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Thursday 30 January 2014

My latest book haul from the UL

History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet
Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680-1820
Critical Thinking: An Exploration of Theory and Practice
Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena

Tuesday 28 January 2014

Great informative video on LinkedIn by the Cambridge Judge Business School

Who better to give you the run down on how to use professional networking tools like LinkedIn than librarians at a business school? I watched this video and brought my LinkedIn profile up from "beginner" to "expert" level in one evening! Meg and Andy explain why LinkedIn is a good tool and how to make the most of it. I highly recommend watching it, especially if you feel a bit flummoxed by LinkedIn.


(I'm well aware this sounds like a paid advertisement - it is not. I just love sharing informative resources! Because I'm weird.)

Friday 24 January 2014

The Terrible Inevitability of the Past

Robert Quilter Gilson was at King Edward's School, Birmingham with J.R.R. Tolkien, part of his close-knit group of friends who called themselves the T.C.B.S. While Tolkien went to Oxford, Gilson went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1912 to read classics. When Britain entered The Great War in 1914, Gilson entered the Cambridge University Officer's Training Corps, and was shipped out to France with the Cambridgeshires in 1915. A reluctant but beloved officer, Gilson was also a prolific letter writer, to his school friends, his family and his sweetheart, Estelle King, and wrote nearly daily from the trenches. Gilson was killed by a shell while leading his men over the top on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1st July, 1916. Friend and fellow officer Andrew Wright wrote to Gilson's father, "It was the final but not the first triumph over his sensitive nature - He alone is brave who goes to face everything with a full knowledge of [his own] cowardice." (Excerpted in Garth, Tolkien and the Great War.)

R.Q. Gilson (left) with J.R.R. Tolkien in 1910 or 1911 (image from www.johngarth.co.uk)
I've been researching Gilson for an exhibition I'm helping to prepare on Trinity and members of Trinity in WWI. I wanted to find someone to focus on who wrote letters from the trenches and could speak, not to a spirit of the age, but for himself, and found Gilson in the pages of John Garth's excellent biography Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth. I've been looking through Trinity's archives and other records for mentions of him and have found relatively little, but have had a few nice surprises, for example a drawing he did of the cloisters beneath the Wren Library appeared in Trinity Magazine in 1914 in a section called "Artwork by Undergraduates". The past few days I have been doing this kind of work; chasing leads and scouring records, feeling more like a historian than a librarian for the time being.

Today, as part of my research, I looked Gilson up in the college Admissions Book, mostly to find the name of his tutor, as I already had a fair amount of information about him from other sources. After silently cursing my predecessors for not having students fill in their details alphabetically by surname as I do at the beginning of each Michaelmas Term, I found his entry and was surprised by the emotion I felt on seeing Gilson's details in his own handwriting, his curling script leaning slightly to the left in that upright early 20th century hand. It was as if after the time spent chasing after scraps of evidence of his existence, I turned a corner to meet him face to face. I thought about all the young men and women who I see signing the latest incarnation of the Admissions Book each year and imagined Gilson (I admit, I call him Rob in my head) in the same situation, brimming with possibility and purpose, but in this case I know what lays in store for him, unguessed by any of his peers. He has four years left after writing his details in the regimented columns of this book.

Four years.

Most of what I know of him comes from John Garth's biography of Tolkien, but I have the impression of a generous friend, a kind, caring, eloquent young man with a talent for drawing and painting. He got so little chance to leave his mark, but he left one just the same. I've reached 1914 in the Cambridge Review searching for Rob's name, and behind the articles about donations of books for the Field Hospital in Nevile's Court, Trinity, a Royal visit to the Leys School and sudden anti-German sentiments there are the statistics, the falling undergraduate numbers and the growing lists of names. And each of those names was another Rob Gilson - perhaps not as eloquent or artistic, perhaps not so fiercely beloved - but a young man full of potential.

Lieutenant R.Q. Gilson of the 11th Battalion Suffolk Regiment (known as "the Cambridgeshires" - image from http://www.curme.co.uk/p.htm)
I do not want to argue that World War I was good or bad, or that nationalism is foolish. My own pacifist feelings are, after all, a legacy that this war, the Great War, gave to the modern world. It's as irresponsible to judge people in 1914 for going proudly to war as it is to judge people predating the germ theory of disease for not washing their hands. I have little patience for people who indulge in this kind of retrospective superiority. But I do mourn what these men might have been. I want people who see our exhibition to know of someone like Rob Gilson, to see the awful gap he left in the world when he died in a field near Albert, France in July, 1916.

