I spent my winter vacation migrating my website from WordPress to micro.blog. I thought I’d write a little bit about the process. There’s a help page about doing a WordPress import and it worked for me exactly as described. I actually managed to accomplish the whole migration using only my phone: I downloaded the WXR file to my phone, uploaded it to micro.blog, and that all worked fine. I pointed my domain to micro.blog, requested SSH (so my domain has https:// in front of it), and @manton got that set up within an hour of my request.

I made the move because my webhost hasn’t been able to support IndieWeb technologies as much as I would like, but I’ve also found that the webhost I was considering as a replacement might not support all of the IndieWeb features I want, either. So I moved my personal site here to micro.blog. Then, I opened an account with Reclaim Hosting and - again, using only my phone - successfully migrated my webhosting over to them. They were able to migrate my entire hosting account. The whole thing was done, including manipulating of various domain names, inside of 4 hours.

It’s worth noting that in the case of both of these services, most of my tech support emails came directly from the founders of the services. I know that this level of service doesn’t scale, and for many people it would probably be less than ideal to have a founder or CEO handling things like site migrations and secure domain set up. But it felt really good to me - clear that I was communicating with a person who not only had the technical chops to support me, but who believed in their product.

I’m just beginning my interactions with these services in particular, but they both embrace an ethos that reminds me of my mid-90s technoutopian web developer origins, and it feels good.

There’s still a bit of work on my end to make everything work just so:

• migrate featured images over from my WordPress installation
• apply the "research" category to all of my research-related posts
• decide if I want to apply any other categories

This will give me a chance to review all of my old posts.

I’m excited to be on micro.blog because theme development relies on languages I already know (HTML & CSS).

📄 I didn’t feel ready to write a year-in-review post before now, but here we are! So what did I get up to this year?

This year I:

• keynoted IndieWebCamp New Haven
• had my first freelance librarian gig
• visited Knoxville, Atlanta, DC, and North Myrtle Beach
• dealt with at least 5 house contractors
• finished Project READY
• worked as an exhibitor at a professional conference for the first time
• weaned M.
• went to 3 fan conventions
• learned how to use MaxQDA
• hosted M.'s third birthday party
• moved M. into his own bedroom
• got anxiety meds
• tried and loved flotation therapy (still waiting for my ESP to kick in, though)
• cosplayed 3 different characters
• special ordered pies from Phoebe Lawless
• wrote my lit review
• drafted my proposal
• passed my comps

I decided to focus exclusively on the positive here. There have been a lot of hard days this year, a lot of illness, a lot of scares, but even the worst days each had something redeeming in them, and I think that's important to remember.

Cosplays of 2019: Luna - Cat Version (Sailor Moon), Ariel (Ralph Breaks the Internet), Wednesday Addams (The Addams Family, 1991 film)

My word of the year for 2019 was PHASE. My goal was to accept cycles and understand that all things pass. I’m pretty satisfied with how I did with that. I think I’m a much more chill parent at the end of this year than I was at the beginning. In addition to embracing that energy, I wanted to own my personal goth aesthetic, read for pleasure, and have a good time. I think I did all of those really successfully.

With respect to my aesthetic, I expanded it so that it shifts seasonally (tying the phase energy in even here!):

I always transition to Gothic Girl Fall in September, leaving behind my Summer Mer-Goth Sea Witch vibes... In winter, I sport full Holiday Goth (lots of dark green velvet) and my spring aesthetic is Goth Fae... https://t.co/HmHMcgcu3W

— Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) September 6, 2019

I read a lot for pleasure in the first half of the year, but once comps really ramped up, my brain just wouldn’t take in any more words. I met my goal for the year, thanks to counting single comic issues as books. And of course, if I’d counted every article I read, well… I’ve read a lot. I’ve also read many words of visual novels, but I don’t think GoodReads tracks those.

I definitely feel like I’ve had a good time this year. I went to Retro films several times, went to Silent Book Club a few times, had a blast wandering around DC with SILS folks for dinner, an escape room, and some Harry Potter Wizards Unite fun, and watched my kid continue to grow. I saw Frozen II and laughed and cried, and Will and I saw Knives Out twice and Benoit Blanc is my new favorite character.

The year’s not over yet, and I’m looking forward to a lot of family fun, submitting the final draft of my dissertation proposal, another trip to North Myrtle Beach, and maybe seeing The Rise of Skywalker before the year is out.

…but onwards, to 2020!

My word of the year for 2020 is FULL.

While there’s been a ton of good these past couple of years, I have more than once felt empty or hollow, like a pumpkin after you scrape its guts out. I’m done with that nonsense. I’m going to fill my well.

