How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan

Elements of article planning: beginning stages

 

I’m newly collaborating with a colleague and it’s made me hyper aware of my own system of article writing. We all have quirky shortcuts, and writing is ALWAYS a case of “you do you” (and I do mean that in the nicest way possible: you really should follow the thing that works for you as a writer!). But I also love hearing how other people approach things, so thought I might usefully share my own standard ramp-up.

First, of course, is the good idea or the new data point. Something important enough to be written up, something bright and shiny, something interesting enough to pause a colleague in the hallway and talk about it. (Brainstorming ideas is a separate process, and not the subject of today’s post.)

And then, it’s time to do something with it, and that’s where we begin.

WHERE TO TARGET:

First, I figure out where I might like to write about it. I am a bonafide nerd; I keep a spreadsheet of possible venues, categorized by area. Oooo, this is medieval. No, it’s musicological. Gee, I should write for the regional history crowd. This one is definitely monastic. Whatever it is, there’s an outlet for that. (Fun fact, I also scrutinize my own article bibliographies for venues that might be a possible future locale where my words might reside. Where do my so-interesting colleagues publish? Write that place down!)

So, I generally try to envision two or three different journals where this future “thing” might go. That will be shaped by style, by content, by my current proclivity for footnotes, and by the capacity to write mere words, or to include images/tables/figures, depending on my mood and on the nature of the bright idea.

I then sit with recent issues of each, getting a sense for what the current editor/editorial team seems to like. From that, I usually find a clear target, the place I want to publish this bright shiny thing. First task in writing is always to know your audience. Done!

HOW TO START:

Starting the writing is hard, I know. So, shortcuts help. I use that “sit with the journal” time to get a sense of the shape of articles from that journal. 

• How many intro paragraphs?
• Does the article use sub-headers or continuous narrative?
• How much space devoted to the author’s method and how detailed does it get?
• How many “big sections” are typically in the main body?
• How many images / tables / figures are there?
• What kind of conclusion does it use, and how “big picture” does it get?
• What’s the total word count for each article?
• How many sources are cited? Is this one of those tour-de-force places demonstrating complete bibliographic control, or is it more “here are a bunch of related books”? I have sometimes switched target journal based on those practices. Ahem.

I make a little table from 3 to 5 of the recent articles, and I also use that time to capture the citation conventions (and translation habits) that are typical. Yes, I know that most journals have a style guide for authors, but I am here to tell you that they are … uneven … in their level of detail.

Why do all that work on topics unrelated to my bright shiny thing? Because these become your formulaic guide to how to approach your own writing.

BUILDING THE (BROAD, VERY BROAD) OUTLINE

For me, the next step is building my own article’s broad outline – capture the content in 5 to 7 big strokes, and distribute the number of paragraphs according to the shape you want it to have. Is there a climax to the article? A place where that treasured story needs to go?

Here’s where math comes in. My standard default article length is around 35 paragraphs, though my most recent article was actually 52 paragraphs after revisions, so, yeah. Choose a number somewhere between 30 and 60 paragraphs – those tables you built will help.

Of those 35 paragraphs, I figure I’ll spend about 3 paragraphs for the intro and 3 to 5 for the conclusion. Method might fall in intro or in main body, depending on my thinking and on the habits of the journal. We’re in the humanities; there is no one journalistic formula.

Then 25 to 28 “main body” paragraphs gives me space for about three categories of supporting data.  What are they? I try to come up with provisional sub-headers, since that will shape content disposition.

As a frame of reference, that collaborative article that got me thinking about this? We have 6 “content points” identified, one of which has 4 subtopics. We’ll do more extensive outlining next week, but I already feel good about where this is going.

This is also a good moment to just free associate. Do I already know of subtopics? Are there authors I should cite? Can I bullet point any of this? Whatever you have an answer to, and this is important, WRITE IT DOWN. At this point, my “progress” might look like a bullet-point list, or a mind map, or a scrawled flowchart, or several pages of word-doodles in my notebook. But it’s a first-round “capture” of what I think I might be doing.

BUILDING THE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Then comes my favorite part: building out my reading list. I do love to go trolling through the literature. I want one of those, and one of those, and three of those… My habit is to have bibliography in at least two and maybe three areas.

One is the content area, obviously, and that often includes going through my old bibliographic lists. Is this a case of “go deep” on the monastic element? The musical one? The “cool thinking about contemporary topics using the past as a case study”? The list of citations will vary depending on the answer to that question.

But the part that’s the most fun is the “how could I approach this topic” reading. There’s a whole set of topic-adjacent literature to draw on, some from people whose work I know, and others who are new to me. That’s the real permissive joy of scholarship: the adding something new to one’s own perspective.

What that looks like for me is usually thinking about one of two things: methods that match, but content that differs, or content that’s similar but spaces or times that are different. For the former, it’s reading about community music – a scholarship largely focused on 20th/21st century musicking experiences – and then applying it to 15th century Vorarlberg. For the latter, it’s reading about chaplains in England and Bavaria in order to write about chaplains in Bregenz. (Austrian-focused chaplain lit would already be in my own content area.)

This “breadth” gives me a focus for reading. My lists of “new lit” typically run from 30 to 90 items for an article, though the handbook article I wrote recently wound up at 125 items or so. (Yikes!) 

