I like setting myself little challenges for the Project to keep up my momentum and to avoid the sense that it's become an endless march from one random publication to the next. Thus, I alternate between thematic groupings and simply working my way through what's left in a folder or on a shelf. Doing an "every day" push for Pride Month helps kick-start me out of a period of distraction where other projects take priority. At this point, I have enough written up to continue posting every day into mid-July. And given what I know of my work habits, I'll probably do just that , though I'll probably slow down a little once I get caught up.
As you might notice from some of the briefer summaries I'm posting currently, in going for a somewhat content-neutral completeness goal, I'm now finding myself encountering a fair number of articles that are preliminary versions of material I've covered in book form, or articles that are more "popular" presentations of material where I've already covered the scholarly version. The Project, of course, has multiple functions. Foremost is the incentive for me to read and digest the information. Secondly is the purpose of presenting a summary for a non-academic audience. But one additional purpose is to give readers a chance to figure out whether they want to track down the original publications to do a deeper dive on their own. And for that purpose, summarizing an article as "this ended up being chapter 3 in book X" or "this material is covered in much greater detail in article Y" or "this is badly outdated and you might want to read Z instead" might help someone else map out their own research more efficiently.
Besides which, with over a thousand titles in my database, I can't always remember what I've already read and blogged! So including everything with any potential relevance that I've looked at means I don't find myself duplicating work on items that I concluded--at some point--weren't all that interesting. One step in working on each entry is reviewing the notes and references to find new publications to add to the database. I regularly find myself thinking, "Oh yeah, that's going to be interesting! Oh...wait...not only is it already on the list, but I've already read it!"
Comments