I’m also choosing full in the sense of going full something, in my case Going Full Kimberly. This means refusing to suppress all of the weird bits of myself that make me who I am. Obviously, we behave differently in different contexts, and that’s fine. But too often I find myself thinking things like, “Oh, I won’t double down on my affection for Star Wars because W. is out on Star Wars,” or “I won’t wear those sparkles because I’m too old,” or whatever. And I’m done with that. I’m 38, and it’s time to just be myself unapologetically.

Embrace imposter syndrome.

Revel in the fact you have fooled everyone.

You are a Trickster Goddess.

You are the Imposter Child for Deception and Clever Ruses.

— i’m a skELIton (@EliLizzieLizbet) March 17, 2019

I told W. that for my mid-life crisis, I’m just going to brush up my sewing skills and start creating adult-sized versions of all the sparkly little girl fashion at Target.

When I was a teenager, with only a few rare exceptions, I really liked being myself. Leonie Dawson talks about how you should love yourself, because you’re rad. I’m rad. You’re rad. Let’s stop acting like we’re not rad, y’all.

In the spirit of going FULL KIMBERLY, of being Kimberly af, here are the things I’m feeling, my non-resolutions, for 2020:

• Continue to read for pleasure.
• Play video games.
• Pursue my core desired feelings of ease, creativity, and connection.

And then my beautiful, auto-text-generated resolution:

Reviving this from @thephdstory but for 2020... My 2020 resolution is to be a part of the team. https://t.co/dkeCjW6coX

— Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) December 18, 2019

---

Featured image is a photo I took during Bull Moon Rising, when the Museum of the Moon (by Luke Jerram) was in town.

I passed my comps last Tuesday, and I thought I’d take some time to write about it today.

Previously, on Dissertating in the Open:

1. Inspiration strikes and I write a prospectus.
2. I work with my advisor to select five areas for my comprehensive examination literature review package.
3. I contact five faculty members - 3 internal, 2 external - and ask them to be on my committee. They accept.
4. I had my first meeting with my committee and we narrowed the scope for my lit review a bit.

And then I didn't really blog about the process for 9 months because I was too busy actually writing the literature review.

Over the course of that process, some things shifted.

As I mentioned in my post about my first committee meeting, my lens on information literacy changed from a broad one to one that narrowly focused on information literacy practices as a set of sociocultural practices, tied to a particular context and set of social interactions.

When it came time to write about theory, I decided to write exclusively about the theoretical concept of affinity spaces. I discussed collective intelligence and participatory culture in the information literacy chapter instead, and decided to included Sonnenwald’s work on information behavior as part of my proposal.

As I wrote about affinity spaces, I learned about some new-to-me methodologies: connective ethnography and affinity space ethnography. I took on ethnography as my broad research design, taking a constructivist research approach, and then used connective/affinity space ethnography as my stance for how to conduct ethnography in the cosplay affinity space.

Over the next several months, I drafted chapters of my comps and sent them to my committee for review. You can see the first drafts here:

1. Information Literacy as a Social Practice
2. Cosplay
3. Connected Learning and Libraries
4. Affinity Spaces
5. Connective and Affinity Space Ethnography

I prepared for and wrote each of those drafts using some variation of my start-to-finish literature review workflow, drawing heavily on recommendations from Dr. Barbara Wildemuth and Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega. I didn't always follow the workflow in a truly linear fashion; sometimes I would find myself needing to memo a subset of literature before I could move on to another concept at all. Other times I would write a memo that was basically a draft, then mark it up with pens and rearrange the whole thing. Sometimes I would cut entire sections after writing them. I'm a little sorry I didn't document this process better.

As I finished each chapter, I sent it out to my committee. Different committee members provided different amounts of feedback, but none of them were under any obligation to provide any feedback at all. I’m grateful to them for their help.

When I started writing the final chapter, the methods chapter, I first began by memoing articles about my specific data collection methods. As I tried to turn these into a cohesive literature review, I realized I needed some guidance. So I emailed my advisor, Dr. Sandra Hughes-Hassell, and my research methods expert, Dr. Casey Rawson, asking them about this chapter. Casey suggested that this chapter should be about my research design and approach - constructivist? pragmatist? participatory? and ethnography? case study? narrative? - more than my specific data collection and analysis methods, which would be a key part of the proposal rather than the lit review. This help determining the scope of the chapter was invaluable, and let me really focus on connective and affinity space ethnography conceptually.

I revised the chapters based on my committee member’s feedback and my own notes, compiling them into a single document along with my prospectus, also slightly revised. I also sent the committee a brief statement of my research interests.