I would like to take this moment to thank the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office without whom life would be much much much more complicated. You make what we do possible.

Not all of these articles and book chapters are going to be in the bibliography, obviously, but it gives me a chance to poke at the shape of the field. I’ll cruise through them at the rate of about 10 articles a week. Some just get the “AIC treatment” – Abstract, Introduction, Conclusion, and a bit of “what is this doing” by flipping through the middle sections of the article. Others I read fully. Still others get extensive notes and make it into my everything notebook. But all of them bring me joy. (Except that one. That one was terrible. That gives me an excuse to grump about the state of scholarship. Grump grump grump. Which brings me a bit of joy. Plus, I now get to DELIBERATELY omit it from my bibliography.)

Once I’m into reading, I’m into writing. And with an outline in hand and a bunch of notes from my reading, I’m no longer facing the proverbial “scary blank page” that causes me angst. (Note: if you came here hoping for actual writing strategies, you might look at my discussions of  strategies to avoid writer's block or strategies to organize writing tasks so you'll actually do them.)

And that, friends, is how I get started with an article. Figure out the “where,” and how it does its business; map out a high-level overview of this current project, and generate the bibliography to support that work. Then it's time to go play with your material and do more formal writing. GOOD LUCK!

My Late Lamented “Everything Notebook”

Blue Spring 2025 notebook, plus a page from a previous notebook

I’m a paper person. I think best while writing; I am an inveterate list-maker; I write up things as a bit of anticipatory joy; I take notes in pen on things to come back to for class. My life is wrapped up in bound notebooks, not just in the abundant books-for-life that I am actively reading at any given moment. (Fantasy! Gardening! Nuns! The Gaze! Space! Soundscapes! If it has words, I probably want to read it. But that’s not what this post is about.)

Because writing is so integral to life, I carry an Everything Notebook almost everywhere I go. It’s gone to meetings (so many meetings); it’s been there while I’ve read email (put a note on the list of future agenda topics); it’s been there when I needed to outline or brainstorm; it’s been there at those difficult draft stages when the ideas need to move hither and thither. It’s done poetry, and drafts of valentines notes, and organized the garden. It has made note of trail damage to report to the ranger; it has the outline of the backpacking trip I want to take. It has non-Amazon book buying websites, and great quotes for the next time I teach that writing class.

And it’s gone. Sometime last weekend, the winter Everything Notebook escaped for freedom. It’s not in the scout bag, it’s not at the bottom of the car, it’s not at Lost and Found, it’s nowhere to be found.

The good news is, there were only about five pages of future-book related notes, and those are mostly mentally recoverable. I had just submitted project 1; I had also submitted project 2; and project 3 is up in the cloud, with part 1 out for review and part 2 in a brand new group brainstorm. There’s never been a better time to lose the Everything Notebook, because nearly all of its big sections are in the “done and done” stage, checked off with gigantic check-marks cutting across the page.

I can reconstruct most of it; there’s probably about three hours of focused work that I need to do to feel fully “back in control.” My list of Amazon substitutes will be out there in social media; the to-do list for the garden I can reconstruct in the car as we drive up north at the end of the week, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got notes on nearly all that I’ve read saved on the computer somewhere. I’ll be missing a couple of great quotes (“here’s that place I wanted to share this thing I once read” doesn’t go over as well as the quote I’d actually copied out, alas), and my record of what we did over the long holidays will be more memory than archive. But it’s okay.

WHAT?
So now, here I am, starting a Spring-based Everything Notebook. I’ve put the blue tape on the front with its label. I’ve foliated the thing (that is, put numbers on each leaf, or folio, rather than on every page – so each opening has a number). I have left my space for a table of contents.

But I thought you, dear reader, might like to know about the concept of the Everything Notebook.

I know a lot of people invest heavily in theirs, with nice almost-like-cardstock pages. I get mine from as bound books (wide ruled!) from the dollar store. It’s going on canoe trips in my backpack, so cheap cardboard covers and a capacity to take notes are my priority. But no spiral binding; spiral binding gets squashed and catches on things. A plain old bound composition book, one that doesn’t create a hurdle to writing in it. (I once carefully inscribed the title page of a notebook. That notebook was too nice for real use and it languished. Now, I just put a title and my contact information. My current notebook has a pre-torn spot on the cover and came pre-installed with a coffee stain when the cat bumped my arm one morning – it’s messy and disposable enough to USE, not to CHERISH.)

My brand new slightly soiled and torn Everything Notebook – plus a page out of one from last year

And treatment of the Everything Notebook differs from one person to the next. Some people are crafty and elegant. Their handwritten notebooks are works of art, with beautifully drawn flowcharts and multi-colored pen annotations that could be reproduced in their next article. Not me. My Everything Notebook is a squawky thing, with mind-maps with words sideways and angled to draw attention to this or that relationship, and lined-off lists of tasks accomplished, and giant caps to remind me to do “the thing” the next time I see that page. 

 A scholarship brainstorm with lines aslant

Some people use fountain pens and inscribe their notebooks as beautifully crafted legacies for their  progeny who may someday consult these pages of wisdom. My handwriting ranges from the tidy to the out-of-control scrawl as the car bounces up and down on carpool days. Nor do I use the fountain pens or multicolored pen shades to carefully shape what a person notices. Instead, in mine, there’s a mix of all-too-bleedable felt-tip ink with good solid ballpoint and even pencil that smears because for me, different kinds of writing implements support different kinds of thinking. This is a work space, not, for me, a pretty one. I don’t put on my glasses when I jot a note in the middle of the night, I just try not to overwrite things already noted down -- though it’s been known to happen.

