Month: August 2018

Big projects

  By

You can tell I’m thinking about this one a lot, both because I’m still not talking about Zotero, and because it’s been two weeks since my last post.

(On that note, I’m going to go for a post every other week here for a while, both because I’ve got some other projects I’m working on in bits, and because I have a shorter list of things to cover here easily.)

Research tools: an astronomical device opens up like a pocket watch with many tools

I think a lot about the interaction of productivity and research, and how we structure projects, especially big long-term ones that don’t have visible end points for ages.

I’m working on one of those at work (our catalogue upgrade). We’re nearly done with one stage of it (I have to write a lot of documentation next week!) But after we take it public, we’ll have other things to work on, which will take a year or more to finish.

And this new research project is another. I have ideas about how to go about it, but I also have a lot of ‘I can try that, and if it doesn’t work, here are five other ideas’. Because for it to work for me, I need to have something that’s sustainable in my current schedule. Being able to do something once isn’t the same as being able to do it across a lot of different kinds of content.

That’s very different compared to some of the other things I do, where I might spend an hour or two answering a reference question, but then I’m done and move onto something else. Or write a blog post, then I’m done with that one. Or even a longer writing project, because 60,000 words is a couple of months work for me, not years. (I’m pretty regularly averaging over 30K a month, right now. )

Breaking down a big project

The classic advice is, of course, that when you have a really big project, you break it down into smaller pieces that are more manageable.

This is not bad advice, but it presumes that you have the skills to break down a big thing into smaller things (not everyone does!) and it also assumes some degree of knowledge about what the pieces are (which may be utterly mysterious or overwhelming when you have a big idea.)

Sometimes I’ve gotten around the boulders in this one by focusing on what I need to do first, to get started. Often once I’ve done one or two things, how to break things down further gets more obvious.

For our big catalogue project, I broke it down into specific things we needed before we could launch it. As we worked through training in the new system, we have kept adding to the list (as we learn more about what’s possible.)

In this big research project, one step is clearly “Figure out some starting sources” whether that’s for modern material about plants or stones, or whether it’s about looking at historical sources. I’m working my way through looking at lists, bookmarking sources or information about sources, and generally gathering a dozen or so places to start.

Preparation time

One thing I think people don’t talk enough about is the time it takes for you to get set up to do a thing. Some kinds of work, you can just sit down and do them, without needing lots of references or things set up a certain way. Other tasks take time to set up.

Take the catalogue editing at work. Right now I’m doing transferring a set of informational notes. That requires a search of the existing cross-reference information, and a second window (in a second browser, so I don’t upset the first search) to add the revised items into. At work, I have a dual screen setup (so amazing for productivity!) and setting up all those searches does take a few minutes. So it’s not something I start if I only have five or ten minutes.

In my personal research projects, taking out the books, opening the files, and getting things set up can take me a few minutes (I don’t have a lot of book storage near my computer, or this might be easier.) So, figuring out when I have enough time to work on that (and put things away) sometimes means it’s not the right project for a particular bit of time.

Batching time

Some things work better when you get into a rhythm of doing them, and you can do a bunch of similar tasks in a row. For example, I find it easier to make graphics for blog posts several at a time, if I know what I want. I already have the application open, I can duplicate things quickly, and save them. It’s much faster than doing that several different times.

I can do the same thing with some kinds of writing. Some things flow naturally from one to the other. When I was job hunting, writing cover letters for similar kinds of jobs were often much easier to batch. I was thinking about highlighting similar skills or answering specific questions common to one kind of library job and less relevant to others. (For example, skills working with the public are different than technical skills.)

The question of energy and focus

One of the biggest things for me is that I can handle different kinds of projects at different times. I have a horrible time doing in depth editing of writing after work (when I’ve already had a full day) so I need to make sure to block off time for that on weekends (or vacations). On the other hand, if I start early enough in the evening, I can easily put out 1500 or 2000 words between getting home from work and bedtime. Often, I can manage to do that and also do another task that takes some focus, but not a lot, like getting my next newsletter set up, or notes out from the most recent witchy class, or whatever else I’m working on.

I don’t quite know where that’s going to be for the big new project yet. My guess is that I’ll break it down so that some parts (looking at sources and setting up notes) will be a thing I do after work, but that I’ll need more focus for other parts of the writing, the synthesis.

Time for things to cook

I’m a big believer in there being time for things to cook or gel in my head. That means I often start thinking about a thing days or even weeks before I do substantial work on it. (This is working really well with my current fiction project, where I’m thinking ahead to the next piece while writing the current one. Then I finish the current one, do a quick outline for the next one, and think ahead to the one after that.) It means that a lot of my writing time is just about getting words down, which is often much faster with all that preparation.

None of these ideas is novel or unique, but I hope laying out some examples gives some ideas on how to apply a different approach to a big project you may be a bit stuck on.