I submitted all of that to the committee at the end of October. We scheduled my comprehensive examination date for December 10. In my department, the literature review stands in lieu of a written exam.

Over the next month, I drafted my dissertation proposal, which will be another post, though I did finish it in time for my committee to have it for a few days before my comps.

For the comps exam itself, my internal examiners were physically present, while my external examiners called in via Zoom. We began the exam with me delivering the following brief presentation as an overview/refresher:

(Note: If you are a cosplayer or photographer featured in this slideshow and would like your image removed, please let me know and I’ll take care of it ASAP.)

After this, Sandra asked each committee member to ask me a question, working around the Zoom/room clockwise. Each committee member had one or more really insightful questions to ask that helped me think about my methods, my plans for data analysis, the role of theory in my study, and how I conceptualize cosplay and the relationship between cosplayer, character, narrative, and costume.

In the end, I passed and came out of the exam with several ideas for how to refine my dissertation proposal, which I’ll write more about in my next Dissertating in the Open post.

I’m writing this in an attempt to help people without chronic illness understand the constant calculation people with chronic illness (whether physical, mental, or both) have to undertake to budget our energy, as well as the limits on our resilience.

First, go read about the Spoon Theory (which is technically a metaphor, yes I know). Then come back. I’ll wait.

….

You’re back! Great. Let’s continue.

To review:

The basic idea of the Spoon Theory (Metaphor) is that, while most people have a consistent level of energy that’s pretty high and don’t have to calculate how they expend their energy, people with chronic illness - whether physical, mental, or both - are engaged in a constant calculation of what they can afford to do before they run out of energy and have to rest or risk illness and collapse. For example, some days I have to decide - if I take the full recycling bin out first thing in the morning, will I have enough energy to get M. to our co-working space/Montessori school and then do any good work once I’m there? If not, I better wait on the recycling, or I risk having to spend my workday in a fog being unproductive.

An important part of this metaphor that the original explanation doesn’t address is that the number of “spoons” - the amount of energy a chronically ill person has - varies depending on a number of factors. So a person might be able to accomplish a lot one day and very little the next, or might have a run of bad days with very few spoons and need many restful days to recover. This happened to me when we rearranged the house rather quickly right before M’s birthday. I’m only now beginning to find energy for things other than school or caring for M.

There’s another element to this that the spoon theory doesn’t address, and that’s the case of having variable emotional resilience. Anyone can have their resilience depleted, but some people have more resilience to begin with. In my case, depression and anxiety mean when those conditions aren’t well-managed, I have much lower resilience than a normal person. A tantrum from M. that I could normally handle gracefully and with gentleness might prompt me to snap at him or have to separate myself from him when I’m feeling this way. The metaphor I find helpful for this is to think of myself as a rubber band. When I’m stretched close to my limit, a very small additional stretching could cause me to snap. My rubber band might be more brittle or smaller than someone else’s, someone who could tolerate more demands on their resilience before snapping.

I hope this has been helpful for people, especially if you care about someone with chronic illness but don’t have it yourself,

Grad school and parenthood are both immensely isolating experiences. So when you combine them, you tend to be… immensely isolated. I feel very lonely most of the time, but also too exhausted usually to do the things I think you have to do to keep a friendship going. So I start to feel like I have no friends, when really I have a lot of friends, but I’m just not communicating with them much.

This is, I think, actually pretty normal. This article I read for class a few years ago had the image below in it.

[caption id=“attachment_9253” align=“aligncenter” width=“514”] Figure from “Question-Negotiation and Information Seeking in Libraries,” Robert S. Taylor, College and Research Libraries 29(3), 178-194[/caption]

The way I interpret this schematic, when people first become friends, there’s a lot of communicative acts that are of the getting-to-know-you type, not focused on any particular topic. But as the friendship endures and you know each other better, you communicate less frequently but more topically.

My friendships fall in line with this pretty well, but there’s not much communication that’s just on the topic of, you know, how we’re all doing, and how we value our friendship. So here’s me, lonely, missing my friends, too tired to do much about it, and also a little overwhelmed at the prospect, because what do you say to someone you care greatly about but haven’t talked to in months?

…

On Thanksgiving, W., M., and I drove over to W.’s brother’s place for dinner with that side of the family. M. hadn’t napped and fell asleep on the way over. I told W. to go ahead inside, and I would stay in the care and bring M. up if/when he woke up.

I’d brought books with me, but I found that my brain couldn’t process the words in them. So I played some games on my phone and watched “Pangs,” as is my tradition. After that I started to watch The Empire Strikes Back, but I got a text from Verizon saying I was about to use up all my data, so I decided to stop.