Page labeled “Brahms” with some hotel scribbles, a note about Climbing safety, and prep notes for a training. Pretty? No. Functional? Yes.

SOURCE AND ORIGIN
I came to the Everything Notebook from two places. First, I used to take topical notes: one topic in one bound composition book. I’ve got three such notebooks from my early days as a monastic scholar, for instance – notes on readings, lists of convents, those kinds of things. And then I had another book on Beethoven, and one on Mozart, and piles of paper for my to-do list. Packing for the office was regularly a virtuosic act of “where did I put the things?” and not the calm collected departure that leads smoothly into the productive part of the day. Besides, I was forever leaving a notebook at the office, and needing it at home or vice versa, and writing on slips of paper to be added in later, and … well, it was a mess.

So by moving to a single bound composition notebook – large enough to fit a lot on a page, small enough to fit handily in even my smallest daypack – and ensuring that it goes everywhere with me, I’ve done away with a lot of the paper clutter. (Cue my family laughing heartily; but now my paper clutter is at the level of the article draft or PDF printout rather than at the level of little slips of paper. Trust me, it’s an improvement!). That “aha” moment was about a decade ago, after one last frustrating search for the list I’d made just the day before. I rage-wrote the list in the back of the nuns notebook. And then the lightbulb went off: what if I just put everything in one place? And the Everything Notebook was born.

The second inspiration was my 20 page to-do list. Okay, not everyone does that kind of self-organizing. But I found early on that each of my projects (and I have had a lot of projects) has about 10 things I’m trying to track. Schedule the next meeting, draft five bullet points, find the verb list and write up that Learning Outcome chart for the bureaucrats out there. Now, each project can be tracked at once in one place with my Everything Notebook in hand. My upcoming trip to China and Nepal is there alongside my class prep is adjacent to the bibliographic planning for the next article. And the list of seeds I need from the store will be there when I go to handle the recycling later today. I manage (mostly) to get it all done, because I can track it.

HOW?
To support my wild-and-crazy work/life balance, I’ve divided my book into sections. Sometimes I start at the back-end of a section and work toward the book’s front, and other topics work in the regular front to back. It seems chaotic, but it does help me navigate.

And my sections are:

• fols. 2-3: Table of Contents (grows organically as I work)
• SECTION 1: RESEARCH
• fols. 4-5: Info about conference and book deadlines, high level overview of the season’s plan
• fols. 5-20: Research on the book
• fols. 20-40: Research on other projects, either grouped or interspersed, depending on mood
• SECTION 2: CLASS PREP / TRAVEL
• fols. 50 backwards to 40: class prep stuff
• fols. 50 forward to 60: travel planning
• SECTION 3: ADMINISTRIVIA
• fols. 75 toward the front: meetings, so many meetings. And more meetings. And then some notes on meetings
• SECTION 4: PERSONAL
• fols. 75 toward the back: language learning. Right now, I’m getting ready for China. Chinese is haaaaaaard.
• Fols. 97 toward the front: to-do lists.

And, at random in the range of the 80s or so, things to do with life. Poetry. Bird lists. Recipes. Stuff.

WHY?
Why tell you all of this? On the one hand, it’s one quirky person’s way of managing All The Things. On the other hand, this is the kind of practice that can really make a difference in terms of personal productivity, because it puts “life” and “work” into the same physical space, and invites a contemplation of brussel sprouts (with honey and sriracha) alongside contemplation of the intricacies of prayer transmission in the 16th century. Because both are important. And the Everything Notebook helps me keep track of it all.

Another advantage, which I didn’t think of when I started this practice a decade ago or so, is that I do actually remember my work chronologically. Oh, that was the project I was working on when we were doing improvements down at lakeside. Pull out the 2019 notebook, and there are the bibliographic notes from that work on this-or-that. It helps me remember more than if it were limited to the thing itself. It also helps me find things on my computer, since I can put boundaries on the date search.

And third, I really do believe all the scholarship that tells us we remember what we write by hand better than what we type. Type is fast; ideas flow through the fingers onto the page. But the dramatic sad face next to the bad archival news recorded on the sheet of paper is the thing my brain actually chooses to remember. I’m a geographical filer; that’s true in note-taking space as well as in my life. I know where to look, and that’s enough to help me track down the thing I’m looking for. (Where was that great mushroom soup recipe? Oh, yeah, that was the year we did the quick departmental retreat – it was at the back of that notebook. Yum.) So for me, this kind of organization works with the ways in which my brain chooses to connect things. My coffee stains and rain-ruffled pages are my version of Proust’s madeleines – the spark that brings to life the whole complexity of thinking indulged in by my previous self.

As long as I can keep track of where I’ve put my book. Sniff. I’ll miss that winter volume, but I still carry around an image of the coffee stain on page 16 with the notes from that inter-library loan book on scribes, and the carefully checked-off “tell my sister X, Y, and Z” list from the winter holidays at the back of the book. The writing imprinted not just the page, but also my memory.

