Beginnings and Endings

It’s starting to feel a bit like spring around here and that means both that I’m starting to plan for my summer research season and that I’m feeling some pressure to wrap up projects before everything goes on pause while I’m “doing the archaeology.” 

Over the last few days, I’ve started to work in earnest in wrapping up the second volume in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project series. The first volume, as readers of this blog know, dealt with our intensive survey of the coastal zone of Pyla village in southeastern Cyprus and the second volume will focus on three seasons of excavation in 2008, 2009, and 2012. This volume has taken us much longer to finish than we expected. In fact, as I was fussing with citations and figures yesterday, I found myself editing some texts that I had written for this volume in 2013. 

I have to admit that I’m terrible at end games. In chess, when I feel like a situation is hopeless or, in happier cases, resolved, I tend to resign or get so bored that I make silly mistakes (often complicating the course of winning!). In working on my own projects, I tend to get frustrated as the pace of a project slows and more and more energy is needed to complete the fussy parts of book preparation such as illustrations, checking citations, and reviewing final manuscript pages. While I find such work immensely gratifying when the book belongs to someone else, I find it beyond tedious when it is my own work. 

But it needs to be done and so it goes.

At the same time, I find the beginnings of projects fraught with anxiety. On the one hand, I get excited when I set upon a new (to me) ideas and feel the rush of encountering new bodies of scholarship and evidence. On the other hand, I’ve come to learn that a lack of discipline early in a research process can often lead to inefficiencies later. Indeed, some of the tedious work that I’m doing now with the PKAP2 volume is the direct result of my lack of discipline when I started the project.

I’ve been keeping up with some of Tom Isern, a colleague at NDSU’s history department, musings on research process. In a recent post on his blog, he has reaffirmed his commitment to hand writing notes in a notebook. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that my note taking practice is a bit of a “warm mess” which combines proper (albeit digital) notes, with annotations on the book itself (and sometimes on digital versions of the book!), and casual writing (which I often post to my blog). The result is a complicated jumble of information that leaves me constantly scrambling to find a passage or to recall whether this or that book said what about whatever. 

Tom’s commitment (as well as my colleagues Eric Burin, Kostis Kourelis, and Richard Rothaus!) to note taking on paper has made me contemplate a shift in discipline for my new project on pseudoarchaeology. As a rule, I’m preoccupied with process (or as we call it in publishing “workflow”) and maybe shaking up my workflow at this stage of my research will energize my practice a bit and perhaps pay dividends when I have to turn the jumble of words into a proper manuscript!