So there I was, in the dark, in a rare silent moment, all by myself, and I had a revelation:

All I had to do to connect with my friends was to say hi. It was as simple as a text. It didn’t need to be a dramatic letter full of reasons why I haven’t been in touch, apologies for ghosting them, lengthy updates on how things are going with me.

So I opened up the Contacts app on my phone and just started going through it, texting people I miss a lot and haven’t checked in with in a long time. (I did miss some people and only realized later that I should have included them, so the next time I find myself in a truly quiet moment like this, I’ll get to them.)

To each of them, I sent a customized version of a message that went basically like this:

"Hi [friend's name]! I'm in the car with a sleeping M. outside W's brother's house and taking the rare quiet time as an opportunity to text friends and wish them well. I hope you're having a great day!"

Some people just got “Hi! I love you!” and others just got a variation of “I hope you’re having a great day!” without the explanation about M. sleeping.

And in a few minutes, answers started coming in.

I am thankful for your friendship.

❤️️❤️️❤️️

We just pulled off our first Thanksgiving in our house!

I love you right back and I hope you had a wonderful day too! 💜

Thank you! We did have a good day! I hope you and your family did as well.

Thanks for the Thanks-greetings! I hope you’re doing well and junk!

I love you too! And I miss you!

Hey lovely! I hope you’re well! I adore you!

Friends. They’re great, right?

Now I’ve opened up all of these conversations, I hope I’ll feel more comfortable just sending a note to say “Hey! Thinking of you! How are you?” I can’t believe it took this long for it to occur to me that it’s as simple as that.

And let’s conclude with this:

If you’re someone who thinks sometimes of reaching out to me and then doesn’t, because it’s too daunting or whatever, know that I always welcome a “Hi! How are you?”

I’ve been thinking today about something Maria Bamford said - I think it was in her episode of The Hilarious World of Depression. She said that one of the times she was hospitalized for her mental illness, and before she met her husband, she saw the people in the psychiatric facility and how they had people who loved them visiting them, especially spouses and romantic partners. She said it made her realize that she didn’t have to wait until she loved herself for someone else to love her.

I think this is so important to remember. There’s a lot of rhetoric out there about how if you want to be loved, you have to love yourself first. But I’m here to tell you, and so is Maria Bamford: it’s just not so. You are worthy of love, whether you love yourself or not, and the people who love you will love you when you think you’re great and when you’re very down on yourself.

This blog post contains affiliate links. If you click them and make a purchase, I may receive a commission (at no extra cost to you). Thank you for your support. I promise not to link anything I don’t use and love myself.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m participating in #AcWriMo this year and calling it #DissProWriMo, since I’m planning to churn out a pretty workable draft of my dissertation proposal this month. Is it an ambitious goal? It sure is. Can I do it? Here’s hoping!

But Kimberly, what resources are you using to help you?

I’m so glad you asked. Here’s a list:

• Katy Peplin's ThrivePhD #AcWriMo resources
• Raul Pacheco-Vega's Academic Writing resources
• The 5th edition of Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches by John W. Creswell and J. David Creswell
• My Bullet Journal (a Moleskine Hardcover Large Dot Grid notebook + Pilot G2 pen)
• Paperpile
• Google Docs
• Forest app for the Pomodoro technique

Nice. What are your goals?

Final goals:

1. Finished draft of my dissertation proposal
2. Submission-ready version of a paper I'm co-authoring with Dr. Maggie Melo.

Progress goal: 1-3 pages of writing per day

What are your limitations?

I only have 17 days with childcare this month. I’m planning to spend at least 2 hours a day writing, but more if I can manage it.

Anything else we need to know?

I’ll be posting a weekly blog update on my progress. You can follow along by clicking any of the social links to the left or by subscribing for email updates (also in the left sidebar).

 

I was out at dinner with my family a couple days ago and four adults were sitting at the next table over, conversing about movies and books and society. For the first time since my son was born, I realized that I miss that flavor of conviviality.

Of course I love my kid more than anything in the world, but I also enjoy conversation that consists of more than “The potty IS a good place for poop!” and “I don’t know why Winnie the Pooh has a grumbly voice.”

To be fair, my kid and I actually have some solid commute conversations, but they’re still not the same as chatting with friends about pop culture and the world.

(Does this post - or my others about parenthood - mean I’m a mommy blogger now? When I was pregnant, my friend Whitney asked, jokingly, if I was going to become a mommy blogger once I had my kid and I was all, “Haha no!” But did I? Jenny Lawson and Heather B. Armstrong are considered mommy bloggers and I really like them, so I’m going to rock it, if that’s who I am now.)