And that process of writing information into memory is exactly what the Everything Notebook is for!

Making magic with old texts – how one scholar uses Transkribus (2/16/25)

A snippet of the Thalbach Chronicle (Bregenz VLA Thalbach Hs 9) and the logo/motto from Transkribus: "Unlock the past with Transkribus"

I’m not a modern-day marvel; digital humanities *seems* cool, but it’s not my training and not my natural modality. I live on a farm, with all the attendant joys of rural internet. (Failed the ping test recently? Us too!) I have read a number of DH articles with interest, and adopted some of the intellectual practices that volume assessment allows for. But at last, the moment has come: it’s time to learn a new tool in order to make my regular work go faster.

There’s this monastic chronicle (Bregenz VLA Thalbach Hs 9), you see, and it’s unedited. That there is, in fact, data from within “my” convent is a wonderful thing, and I’m thrilled to have access. There are two big problems, however. First, it has not been digitized. And second, I don’t read (well, I didn’t read) 18th-century Kurrentschrift. So, here’s what I did.

STEP ONE: GET PHOTOS. With the permission of the archive, I was able to photograph the chronicle. My system relies on the step-basis auto-numbering of photos, and is woefully “brute force” for the more sophisticated user. It is also (I confess it now!) simply a set of photos on my cell phone. No fancy lighting, no high-tech imaging for the ages; these are functional photos for use as a musicologist, not reflecting the book-history elements (which may be interesting but are not my raison d’etre). Before I start, I prepare a written description of the object, with special note of handwriting changes, format changes (from 18 to 24 lines, for example), and so on.

To organize my photos, I start by taking a picture of the description of the MS that I prepared in advance, and of its gathering structure that I prepared on-site. Then I take pictures of the outsides of the MS and of the visually interesting bits that caught my early attention. (These pictures are for slidedecks for any talk I might give – they’re the visual capture of the “coolness” of the item.)

Then, I take a picture of the gathering description for the first gathering, prepared in pencil in the archive. For more complicated gatherings, that includes a gathering structure diagram, but it’s often just a few lines of text. That becomes my photographic “label” for the section. Then, I take sequential pictures of the pages in the gathering. Occasionally I repeat a page if I want to be sure that I captured some particular detail, but mostly I move from first page to last page in the gathering. When I’m done with the gathering, I take a picture of the wooden table as a marker. Why? Because that’s going to leap out at me when I’m looking at all these photos of handwritten pages on my phone!

Now, onto the next gathering, and the next, and the next after that. Each starts with a header photo; each is sequential; each ends with a picture of the wooden table. At the very end, I go back and take pictures of details – with a label card or paper-pad notation first telling what gathering and folio it’s from, and why I thought it important (“detail of the insertion in the right-hand margin showing a different hand”).

Lastly, I go home and back everything up into a file folder. At this point, the sophisticate would probably rename all the photos, but I let the assigned image number stand for the page. YMMV. [That’s the increasingly old-fashioned phrase “Your Mileage May Vary,” if we happen to live in different acronym worlds.]

ORGANIZING IMAGES ON MY HARD DRIVE

With a couple hundred images, managing the inventory can seem daunting, but I’ve developed some habits over the years. I’m a spreadsheet person; spreadsheets make my heart sing. I love me some useful spreadsheets. So, for each of the important manuscripts in my life, I have a translation table: Photo Image number, gathering, folio or page, content, commentary, and then columns of whatever I’m interested in (concordances or chapter number or dates or places or whatever – that’s for the assessment phase).

So with the Chronicle, I now had a mass of mostly indecipherable eighteenth-century text entries carefully organized into a folder and managed via spreadsheet. Now it was time to start reading. Except, I don’t (yet) read Kurrentschrift, so I’ve got a whole mess of gobblety-gook. Enter the wonderful world of technology! I know AI has its issues – not least of which is its ecological impact – but there are tasks for which it is exceptionally well-situated, and it turns out that teaching the novice how to read new scripts is, for me, one of those true talents.

TRANSKRIBUS

I’ve heard of Transkribus (at https://www.transkribus.org/) for years; the idea of an app that can decode various historical scripts is an attractive short-cut for handwriting styles I don’t know, particularly since my focus is the content more than its presentation. I’m an extractivist: I want to know what the chronicle actually says and add those data-points to the story I’m telling. Also, I’m not keen to prepare editions – a chronicle is a side-witness to the music for me, not a central focus of my work. Many of my decisions reflect that perspective. I didn’t seek out a colleague for collaboration, for one thing, nor go to a paleographic institute. Hooray for brute force, right?

I searched out the Transkribus website and read all the (very helpful) guides that were prepared. I even watched two of the introductory videos, though I had to go to town for them to download at playable speeds. And, they have a capacity to try a few sample pages lower down on the page (scroll down to “try it out”). I chose a representative image and uploaded it to see what it did. Magic! From the loops and lines of Kurrentschrift emerged words that were, for the most part, German dialect, and familiar in style and spellings from other texts from the area. Success! I admit that I scooped up the sample reading and dumped it into a document file; I wanted to be sure that whatever I had, I saved.

