The Grind

One of the most basic realities of academic life is that for every published article, chapter, or book, there are untold hours of pure and unrefined drudgery. This is the kind of drudgery that stubbornly resists the latest AI wizardry and can’t be streamlined or made more efficient. It is also incredibly boring.

I’m coming to realize that this kind of drudge work will take occupy most of my summer in Polis. So far this week, I’ve painstaking gone through a publication draft to check the intricate little arguments that support our larger statements on phasing and chronology. I cannot explain how boring this kind of work is. It involves not only careful reading of texts that I have written (and this is a kind of solipsism that is soul crushing at the best of times) and the careful cross referencing of this narrative with notebooks, databases, and other passages in a 30k word pre-publication draft.

When this becomes all together too much, I shift my attention to digitizing a state plan. While there have been some software improvements that have made this slightly less painful, there is still no obvious short cut available to produce vectorized (rather than rasterized) plans that can be manipulated for publication and presentation of phase plans. It still involves clicking a million times in Adobe Illustrator or ArcGIS. With each click I feel a bit of my spirit evaporating.

Finally, there’s what I call “concatenating,” which feels like it should draw on the same root from which we get the word “catatonic.” This involves making sure that we everything from descriptions of strata to catalogued pottery to illustrations in order (and for reasons best left to editors, publishers, readers, and trained scholars are in the proper numerical order). This means every change to anything could require the renumbering of everything.