Something in me has broken, and now I am cracked, open and vulnerable. For the first time yesterday, I set my armor of humor aside and sat with the fact that, as a high-risk person, I am scared. I am scared not because I think coronavirus will kill me; I am scared that it will incapacitate me for any time at all, that it will place a huge burden on my family. I am scared that I will have to be kept away from my child. I don’t think I have it, but I’m scared that if I get it, this will be the outcome.

In November 2018, I had walking pneumonia. It was miserable. If that’s what a “mild” case of pneumonia is, I don’t want to know what a moderate one feels like. My husband, W., was out of town, I was on my own with my kid, M. I don’t know why I didn’t seek out more help from my family. W. came home and we almost immediately set out for Charleston as a family; I could have stayed home with M. by myself for a few more days, but that didn’t really sound like convalescing. So with what my doctor had said was inflammation but not yet infection (this was before the walking pneumonia diagnosis), I traipsed about Charleston with my kid. Our last day there, at breakfast, my lungs actually started feeling wet and gurgly inside them. I made an appointment to see my doctor as soon as we got home. (I was past the worst of the coughing at this point, so I thought I was on the mend. Ha.)

I came home, she diagnosed me with walking pneumonia, gave me some antibiotics, and an order for an x-ray if I didn’t start improving in the next couple of days. I took ONE DAY to stay in bed all day, and then felt like I better get back to helping with my kid, since he is basically my only family responsibility and it never feels great to me to ask the person who provides 85% of our income, cleans, does laundry, does dishes, and does yardwork to take on more childcare than he normally does. (He’s basically primary caregiver on weekends, too. He is remarkable.) I don’t think it was apparent to anyone else except maybe my mom how sick I was. Including M. and W. I think they thought I was a little unwell.

I got better, though pneumonia - even walking pneumonia - takes several weeks before you get as strong as you were before. And I don’t think I ever really got close to my pre-pneumonia level of strength and energy (which itself was not that great, because chronic illness). My lungs still feel a bit wobbly whenever I get anything respiratory.

I don’t want to feel like I did then.

I also am increasingly believing that the current disruption to life which has led me to be a stay-at-home mom more and a scholar less is going to continue for longer than I originally anticipated. And it’s kind of hard to feel like cosplay research is important right now (though honestly, it’s actually information literacy research and that feels VERY important right now). So I’m re-evaluating what I want to direct my attention to right now.

I’m not doing great with combatting social isolation. My introversion combined with flare up/world state low energy makes me less likely to initiate communication, so I’ve been trying to stay connected in more passive ways. But my efforts to stay connected, which have consisted mostly of scrolling Micro.blog and Twitter, have now driven me into middle-of-the-night anxiety spirals, so I’m taking action to disrupt those. Here are the things I’m doing.

Getting my news once per day via email. I get The Skimm for national and world news, the Indy Primer for local news (though it also covers national and world news), and the Wired coronavirus update for coronavirus-specific news.

Only looking at notifications/mentions. I am not going to scroll Twitter or Micro.blog anymore, as each time I do it throws me into an anxiety spiral. I’m only looking directly at my notifications or mentions. I have pinned these pages in Firefox as top sites, so I can go to them without having to navigate timelines or feeds to get to the notifications/mentions.

Consciously connecting with communities I know will alleviate my anxiety. Mostly, this is Kim Werker’s Community of Creative Adventurers right now.

Committing to doing more with my hands and living in my body. In the middle of the night, a balm for my anxiety came over me: GARDEN. This works on a couple levels, because gardening is a soothing activity, and also because I’m in this panicked near-survivalist mindset and if I can garden, I can learn to grow my own food, and then it won’t matter if the grocery store doesn’t have strawberries. (Obviously that’s a more long-term outcome, but I’m feeling pretty dire right now.) So I got out my copy of You Grow Girl and visited Gayla Trail’s blog, where I found a blog post from her that perfectly echoed my mindset. So this is where I’m at right now.

Watching Muppets Most Wanted with my kid as many times as he wants. It’s bizarre to me that he prefers this to the 2011 The Muppets, but whatever. This song, in particular, delights me every time. (Also, Tina Fey. Tina Fey delights me as well.)

Storing links here so they’re easy for me to find when I need them during the next two weeks. Maybe they’ll help you, too?

• 13 things to keep kids entertained if quarantined for coronavirus
• Keeping Kids Busy for Work at Home Parents – A Coronavirus Helpful Guide
• Kids Stuck At Home? Here’s How To Keep Them Busy And Grow Their Brains At The Same Time
• Stuck at Home? 10 Fun At-Home Activities to Keep Kids Busy

More to come.