The next step of learning was a several day project. One of the best things about the Transkribus tool is that it has a lot of subsets that use certain sets of documents as training tools. These models are available to apply to your document(s), and some of them work better than others. I literally made a list of ALL of the models that covered German Kurrentschrift of the 18th century and tested them with two different pages from my chronicle. For each, I did A/B testing: was this model better than that one? I kept notes on which ones did well, and went back to a couple of the models three or four times until I settled in on the one that seemed the most accurate on a first pass. I know that I could train the model for MY project, but I wasn’t interested in that this first time through, in part because I was a complete script-reading newbie, and didn’t want to mis-train the AI.

Once I had a model in hand – and had taken careful notes on its model number and name for scholarly purposes – it was time to start the transcription project. So, I created a free account (which currently gives you 100 pages of transcription free per month), and priced out the subscription model I’d use once we’re in the new fiscal year at my University.

As I planned my project, I realized that organizing the materials is an important consideration. There are “collections” in Transkribus, and “documents” within the collections. As a reminder to the reader: I’m not aiming at edition prep; I’m working toward extracting my data. So I created a hodge-podge organization that made sense to me. Instead of a collection that was the entire chronicle – something that I believe would probably be best practice – I broke out my chronicle into its gatherings, so I can navigate to-and-fro easily.

And then, I uploaded subsections of the gatherings as documents, rather than the entire gathering at a go or (at the other end of the spectrum) the individual leaves of the chronicle. This is being created for my convenience, after all, and this first go-round I wasn’t certain how things worked. I have between 4 and 16 pages in each “document.” I did learn that the windows folder bugaboo, randomization, occasionally impacted my uploads, which is one of the reasons that I kept my “documents” short. I also decided to retain document naming based on image number; for me, my spreadsheet is the controlling document. Renaming is both time-intensive and an area in which error can enter. As a result, my documents are named such compelling things as “IMG_1421-1427.” It works for me. (On the other hand, my naming for the gatherings is a bit more obvious to the outsider: “ChronikGath3” works here, and continuously typing in “ThalbachChronikGath3” just seemed like more work than needful since I’m not contemplating doing this with other chronicles, at least not in the next three years.)

Finally, after uploading the first document in the first collection, it was time to drive. I selected my pages, hit the “Recognize” button, and was taken to the interface. I added the “public model” that I had selected through testing, then took a deep breath, and hit “recognize.” The job runs in the background, and eventually the selected pages will have header colors that turn orange, to signal that the draft text is ready to review.

USING AI TEXT RECOGNITION TO CREATE A SEAT-OF-THE-PANTS EDITION

Here’s the part where things get wonderful. The AI model I chose is actually pretty decent with my text. As a new reader of Kurrentschrift, it took me a while to get a hang of it, but I used the process to teach myself the reading skills which will be necessary to me for this document and a couple of others upcoming. (I’m a 14th-15th century scholar; our handwriting is MUCH more legible, thank you very much!) For those who are in my boat, here are a few things I did that made learning to read the script go quickly.

First, I pull the transcribed text into a document file so that it’s on my local machine. (Remember, I’m that “rural internet” guru; failure to reach the world as a whole is as regular an experience as is going grocery shopping.) Alas, I haven’t been using the export function, though it’s there; instead, I cut-and-paste. It’s a rube’s approach, I know, but it’s fast, and it puts everything in a space I can edit with my own tools and habits. (I’m on LibreOffice these days; again, YMMV. But it’s free, and it doesn’t keep trying to put everything in OneDrive. Which is out in cyberspace. And often unavailable here at the farm. I’m glaring at you, Microsoft.)

To manage these texts, I insert headers for each individual page in all caps (to stand out from the transcribed text). For my purposes, the image number and the MS gathering and folio numbers suffice – along the lines of “PHOTO 1363 CHRONICLE GATH3 p. 34”. Also, like the AI transcription, I honor the line breaks of the original, so that toggling from transcription to image and back is easy. (Also, I insert my cut-and-paste as unformatted text; others might want the line numbers, but there were enough errors in line identification that I found it easier to do without.) This was a good cross-check to that randomizing ordering that windows puts on file transfer; by checking each image against its image number and page or folio number, I was able to ensure that the order of my text was in fact the order of the chronicle (except that the chronicle gatherings are actually out of order, but that’s a fault in the manuscript, not the editor nor the technology!).

Second, I got myself a couple of tables of cursive letterforms compared to Fraktur letter forms, so that the basic shapes were something I could puzzle through. I admit that my first pass awareness-level was so low that on the first four pages I read, the only word I could decode independently was “septuagesima.” However, once I learned that those really precise looking “n’s” were actually the letter “e,” I started to see the handwriting emerge from the page.

Third, it is my practice to work through systematically, allowing “bad readings” in order to get from zero to literate. I mangled my way through the first four pages, by which time the d’ as “der” and the dß as “das” was pretty clear. I go line by line, and I’ve learned to highlight the relevant information in different highlighter as I go. (For me, yellow is people, green is liturgy, blue is date or place, red is music, sweet music.) My goal is extraction, not perfection. It’s embarrassing to note that neither the AI nor I at first recognized the swoop at the end of words as an “-n.” Likewise, it took a while before I was confident enough to simply obliterate the AI’s suggestions for my own reading of a word. That said, it’s truly a case of learn-by-doing; as I hit page 20, I was starting to read each word instead of decoding it letter by letter.

