great reminder for those of us who are privileged enough to be in a situation where we can rest and wait.
  • Probably you should check out my friend Kitā€™s Instagram because he is writing a haiku a day and justā€¦ well, go get to know him that way. You wonā€™t regret it.

What pandemic?

This post about Jessica Drew Spider-Womanā€™s costume (and Batgirl too) speaks much of whatā€™s in my heart. As Iā€™ve been planning cosplays, Iā€™ve been thinking about both the extent to which I feel like playing up my sexiness (I donā€™t, not in cosplay, really) and also whatā€™s comfortable (hint: not most superhero costumes, especially the ones for women). The awesome moto Spider-Woman costume here is one of my planned cosplays for whenever I can cosplay somewhere. (Still need to put together gloves and glasses.) I was so excited when I learned there would be a new Spider-Woman book, because Iā€™ve been missing her, and so sad when I saw what her next costume will look like. Seems like with every iteration, it gets closer and closer to being less like spandex and more like body paint. I donā€™t mind unrealistic proportions. I do prefer outfits that look easy to fight in, though.

Until next time!