All friends & students who are in the midst of dissertation data collection - I know recent events have made the process even more stressful. I hear & acknowledge the worries. Reach out to your supervisor/chair/colleagues/mentors - we can talk through options & possibilities.

— 𝔻𝕣. 𝕃𝕖𝕚𝕘𝕙 𝔾𝕣𝕒𝕧𝕖𝕤 𝕎𝕠𝕝𝕗 (@gravesle) March 11, 2020

My kid has been sick the past few days. Today is our first day back at Montessori/co-working space since last Friday, and while I’ve been pondering how the spread of coronavirus will impact my research the whole time we’ve been out, today I actually plan to figure out what I’m going to do about it.

Yesterday, Governor Roy Cooper declared a State of Emergency in North Carolina. The press release includes several suggestions. The one that is pertinent to my research is this one:

NC DHHS recommends that people at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19 avoid large groups of people as much as possible. This includes gatherings such as concert venues, conventions, church services, sporting events, and crowded social events.

One of the key pieces of my research involves interviewing and observing at conventions. I’m not sure whether or not I am at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19, though I suspect I am, due to having pre-diabetic Polycystic Ovary Syndrome and autoimmune thyroiditis. Autoimmune disesases don’t make one automatically immunocompromised, but I don’t trust that there aren’t some hidden conditions going on in my body that would make me such. Additionally, I spend a lot of time with my son’s grandparents on both sides of the family, and all of them are in high risk categories. Even though so far none of the cons I was planning to use as field sites have been canceled, I am reluctant to attend conventions myself.

The interview protocol I’m using requires participants to create a graphic representation of their information horizon, drawing themselves in relationship to the resources they use when they have an information need related to cosplay. My plan was to do the interviews in person, giving participants blank paper.

One potential solution is to add more cons - further afield than the initial 50-mile radius I’d originally planned to maintain - that are occurring later in the year, in hopes that coronavirus risk will be reduced by then.

But with the situation changing so rapidly, I don’t feel comfortable relying on that.

So of course, I’m considering how to conduct these interviews online. I have access to Microsoft Zoom through my university, which provides excellent quality for video calls and easy recording. In one sense, this would actually be easier than a face-to-face interview. Except for the graphic representation piece. I could have participants draw on the Zoom whiteboard, but that would require me to give them a tutorial in the whiteboard features. What my colleague/committee member Casey Rawson suggested, and what I’ll most likely do, is have participants draw on some paper at their homes, then both hold the paper up to the webcam for me to see and take a photo of the paper and email/text/DM it to me.

I was concerned as to whether this shift would change my IRB exemption, but after examining the type of exemption I have, I don’t think it will. It is no less secure or protective of participants’ privacy than face-to-face interviews, and in some ways, it is moreso.

That still leaves the question of observations. Part of the unique contribution of my study is that it is the first to examine a blended affinity space, a set of spaces where people gather around a common interest both online and in-person. (Earlier studies looked at World of WarCraft but not BlizzCon, and Minecraft but not Minefaire.) If things go very badly and there are no cons, well, that changes things quite a bit.

On the other hand: Everything is data, so seeing how participants in the cosplay affinity space itself handle avoiding cons or con cancellation will be instructive in and of itself.

Whew.

I’ll figure it out.

I really just want to graduate before I’m 40, y’all.

Last January, I launched Genetrix, a newsletter to curate stories of creative mothers. After sending two issues, I started to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. But I felt called to it again recently, so I changed up how I’m doing it. Now it’s a newsletter/blog. It’s now hosted on Tumblr and syndicated via Micro.blog @genetrixletter, RSS, MailChimp, Twitter, and Facebook. The rest of this post will be the intro post from there. Please check it out if you like.

Welcome to Genetrix!

How did we get here? I’d been collecting articles and books about motherhood and art for months when Electric Literature published Grace Elliott’s “Why Do I Have to Choose Between Being a Writer and a Mother?” in which she writes:

I am having such trouble finding narratives of women who are mothers and artists, or mothers and musicians, or mothers and writers — stories in which women are both, without their struggle to be more than a mother overwhelming them… [I am] looking for a narrative in which creative women do not have to choose between abandoning their work or their children. I hope to find a story of women who live as men do: loving and ambitious, child-raisers and artists.

