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Thinking about blogging again:

I’ve been reading A LOT with the start of this new semester, trying to take in as much as I can so that I can hopefully get a better idea of what exactly I want my thesis to explore. I just recently discovered Zotero, and I love it. It’s been super useful for reading, annotating, and organizing all my texts and all the research I come across (which is a lot: over 200 items in my library already). But I’m finding I’m having a lot of trouble remembering certain facts or quotes or even whole ideas.

In reading How to Read for Grad School, I realized I need to start taking notes as I read. Then I remembered a former student of my program saying something about keeping a journal or blog as she worked through her research process, and that doing so was incredibly helpful when it came time to actually write because much of the leg work was already complete.

So, as part of my new website, I’ve decided to try and maintain some form of blog. I’m very hopeful that it will not only help me with recall later on, but that it more so helps me improve my writing abilities. There’s only one way to get better, and that’s to practice!

I started off the month doing my annual song-a-day/genuary daily creative challenge. That was actually going pretty well until school started again, and all my focus and energy turned to reading. So I’m happy that in a way I’ve picked up the daily practice again, but instead of music and visual, it’s now more focused on writing. Which is a good thing, I think. The writings feel much more productive and important right now than the A/V experiments did.

I’m sure there will be days where I don’t feel like writing, or don’t have anything to write about, and maybe I’ll post an A/V experiment, or an interactive web experiment, or a photo, or a drawing, or a piece of nothing, who knows? But the idea is just to try and do something thoughtful or creative everyday, and then to put it out there into the world. Who knows, maybe somebody besides me will get something out of this.

Another little thought: I’ve referred to my A/V experiments as “dailies” for a few years now. I like the term because of its connection to dailies, or rushes as they’re also called, in the film making context. I like thinking of these posts as raw footage. I think it’s totally fine if these are rushed and unpolished/unedited. Again, the idea is just to try and do something thoughtful or creative everyday, and then to put it out there into the world. It doesn’t have to be prefect, it just has to get done.