Fourth, as a matter of process, I’m comfortable leaving in uncertainties. This work isn’t directly for publication, so if I wasn’t sure of a word, I would simply accept it or type in my best guess, then put in square brackets another possible reading, and frame things with question marks. For instance: “unser lieben Erbar [? frawen?] officii” – even as a newbie reader, the word “erbar” makes no sense here, but rather than worry about it at length, I put in my contextual reading and then moved on. I can search those up and revisit them after I’ve plowed through the first time.

Finally, as I indicated before, I reward myself with the “ping” of a data finding by using those highlighter buttons liberally. As I look back now over less than a month of intermittent work, I’ve got a long roster of people and events to code into my other note-taking systems. I haven’t harvested them yet, but they’ll be easy to identify as I finish up the process. Having those rewards in sight makes the days of “ugh, I can’t DO this” more bearable. And each time I return to the document, more and more of it looks like German instead of just “ink scrawls.”

MY TAKEAWAYS: THE MAGIC OF TECHNOLOGY

The reality is, the technology is remarkably impressive. Even without training it on my manuscript, it’s getting 75 to 80% of the text down properly. (It confuses Q for G, though: Quardian is not a word. Maybe next time I’ll try training the model.) That’s amazing!

It’s working from manuscript, and that’s an imperfect environment. Every so often, particularly when the scribe’s lines have a waver to them or when the page was curved in the photo, it mangles lines and mixes up word order – the manual corrective is absolutely necessary. 

The benefit is that as a scholar, I’m a factor of ten times more competent with the script now than I was at the end of the first week. Having learned to read a cursive 16th-century hand without AI assistance, I can testify to the massive jump-start that having a plausible transcript makes, as long as I’m working systematically, letter by letter and word by word. 

It’s just like practicing. If you work on the details and the techniques, there comes that moment where all of a sudden your perspective shifts from notes on the page to the sounds of the past. And that, my friends, is magical.

ACCESS
https://www.transkribus.org/
https://www.youtube.com/@transkribus
 

Writing is momentum (12/28/24)

Newton's cradle with an arrow for the impulse of "writing"

Why write a blog? In all the busy times, with all the other things to do, why blog at all? In the few months since I’ve started there are a few things that have been motivators.

Ideas: it gives me a place to work out ideas – to take the bits and bobs of reading and remembrance and tie them up into small packages that I can come back to when the need arises.

Accountability: Writing is a kind of progress, even if it isn’t directly adding to word count that “matters” for the CV. Thinking through things on the additive basis is making progress. And to make progress on MY work while also chairing the department, handling hospice at a distance, householding, teaching, and spending time with Tom – that’s a good thing.

Writing Practice: Setting up a writing practice has been helpful modeling for setting up appropriate timeframes. Specifically, I think it’s helped me better plan the idea-generation stages of writing.The sitting and listing things IS an important part of writing, and I give myself more time for gazing absently into space now than I did before I started blogging. I'm thinking less transactionally and more effectively these days. Win!

Momentum: I just have a better sense of ongoing engagement with my own work when I’m putting my ten fingers and some coffee time into the project. I can feel the shifting shapes of the book outline moving in the background even if I’m not actively “writing chapters” yet. The ideas about sound experiences in installations in Chicago, for instance, have shifted the way I’m thinking about civic experiences of sound in the 15^th century since I’m considering how shared sounds provide points of reference – a kind of acoustical person-to-person bonding. Moving forward; that’s a plus.

Perspective: Blogging gets me to the proverbial Forty-Thousand Foot view, and I’ve enjoyed my forays into medieval deafness, earlids (or here or here), and poetry (with its follow-along on poetry and silences). I work more broadly in the blog than I do when I think, “oh, I should work on the book.” The details of medieval documents are one kind of practice; this has been a helpful space for developing a different kind of thinking.

Fun: Okay, who doesn’t enjoy putting words together to make a thing? I love making things. And these short things, these posts, they’ve been interesting to me. I share them in hopes that they’re also of interest to some of you.

So, yep, blogging is something that stays into the New Year. I am going to try to cut back on the book binges and to plus-up the Tom time. But I think I’ll keep blogging. As long as it stays fun!

 

 

Starting from a place of blah (12/11/24)

 

A "no entry" red circle over a parallelogram labeled "The Blah Zone"

When you're caught in the blah zone—the one where starting anything feels impossible, but the work just HAS to get done—it’s time for a reset.

Here are three strategies that I’ve used successfully this past week to get over the not-starting blues…

Actual anonymized excerpt from a 70 item spreadsheet from last Wednesday:

1. Spreadsheet with color, text deleted; each row labeled "Thingy 1, thingy 2" etc.

1. Make a spreadsheet.

Those of you who are spreadsheet people will get where I’m going with this: the spreadsheet itself is an accomplishment. Bonus points for prioritizing with colors. (It was a big project – still is – so the kick-off thinking was facilitated by a little fancy spreadsheet driving.)

Don’t you instantaneously feel better, seeing all that organization? I know I do!

Besides, a spreadsheet can make the next steps straightforward. Ask a question about G3. Then about G4. Then about C5. A spreadsheet can put things into an order that your blah brain just isn’t managing right at the moment. Win!