We went to lunch with a friend of my son’s and her parents after the preschool Halloween party today. I thought, This will be great! The kids will entertain each other and we can have grown up talk!

Reader, that is not what happened.

Honestly, though, being a parent seems to mean being really behind on pop culture, so what would I even talk about besides either my kid or my work? And it turns out most people aren’t interested in talking about the spread of ethnography as a methodological approach beyond the field of anthropology, so work’s not great for much conversation, either.

My kid is so cute, though.

When we see a finished piece of writing, we rarely see all the mess that went into creating it. As Annette M. Markham and Nancy K. Baym point out in their book, Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method,

Research reports are carefully edited retrospectives, selected among different story lines and options, depending on one's audience and goals. Within these reports, research designs are generally presented as a series of logical and chronologically ordered steps. Seasoned scholars know there's a complex backstage story line and have experienced such complexities themselves. But for novice scholars, it is easy to imagine that the researcher's route was successfully mapped out in advance and that interpretive findings simply emerged from the ground or fell conveniently into the path. Qualitative research requires a tolerance for chaos, ambiguity, and inductive thinking, yet its written accomplishments—particularly those published in chapters and articles rather than monographs—rarely display the researchers' inductive pathways or the decisions that led them down those routes.

Two of my voice values are transparency and helpfulness, and I want to share some of the messier bits of my writing process. I have hopes of showing off some beautiful, colorful pen-marked-up copies of memos and notes to you in the future, but today, I’m just offering a few thoughts on freewriting.

I often hit a point where I’ve thought and thought and thought about something, ideas are all kind of swirly in my head, I’ve made notes, I’ve mapped concepts, and I’m still not ready to do formal writing for an audience that’s not me. I might be in a good place to talk to somebody, but honestly, I’m rarely around people who actually want to hear about things like affinity space ethnography (now I’m trying to imagine explaining ethnography to my 3 year old). When I’m in that place, eventually, I realize I need to…

FREEWRITE.

So I open up a new document and type out what I’ve got in my head, with notes to myself but also with citations. I know I’m not inventing anything new here, but this is part of the writing process that I think it’s easy for academics to forget.

Here’s what I freewrote today:

Ethnographic methods are appropriate for studying information literacy practices that are social and occur in an affinity space, as this looks at a sociocultural phenomenon, in a naturalistic setting. These methods cannot produce a full ethnography, but rather must be partial (Hine 2000). (BUT WHY? LIKE, THERE ARE REASONS, LEARN TO ARTICULATE THEM.)

Online spaces, however, present challenges to traditional ethnographic methods. Primary among these is the problem of location-based research; using spatial metaphors to define ethnographic research sites is limiting, because: Practices travel across various online “spaces.” Boundaries of online spaces are porous. And, more and more, boundaries between online and offline activity are also porous.

(Hine, 2000; Leander & McKim, 2003; Wargo 2015, 2017)

Ethnography has some key features.

1. The selection of a “field site.”
2. Observation or participant observation.
3. Interviews.
4. Artifact analysis.

There are ways to approximate these features online. The field site is the trickiest bit. It’s possible to select one environment (for example, fanfiction.net) and consider its boundaries to be the boundaries of the field site, but this lends an incomplete picture.

Now, this is not a useful introduction to ethnography for anyone. It’s incomplete, it privileges data collection over more conceptual issues. But it’s helping me move forward in my writing.

I’ve been feeling moderately not okay lately. Nothing truly devastating, but a sense of doom. A sense of never being able to finish anything, of everything moving slower than I’d like while somehow also moving faster than I’d like. Of not being able to get out from under life.

I still feel that way, but I’m doing a little better today, for a couple of reasons.

1. To appease my child, after returning some books to the university library today I went and visited with my advisor and one of my committee members, who is also a dear friend. I talked to them about my slow progress, my frustration, the stage of the work I'm in, the sense that this part is a slog. They affirmed that it's normal to feel this way and that I'm still within my timeline for a May 2021 graduation, and I'm going to be okay. So, next time I feel this way, I should probably remember: talk to Sandra and Casey, because it always makes me feel better.
2. A few weeks ago, I read Danielle Laporte's The Desire Map, which focuses on living according to your core desired feelings. My core desired feelings are ease, flow, creativity, and connection. I have not been doing things in alignment with bringing about these feelings, but I know that I have the power to switch things up so that I do live in that alignment, and remembering that I can do that has me feeling a lot better.

So, I’m still not okay, but now I believe I will be okay, later.