Mechanics of a project

  By

My new project seems an excellent time to walk through a way to think about a large long-term research project (it’s always nice to have a handy example!)

Tea ball with a mix of herbs and dried flowers, cracked slightly open.

Step one: What am I trying to do here?

I described a lot of this in my previous post, but I want to turn out articles that take on the core theories behind what a given plant was used for, and provide more information about them, in a way that allows people to figure out where the information comes from.

(As I said, there’s nothing wrong with intuitive response – but it helps a lot to know what’s underlying it. A lot of our intuition is built on our experiences and the connections we’ve made between our experiences, so knowing what’s influencing that is pretty helpful.)

It’s also really helpful to know where a particular idea comes from if you need to make an adjustment. For example, if you need to substitute a herb you’d use for a spell (you can’t get it, or you’re allergic to it, or some other reason), wouldn’t you rather have a detailed idea of what people think about the alternatives? Too often, people put a whole lot of things together, while forgetting that ‘herb that does passionate lust’ is possibly a different flavour (magically speaking, and possibly also physically) from one that is known for helping build a long-lasting committed relationship.

Why do I want to know about the source?

I don’t believe that older sources are better. A quick look at medical history suggests why learning things is so powerful and important! But I do think knowing where our ideas and information comes from is very helpful, in figuring out what it means to us.

I want to look at the sources to figure out where they came from, and to begin to understand the other associations. One common one from the Middle Ages is the question of why certain figures (Mary is a common one here) are so commonly shown in certain colours.

In Mary’s case, it’s a particular shade of blue. She’s painted in that shade, because it was an incredibly rare and expensive colour to make at the time. So the same way you might put gold leaf on the most important pieces of art, you painted that shade of blue to demonstrate how something in the picture was important or central or most honoured.

In this day of other options for colours, maybe that reason for choosing blue is less relevant than the fact that we know psychologically it is calming, or that it echoes water, or some other reason. (Probably, given colour symbology, multiple different reasons.)

Step two: What do I need?

I need some sources. My idea, to start with, is to pick a number of well-known plants and culinary herbs, things that are widely used and pretty widely documented. (There are whole books devoted to roses, for example!)

And then check out those items in a selection of well-known sources.

This means I need to collect those sources, which will fall roughly into three groups:

Early sources

By which I mean mostly Classical sources – Greeks, Romans, and maybe some Medieval and Renaissance texts. These are things that largely predate our understanding of modern medicinal uses. (In other words, some of their medicinal uses worked, but they might have the wrong idea about why. In other cases, the suggested things and their uses are just bizzare. Want more about this? Listen to just about any episode of the podcast Sawbones…)

Early modern sources

In the 17th to 19th centuries, you start getting a more systematic review of medicinal uses – but of course, you see less discussion of magical uses. However, many of the herbals of this time included folklore and stories. A great example here is Nicholas Culpepper, whose Complete Herbal is a classic in the field. This exists as an ebook on Project Gutenberg, which has the advantage of being searchable.

Modern sources

There are of course dozens, hundreds, of modern resources out there about these topics, from a variety of different perspectives (medicinal herbalism, magical herbalism, religious and magical sources, folklore collections, and many many more.) Making sense of them is baffling.

Obviously, I’m not going to read every modern source – my time, my library, my available ability to hold things in my head won’t allow it. But I can look at a few of the most widely referenced ones, and look at what they talk about, and try and track down stories. For example, Scott Cunningham’s Complete Book of Magical Herbs doesn’t have citations, but I can use it to help me look at stories to trace backwards. I won’t be able to figure out sources for all of them, but I can do some.

Step three: Make a plan

Identify some widely referenced sources, and see what a handful say about each plant, and then follow stories from there. For example, Culpepper, talking about saffron, says: “It is an herb of the Sun, and under the Lion, and therefore you need not demand a reason why it strengthens the heart so exceedingly.” From there, one can follow some notes about where it comes from, how one recognises a plant suitable for use, and so on.

I full expect that sometimes later research will turn up new information or new sources to explore. But one of the things I want to do with this project is model how a long-term project can go, how there often is a spiralling pattern to the work, where you come back to things over time as you’ve learned more or have a new way to connect them.

Mixed with the plants and stones, I also want to highlight useful books, or at least books that are relevant to the project, putting them into context of why they were writtten, what kinds of information they’re interesting and useful for. High on my list is Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette which is a fabulous look at stories and information about colour.

Challenges of research

Wrapping up this post, I want to talk about a few challenges of research.

The biggest one, I suspect, is going to be variations in names. In books written before we had species names for plants, they can get referred to in a wide range of ways. Sometimes the names are consistent through the centuries, but often they’re not. I’ll have to do some digging and hunting to figure out what the references might be in many cases.

The other big challenge I’ve discussed above: so many sources, so little time. The only way to do this is to do things in a manageable chunk, and remind myself (and everyone reading) that I can and will come back.