As a mother and a writer, this spoke to me on a soul level. Reading this immediately followed my participation in Kim Werker’s Daily Making Jumpstart Live, two weeks of attempting to make something daily. In the course of that process, two weeks during which sometimes my two year old son didn’t nap, I found my relationship with creativity and making changing. At first, I had ambitions of crocheting rows and rows a day, preparing elaborate meals, maybe taking up woodworking. In the middle, I started to count mixing some chai concentrate with almond milk as my making for the day. But by the end, I was, in fact, chugging along with crochet, knocking out a giant doily shawl over the course of a week. Some days I could be a mother and a creative person, and other days I couldn’t.

Elliott’s writing and this experience confirmed for me that I needed to seek out the stories of other creative mothers. And my natural inclination is to share the stories I find. Hence, this blog.

What are we doing here? Like motherhood itself, creating and curating this blog will be a process of trial and error. I’ll be sharing links to blog posts and articles that inspire me and can serve as a launching point into our journey at the intersection of creativity and motherhood. I’m hoping to include reviews of relevant books and media, and conversational interviews with actual creative mothers. But please tell me what you would like to see in this space. I’m especially interested in ideas for how we can build a community of people interested in stories of creative mothers.

Who am I? I’m Kimberly Hirsh, and I’m a mother, performer, writer, and crafter. Most of my creativity these days is used to produce academic writing as part of my doctoral work toward a PhD in information and library science. If you want to get to know me better, you can check out my website.

I’m a white, American, raised Christian but currently agnostic and a little witchy, chronically ill but without other disabilities, vaguely straight, monogamously heterosexually partnered, legally married, postgraduate educated, middle class cis woman. I’m a full-time graduate student with a part-time assistantship.

My son was conceived after three years of PCOS-driven anovulatory infertility via intercourse with no medical assistance other than metformin, born of my body, delivered vaginally, and while the labor, birth, and aftermath definitely came with some trauma, it was relatively uncomplicated.

I’m blessed/lucky/privileged to have my parents, my partner’s parents, and our siblings all living close by and able to help with our son. He and I spend five mornings a week at a coworking space/Montessori School, but I am his primary caregiver. We live in a suburban neighborhood in a medium-sized city with many organizations and activities designed to support young children and their families.

A note on inclusion… All those characteristics and experiences mentioned above obviously affect my lens on creativity and motherhood. I’m going to deliberately seek out perspectives different than my own, but I’m also going to mess up. Please feel free to let me know when I do and to share stories and perspectives I miss.

Who counts as a creative mother? For our purposes, a mother is anyone who identifies as a mother. As for a definition of creativity, well, I’m thinking here of writers, artists, performers, designers, architects, crafters… But that definition is a floor, not a ceiling.

I spent some time this morning installing encryption software so that I can encrypt the data files I will be backing up onto an external hard drive.

I created a spreadsheet to track the initial sources for my sustained, systematic observation and entered the resources Kroski (2015) mentions. I noted the title, author, URL, type (book, tutorial, blog post, etc), and whether the resource was part of a larger portal (e.g. YouTube, Instructables, Pinterest).

As you might expect of a 5 year old book, a few of the resources are now unavailable. Not a lot else to report today, and I expect this piece of the work will continue for a few more days before I start actually taking notes using my observation protocol.

I began my sustained, systematic observation today by gathering my initial resources for this phase.

First, on my Dissertation Trello board in my Sustained, Systematic Observation list, I created a card called “Collect initial resources.”

On this card, I created a checklist and including the following types of sources to use to identify resources:

LIS sources

• Those I mentioned in my proposal (book & articles)
• Those referenced in Cosplay in Libraries (henceforth referred to as Kroski 2015) (specifically, LI Pop Culture Con)

Cosplay sources

• Convention websites to review for guest or cosplay group names
• Groups mentioned in Kroski 2015, such as Star Wars groups the 501st & Rebel legions
• Sources identified by Googling “Marvel cosplayers” and browsing the first 10 pages of results. Kroski refers to her own cosplay “origin story” as being when she participated in a call for Marvel cosplayers for an episode of Cake Boss. This mention is why I Googled Marvel cosplayers.

Next, I began a close reading of Kroski 2015 to look for resources she suggests/mentions. This includes specific lists of tutorials related to particular techniques, books she mentions, apps, and references in her endnotes that are cosplay resources such as blog posts. I am flagging these with Post-it flags and will enter them into a spreadsheet before beginning using my observation protocol.

I will also need to perform the observation protocol on Kroski 2015 itself.

I’ve been doing some reading this week on what it means to dissertate in the open, and as there are many different ways to do it, I thought I would talk quickly about my plans moving forward.