2. Boots. Put 'em on.

2. Don’t climb the mountains, put on your boots.

Seriously, who has energy for mountain climbing this time of year? (I did last year, but that was last year. This is this year. Be one with the blahs.) If the mountain (or whatever the next task is) seems insurmountable, ignore it. Focus on the next step. If I’m going to go walking, I need to put on my boots. I will now put on my boots. (Or order the interlibrary loan materials, or figure out the grocery list.)

Once the metaphorical boots are on, I’ll often get a couple of hours mileage out of things done “while I’m here.” And if not, at least I have my boots on. Little bits of progress DO add up. 

3. Work-in-progress list

3. Check back on your progress.

So, you’re just going to open the file to see how much you managed to get done this week. You don’t have to work on it. Just report-out on what got done. And while you’re there, maybe write a little summary, or a reminder of things you wanted to do. Maybe bullet point something. Just a little bit of progress.

THE TAKE-AWAY:

            Little by little, and it all gets done.

You don’t always have to have the “big task” in mind. Make progress in increments for a while and you’re still making progress.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

If you’re up against the writers-block-blues version of the blahs, perhaps this writing strategies post will help:

•     The Silence of Not-Writing – and What To Do About It
   

Caveat: this post is about the exhaustion blahs; more serious causes may need more serious attention. If you think you’ve gone beyond exhaustion into depression, please seek support. Here are two resources that can guide you to help.

• https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/depression

• https://www.helpguide.org/mental-health/depression/coping-with-depression

The Silence of Not-Writing – and What To Do About It (10/20/24)

To actively "not write" is an awful thing. Sure, my kitchen has never been cleaner, and my bathtub sparkles, but inside, I’m sinking. Each moment that the words don’t come feels like another part of me shriveling up, reduced to silence.

As this awful feeling and I have become friends over the years, I’ve developed some strategies for what some people call #WritersBlock. Perhaps one or another of these approaches will work for you. In hopes that they’re useful, I present:

STRATEGIES TO START THE WRITING PROCESS

The junk mail trick	"To whom am I talking?"	Go for a walk	Scrub the tub
The bullet point approach	Jump a section	Whiteboard it	Put in the time
Colored inks	Write to Cousin Tim	Poster paper	Move to the slide-deck version
The Pomodoro	Don't finish	The business card approach	Brown noise
Why it's not working	Don't write: dictate	Read more	Small chunky bits

 

The junk mail trick:

A big blank piece of paper is scary. Halloween haunted house levels of scary. This might help:

I used old envelopes from the junk mail pile to write my MA thesis. Turn it at an angle, and you have to write one word, then three words, then 6 words, then the full sentence....

Then after half an hour I'd type it in and it would be a paragraph or two

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The bullet point approach:

Everyone always tells me to outline first. But me? I don't know what I'm going to say until I write it.

So I don't outline; I just take 10 minutes and try to get out 20 bullet points. I'll use about 7 of them. It’s like scribbling on a napkin – low stakes, and the end product can be discarded at will.

Honestly, this often gives me 2-3 paragraphs worth of evidence and thoughts about them – and editing from something is always easier than starting from zero

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Colored inks:

I take 10 different pens -- different textures and colors. I lay them out. I set a timer for 3 minutes, choose a pen, and write a sentence with that color/texture. Then 3 minutes and another color/texture. Then 3 minutes and... my brain has taken over and I'm writing stuff so I stick with that pen for a while. But it gets me over the hurdle. And a ball point and a felt tip pen write different kinds of words, a weird but true fact (for me)

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The Pomodoro:

Sometimes the problem is trying to write too much. Trying to write a paper? Impossible. Trying to write the next paragraph? That’s at least dwelling in the realm of possibilities.

So: set a pomodoro (named after the timer): 5 minutes for planning, 25 minutes for writing on THAT ONE THING. Paragraph 2 of section 7, or whatever.

Don't worry about the whole of it, worry about the next thing to do.

Also, I sometimes do this in sets in a group setting ("writing retreat") -- we all log in and share our plan, then do 3 pomodoros with 10 minutes between. That's some sweet writing, and a celebration at the end

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Why it's not working

I take 30 minutes and list all the reasons it's not working. I don't know enough about X, I hate my topic, the fridge needs cleaning, all those thousands of reasons that the writing isn't coming together. Then I pick a fixable one and work on that for 15 minutes.

I often get farther in those 15 minutes than in the previous day, TBH

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"To whom am I talking?"

Set aside the content of your project and brainstorm the people in your world. With whom are you engaged -- whose work is driving your thinking right now, who do you hope picks up your book/article, who do you want to overwrite so that the TRUTH is seen, and so on.

Then, revisit your outline or bullet point list to see WHERE you're going to talk to them, and explain something for your favorite imagined reader in words they'd understand

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Jump a section

Okay, this part isn't ready to be written. So put in a placeholder and jump to a section that's going to go rip-roaringly fast. That part where you deconstruct someone's argument and explain it from a different perspective. The part where you're describing your data and just have to get that down on page. The part where you justify your methodology

Progress doesn't have to be linear, it just has to be progress

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Write to Cousin Tim

Sometimes it helps to spend a writing session explaining your project to an outsider. This is what I'm doing, this is why I'm doing it, this is how it's frustrating, this is how it's going to be so cool when it's done. I often draft an email to my Cousin Tim. (Sometimes I even send it – with a front-end explanation of getting over the stuck-ness. Groove on your weird, right?)

