[14 of 100] Libraries
Sometimes I think I had better focus before I was a grad student. Before the mountain of work seemed so vast that the temptation to run away from it was as strong, or stronger, than the desire to do it, because even with an enormous shovel the pile never seems to get any smaller. Some of the emotionally and intellectually hardest work of writing a dissertation lies in the seemingly simple acts of not getting overwhelmed, breaking things down into manageable tasks, and doing the work in interstitial spaces of time.
Today after teaching I went to the library. I needed to find some data on the education of upper-class women in early nineteenth century Britain. This seems like a fairly straight-forward thing to find out, but it is surprisingly hard to track down due to a few factors. First of all, there was no organized movement to educate women before the mid-century. Second, library databases aren't smart enough to know that anything about the education of women in the "early modern period" is not, as one might think, actually about the nineteenth century but is instead about the English Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries.
So I dug up some books. They were almost all hardcover. They were heavy. My back is hurting, so I didn't want to carry them all home. I decided to sit at a carel and skim a few, to see if I actually needed them. Then I discovered that I didn't need the whole book, I just needed some little bits of them. So I sat down, in the quiet of the library, and took notes on the relevant pieces of information. I took down the bibliographic information on the books. And suddenly I had done almost two hours of completely productive, focused work. I regularly do more than two hours of work in a day, but only rarely with that kind of concentration.
It was awesome. Next time I'm making myself crazy by flitting from task to task, I'm taking my ass to the library.
ETA: By the way, did you know that the Tufts Library has a five volume collection of 18th century British erotica?
Today after teaching I went to the library. I needed to find some data on the education of upper-class women in early nineteenth century Britain. This seems like a fairly straight-forward thing to find out, but it is surprisingly hard to track down due to a few factors. First of all, there was no organized movement to educate women before the mid-century. Second, library databases aren't smart enough to know that anything about the education of women in the "early modern period" is not, as one might think, actually about the nineteenth century but is instead about the English Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries.
So I dug up some books. They were almost all hardcover. They were heavy. My back is hurting, so I didn't want to carry them all home. I decided to sit at a carel and skim a few, to see if I actually needed them. Then I discovered that I didn't need the whole book, I just needed some little bits of them. So I sat down, in the quiet of the library, and took notes on the relevant pieces of information. I took down the bibliographic information on the books. And suddenly I had done almost two hours of completely productive, focused work. I regularly do more than two hours of work in a day, but only rarely with that kind of concentration.
It was awesome. Next time I'm making myself crazy by flitting from task to task, I'm taking my ass to the library.
ETA: By the way, did you know that the Tufts Library has a five volume collection of 18th century British erotica?