First, here are some of the sources informing my ideas:

• Dissertating in the Open by Laura Gogia
• Granularities of the Open Dissertation by Laura Gogia
• The Integration of Web Culture into Higher Education by Laura Gogia
• Opening the Dissertation by Bonnie Stewart
• Shifting my research question by Rebecca J. Hogue
• The Open Dissertation by Maha Bali

Laura Gogia’s visual article and post on granularities sum it up best. I can open up my dissertation process and/or my dissertation content, using a variety of tools. So far, I’ve done a combination of both: I’ve offered insight into the process and shared documents such as my literature review, prospectus, and proposal.

For now, I’m going to focus on sharing process. I will come back around to content, especially as I want to share my research with cosplayers, but my primary audience right now is other researchers - especially doctoral students and early career researchers.

To that end, I will be blogging my process memos. In the course of working on my PhD, I’ve discovered it’s far too easy to forget how we got to a certain point, so I’m going to keep daily process memos about the work I did that day. I’ll probably be a day behind in posting them, since I’ll write them at the end of my workday. So you’ll see today’s process memo on Monday.

Have a lovely weekend!

I’ve been trying to establish my data collection/analysis workflow and I’m running into the age-old problem with qualitative research: you don’t really know what you need until you’re in the middle of it.

One of the things I heard repeatedly from professors was that the difference between quantitative and qualitative research wasn’t how much work you would do, but at which end of the process you would do it. Quantitative research requires a lot of up-front work, designing surveys or experiments, etc. , but analysis can go pretty quickly as long as you already know which statistical tests you need. Qualitative research requires a lot of work in the analysis stage, and the beginning of the design process is a little more free-flowing and improvisational.

(She said, thinking about her detailed interview and observation protocols and meticulous research design…)

I’m the kind of person who likes to have structures in place ahead of time so that when I’m in a thing I can just do it. If I don’t get those structures in place, I can be a bit of a mess. For example - life example, not work example - if I don’t do all of my pill-sorting at the beginning of the week, there is an almost 0% chance that I will take anything besides my prescription medications. (I take 24 pills a day, when prescriptions and supplements are added together.)

So I wanted to have a data collection structure in place, so that my data would not become a mess.

I realized, though, that creating an elaborate data collection structure was a form of productive procrastination. After all of the complaining I’ve done about being ready to start on my own research, though, I really ought to get down to it.

I settled on only setting up the data collection structure for the first phase of my research, sustained, systematic observation. I gave myself permission to work exclusively on that for a couple of weeks before I design the next set of structures.

I’m going to start on that tomorrow, and my plan is to write a blog post about that process in hopes of helping future scholars who might use connective and affinity space ethnography.

I successfully defended my dissertation proposal on February 3, 2020.

I have one huge piece of advice for writing your dissertation proposal: buy or borrow Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches by John W. Creswell and J. David Creswell, and do what it says. It will guide you through the proposal-writing process down to the sentence level. It is expensive. It is worth it. It is the most useful graduate school textbook I’ve ever bought.

It’s possible you’ll discover at this point that you haven’t made as many decisions about your methods as you thought you had. That’s fine. Make them now.

For example, I realized that I had no idea where online I wanted to do my observation. This stalled me out for a few days, until I remembered that figuring that out was the whole point of the sustained, systematic observation part of affinity space ethnography (PDF). So I wrote about how I didn’t know that yet, about how my design is emergent, and about how I imagined that observation might play out.

In November and December 2019, I wrote the first draft of my dissertation proposal. I submitted it to my committee ahead of my comps, so they were able to quickly peruse it and offer me some feedback during the oral exam.

At first, some of the feedback overwhelmed me. Dr. Casey Rawson suggested that rather than a wide-scale ethnographic approach, I might take a case study approach, following just a few cosplayers through their process and attending to their information practices. This was an intriguing possibility, but the logistics overwhelmed me, as I’d have to know a few cosplayers well enough that they would allow me to actually physically be with them throughout their process, plus I would have to manage the time (i.e., childcare) to actually be with them. I decided that this was a cool idea, but it was a different study than my dissertation, so I ended up putting it in my suggestions for future research in the second draft of my dissertation proposal. Now I had a research program, not just one study.

I sent this second draft to my committee right before the winter holidays, starting the clock on the 30 days I was required to give them with the proposal before the proposal defense. We scheduled the defense for February 3, and I spent January creating my proposal defense slides. (As always, if you are a cosplayer whose photo I used and you would like it removed, please let me know and I’ll oblige ASAP.)

As I was working on the slides, I read through the proposal and asked myself what questions I would ask if I were a committee member, and then set out to answer them in the slides.

