I was on a roll with my writing a couple of weeks ago. After a lull following completion of Generative AI for Academics I’d started an online writing project, how to enjoy writing, which was exploring my writing practice in an open ended way. I’d written one or two posts most days, leaving me with a vivid sense of this being a topic I wanted to explore in greater depth. It left me with a deeper understanding of why and how I wrote in the way I did, as well as leading to the emergence of a new concept, the ecology of ideas, which I realised had been implicit in my thinking for a long time. This is how I wrote about it in an earlier post in the series:
I hadn’t managed to articulate it previously but my interest in the practice of digital scholarship (in the sense of the mundane actions we take in real world contexts which add up over time to lofty intellectual pursuits) are all to do with cultivating an ecology of ideas. I’m interested in the vast possibilities opened up by a scholarship of abundance in which we can access pretty much any academic content we want, whenever we want from wherever we are. The reason these practical questions interest me is because enjoying writing necessitates a flourishing ecology of ideas which in turns means grappling with the challenge of digital abundance.
I was excited by this notion which linked together Social Media for Academics with Generative AI for Academics, as well as a conceptual paper I’d slowly been tinkering with on scholarship and digital abundance. The argument of this paper, drawing on Andrew Abbott’s writing on excess, claimed that digital abundance is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It is rather problematic or rewarding relative to the relational and sociotechnical constitution of scholarship. I realised the thread uniting these two books was an interest in how scholarship can be reassembled, at individual and collective levels, in order to better meet the challenge of abundance. If there’s more literature (grey and formal), more conversations, more networks, more information* then some some kind of reconfiguration and reorientation is necessary because our established practices have assumptions about our working conditions sedimented into them, which lose their purchase once those conditions change. I was interested in social media and generative AI as vectors of change, as well as the practical challenges and opportunities entailed by this for scholarship.
It was all very energising. Hence on a meandering tour of the south-west deciding that I was going to write another book. My idea was that I wanted to write a third volume Digital Scholarship for Academics, which would turn the first two into a trilogy. It would draw out the broader analysis they shared, with a similarly practical focus to the first two, but with a wider remit to encompass scholarship as a whole without the specific focus on the categories of software which defined the first two books. It would be my response to C Wright Mills’s On Intellectual Craftsmanship and be the point at which I left behind digital scholarship as a topic, in order to go and focus on something else**.
It felt like I had stumbled across the next thing which would preoccupy me at just the right moment. Almost exactly a year after I started writing Generative AI for Academics, completing 60k words over the summer, before spending the subsequent months polishing it off, I had found my next summer project. Would this be how I wrote from this point onwards? Binge write a book over the summer months, spend autumn and winter finishing it off then find the next topic in spring before completing the cycle again. Even if I have reservations about the notion of being ‘prolific’, there’s clearly something in me drawn to the idea this is a positive thing to be, leaving me clutching at a sustainable routine which would seem to facilitate it.
So I tried the exact same approach as Generative AI for Academics. I setup a new Ulysses folder, set a target and prepared to focus on getting as much writing done as possible before I disciplined the process in autumn, with a view to turning it into an actual book. I talked through the project with Claude, worked out a chapter structure and started inventorying the topics which would fit in each chapter.
Not only have I not written any of the book since then, I’ve not wanted to write anything else either. The feeling of mounting energy earlier this month has given way to a vague intellectual ennui in which nothing is really catching my attention, leaving me wanting to get through my day job as effectively as I can while spending my free time doing things as far away from this as possible.
Obviously I’m tired, if not slightly burn out, at the end of a long year. But what’s interesting to me is how imposing a shape on this project too quickly seems to have precipitated that feeling of mild burn out. It’s like I’ve squeezed out the jouissance of writing by preemptively imposing an imaginary structure on it, fixating on a possible object (Digital Scholarship for Academics) seemingly at odds with what the drives were circling around. In part it might be the notion of ‘a trilogy’, turning the book into something which completes my other two books, rather than an entity emerging in its own right. I’m not sure exactly what’s happened but I do know I’ve dropped the idea for now.
Let ideas emerge with time, assuming a shape through doing, rather than seizing upon the first shape which occurs to you and trying to force yourself to adapt to it.
*Disentangling the ontology and epistemology of abundance, what is a matter of more existing items as opposed to more knowledge of and access to those items, was the theoretical question which drew me into this topic. Part of the reason I struggled to make progress with the paper was that I couldn’t work out how to make sense of this as a conceptual rather than empirical question.
**One thing I was hoping this series would resolve was my inner tension as someone who is fundamentally a hedgehog but who acts like a fox. I clearly “relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which [I] understand, think and feel” (a psychoanalytically inclined version of Margaret Archer’s account of reflexivity) yet I “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory”. Unfortunately the ‘something else’ is such a multitude it feels the problem is getting worse rather than better 🤔
Mark Carrigan 