Then lift whatever sentences are ready, and turn other things into bullet points

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Don't finish

This is one from the "how to write" lit: Leave yourself mid-thought at the end of the day.

I'm terrible at this, but it's a great concept. You end your writing session with the question or thought mid-formulated, so when you sit down tomorrow it's easy to pick up the thread.

My best solution on this is to end the day with an all caps question for the next day: WHY DOES THIS DATA SUGGEST XXXX and then when I log in I just have to answer that question.

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Don't write: dictate

I do this one a TON: I do a really rough outline (half-page at most) for a chapter or a section, playing around with the order until it makes sense.

Then I pick up a voice recorder (Hello, cellphone) and I dictate the "lecture" in 5 minute chunks. Then I type it up and edit it.

I've found that larger (e.g. 45 minute) chunks are harder to work with, but in principle it's just the "talk It out" that's important here.

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Go for a walk

I'm a walker. I pose myself a problem, and go for a 2 mile walk. At the end of the first half-mile, I've usually got a paragraph. At the midpoint, I may need to pull off the trail, sit down and throw a bunch of stuff onto the paper. I almost always make at least one critically important connection or have a significant insight.

(You can combine this with dictation, but I've found that for me walking and writing are a better match for large-scale progress)

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Whiteboard it

There's something uniquely satisfying about standing at a whiteboard with colored markers making it make sense. So do that. And then keep working the details, and then the explanation for those details, until you're looking for the fine-tip marker and a spare bit of space, at which point it's probably time to capture all that writing on the computer.

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Poster-paper brain-dump

Poster paper

Get a giant piece of paper -- butcherblock paper or those poster paper things -- and tape them up in your hallway.

Use those to do a brain dump. I do associative outlining in a kind of spider-web diagrammish sort of way, but I also have random blocks of "this is in there too"

I might layer that with what have I read / what do I need to read

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The business card approach

This is the opposite of butcher paper: go small. One thought per card. I used up most of a box of old business cards on this a couple of articles ago -- each idea goes on a card, and I went as FAST as I could go. I might do 7 on a topic (go fast) and then switch to some other aspect of the content (go fast), and then... I did 3 separate sessions of making cards, and then sorted them out like a sunflower with its petals.

Then I typed it up and wrote transitions. I should do this again; I made such AMAZING progress

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Read more

This one is risky, b/c there's always more to read. But, sometimes I need a better overview of the topic than I've got activated, so I do the spreadsheet reading approach -- what's my literature? What gap was each author trying to fill? what methods did they use? What evidence do they have that I want, what findings did they make that make me feel strongly. What 3 quotes might I use from this.

I highlight what I want to be sure to cite, & write from there

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Scrub the tub

This may be everyone's favorite standby for writer’s block, but hear me out. Sometimes, following up on that urge to avoid gives you time for the ideas to gel. Scrubbing the bathtub or organizing the cabinets IS part of the writing process

But set the bargain in advance, and follow through:

Okay, I'll scrub the tub. But then I'm going to write 5 sentences. Or bullet point. Or stand at my whiteboard for 5 min

It's not a lot, but remember the adage:

Little by little, and sooner or later it all gets done

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Put in the time

Sometimes, you just have to sit with it not coming quickly. A lot of how-to-write advice is about word count, and as a counting type person that speaks to my itch.

But in reality, it's the time with the project that is making the difference. Whether it's a 10-minute session or a half-day, try to USE the time you've got as best you can. Measure important progress: I connected this idea with that one and now I need to explain that = progress

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Move to the slide-deck version

Most of us work in a slide-deck world, where our prose needs a visual accompaniment in some formats, and not in others. If your prose for the narrative version gets stuck, flip to the slide-deck and use visualization to outline the section. Is this section 4 slides or 5? What images will it use? What will you say about them? Oh wait, that’s prose. Now move it back to your narrative and adjust the text with that necessary shift of style

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Brown noise

Is your busy-beaver brain in the way of thinking about this current project? Turn on some brown noise (like white noise, but deeper, and a bit more irregular). It rumbles, and gives visceral me something to do so that prose-generating me can actually tend to task instead of checking in on that other layer of thought (I prefer brown noise to music, since when music is going I invariably wind up listening too actively to it -- bad for generating prose!)

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Small chunky bits

My last thought for today is that it's okay for writing to be in the in-betweens. I have written a paragraph standing in line at the grocery store, dictated the transition to the next section while waiting at the stoplight, run in from weeding the garden to make note of those three examples which are perfect for section 7. All of that is writing, even though it's not that "scholar sitting at the desk" approach that my advisor used. Just write. You'll get there.

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My take-away:

Writing isn’t always about grand revelations or hours of uninterrupted work. Sometimes it’s those small, in-between moments that add up. It’s the thinking that you do when you’re doing other things. (Why is it that the BEST ideas come to us in the shower? When you’re deep in the throes of a project, have a pen and pad EVERYWHERE so you capture the bits that help with the session tomorrow!)

In other words, your goal isn’t to write the whole thing, it’s to build momentum by writing the next thing. Whether you're outlining the chapter or just scribbling notes on the back of a receipt, trust that the process is working.

The words will come, and when they do, the silence will feel like a distant memory.