First, I realized that there were some terms I mentioned in the proposal and had defined in the literature review, but that probably needed to be defined again at the proposal defense:

• Collective intelligence
• Information literacy
• Affinity space
• Blended affinity space
• Constellation of information

Then, I realized that my research methods were still not as detailed as I would like. I wanted to be able to show the committee what my research would actually look like, in practice. I remembered that for my theory development class, I had created a grounded theory proposal and included sample data that I had actually coded. I decided to do something similar for this presentation.

First, I demonstrated what the sustained, systematic observation would look like, using a librarian-recommended cosplay resource as my starting point. I created a specific observation protocol for this stage based on the affinity space ethnography literature, and applied that observation protocol to the resource. I evaluated that resource to determine if it was information-rich, and it was. I followed links out from it to other resources, evaluating them as well. I determined that the original resource was information-rich, and showed what it would look like to pull down data (in this case, YouTube comments) and code them using both my information literacy and collective intelligence coding schemes.

I put all of this stuff in my slides:

(I’ll say it again: if you are a cosplayer whose photo I used and you would like it removed, please let me know and I’ll oblige ASAP.)

The proposal defense went really well. I felt very prepared, having done all of this. My committee members said it was a thorough proposal and appreciated the demonstration of the methods. They also gave me several helpful suggestions for revising the proposal further before I submitted it to the Institutional Review Board. I submitted my final dissertation proposal to the review board on February 5, and a copy of it went to the SILS library, as well.

After one round of revisions and one correction of a typo, my IRB application was approved and determined exempt from further review. Time to get to work!

Most of my blogging has been micro this month, which is appropriate since I’m hosting my blog on micro.blog now. It has really made a difference in my comfort level and ease-of-blogging; much lighter weight than WordPress. I don’t feel like I have to have a 1000+ word essay to bother posting (obviously).

I do want to get back into longer form, though. The reason I haven’t this month is because at the beginning of the month I was getting ready for my dissertation proposal defense. As soon as I passed that, I had to write my Institutional Review Board application. Once that was done, I had to write an application for a dissertation completion fellowship. And then when that was done, the IRB application came back with 7 revisions I needed to make. I did that this morning.

I didn’t think all this stuff would take 3 weeks. I thought it would be done in the first week of the month, that I’d sail through IRB (more the fool me!), and then be doing data collection already. I also thought that during that brief wait from IRB application to IRB approval (again, haha, brief, apparently they’re moving very slowly lately), I’d come up with a beautiful data collection and analysis workflow.

Let me tell you what. Based on my quick Googling and visiting my favorite resources on academic writing (okay, my one favorite, Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog) and my lit review, people really don’t want to share the nitty gritty details of their qual data collection workflow/process. Usually, when I bump up against something like this, my instinct is to then be radically open with my own process and create a resource other people can use so they don’t have this problem. (See: the Intellectual Freedom Toolkit I created with W. when there was a book challenge at the school library where I worked.)

But, well, for now, I’m at a loss as to where to start. I went back to my syllabi for what we call babydocs at SILS, and it had some good stuff for navigating the early part of a PhD, but not as much project management lit as I would have liked. I’ll dig into my qual methods course syllabi next, but I suspect they won’t offer much either.

Everybody wants to tell you: 1. why a given research design is appropriate 2. big picture how to do those methods And of course those are SUPER IMPORTANT!

But whoever is writing about like… Where they put their memos, and stuff - how they organize their workday when they’re doing fieldwork - esp. virtual fieldwork - well, I haven’t found those people yet. I’m sure someone must be writing about it. Not sure how much time I’ll spend before developing my own systems.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

• I’ll probably take field notes in my personal physical notebook, originally.
• Then I’ll transcribe those into MaxQDA I guess?
• I’ll use a digital recorder to record interviews and panels, then import and transcribe those in MaxQDA, too.
• MaxQDA has space for coding memos, but I don’t know if there’s good spots in there for reflective memos, so I need to check into that. (Also I’m thoroughly pissed at myself that I can’t find my favorite qual research textbooks - Goodall’s Writing the New Ethnography and Coffey and Atkinson’s Making Sense of Qualitative Data. I might need to do some deep decluttering in the next week or so to try to track them down.) If MaxQDA doesn’t have a good spot for coding memos, I guess I’ll write reflective memos in… I don’t know. Word? I might do it in Scrivener though.
• I’m definitely going to read some advice on dissertating with Scrivener.
• I think I can pull webpages into MaxQDA, too, so that will be helpful.

Anyway. None of this process is helped by an extreme lack of sleep and hormones running wild, so. Might just call today a win with the whole IRB resubmission thing and cut myself a break.

Anyway, soon, I’m planning to write a proper Dissertating in the Open post about writing and defending your dissertation proposal, so stay tuned!