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, forward to The Lord of the Rings
If you want to read more about him, an article excerpting Rob Gilson's letters was written by John Garth and published in Tolkien Studies.

Saturday 18 January 2014

Book notes #2 - Vision

Andy: Do you have a vision for your book?
Me: ...Yes? As in do I know what I want it to be?
A: Not what you want the content to be, but what you want it to accomplish.
M: Yes.
A: Have you written it down?
M: No.
A: You should write it down.

Andy got this piece of advice from a book he's reading on software start-ups and entrepreneurship. The point of writing a vision down is that the particulars may change as you develop  your company, write your book, change your professional development plan etc., but if you have a consistent vision to refer back to, you will always be progressing in the same direction. The same is true, of course, with strategic planning within existing organisations. While you're slogging it out with the details, getting frustrated, getting sidetracked, you always have the vision to refer back to.

This will probably also help those of you that actually read my previous post figure out what the heck I was on about, and potentially provide me with a useful way to succinctly answer the question I keep getting: "Oh, you're writing a book? What's it about?" This has up until now been followed by a resigned sigh from me as I prepare to launch into a rambling explanation beginning with, "Well, it's a bit complicated to explain..." So I thought I should do this sooner rather than later.

At the most grandiose level, I suppose I want to live in a world where everyone capable of making decisions (especially through voting but also in general) is armed with the tools of critical analysis and information literacy in order to make informed and ethical decisions. I also want readers of my book to question the compartmentalisation of disciplines and not be afraid to make inquiries in unfamiliar territory, transferring the skills and knowledge they have to new contexts. In doing this, readers will challenge the idea that learning takes place only in academic spheres and instead feel empowered to explore and learn independently, and to ask good questions of experts such as teachers, journalists, writers and politicians.

At a more practical level, it should give readers of many different learning styles a primer for understanding how knowledge is constructed in many different disciplines and how it is used in many different formats, so that an artist can pick up a neuroscience article in a newspaper and can understand whether the conclusions are valid, and a mechanic can listen to a political speech and know whether there is an attempt at manipulation, just as two random examples.

The audience I have in mind is explicitly not an academic audience, though it could benefit people in academia. I haven't decided if I want to write it specifically for pre-teen students or keep adults in mind as well, but I think that's a challenge I can face later. The main thing is that I want it to be engaging, visually interesting (part text book, part infographics, part graphic novel), full of activities and humour as well as really challenging and surprising.

On a personal level, I just want to try to write a book that makes people as excited about learning and investigating as I am. I want to inspire the kind of wonder about learning and information literacy issues that books like the classic Dorling Kindersley books and other such books inspired in me when I was a kid. I'm looking forward to the challenge, and even if it never gets off the ground I'll have had a lot of fun researching it. But some day I want to hold this book in my hands, regardless of what it looks like, and know that I made it.

I hope this makes sense. I'm sure I'll write more on this soon as I appear to be a little bit in the groove of thinking about this stuff.

Friday 17 January 2014

Book notes #1

In the autumn of last year I got an idea for a book. It's a book I want to read, but it doesn't exist, so, as many writers before me have done, I'm setting out to write it myself. I have only just begun really sitting down to think about it since my course ended at the end of December so these represent some of my first notes. I've written them out by hand and I think I might just transcribe them directly by way of backing them up somewhere other than a flimsy, eminently lose-able Moleskine notebook, in a city where Moleskines outnumber people 3 to 1. (Probably. I'm just making that up.) Feel free to skip this - it's for my own safe keeping, but together these entries may provide an interesting insight into my writing process, or a black box if the project fizzles out.

HWKWWK [my abbreviation for the working title "How We Know What We Know"] - 16/1/14

I spent the evening combing over the shelves of Waterstone's in Cambridge, looking for something useful, relevant or inspiring in some way to my endeavor, but found very little. In some ways this is comforting - apparently there is a niche, and given the prominence and recent proliferation of books on infographics, I think my book will look appealing to fans of that trend. However, I had hoped to draw inspiration from somewhere fairly directly. In the spirit of viewing nothing as a failure as long as it teaches you something, I did at least refine what my book is NOT, and the sort of sources I can safely avoid. I spent a lot of time in the popular science section, systematically disregarding books of 'facts', books about the internet, books about the brain etc. Dawkins' Magic of Reality still looks intriguing but perhaps more comparing science and mythology. One I did consider buying (and stupidly forgot to write down or take a picture of) was a collection of writings by scientists about their discoveries and claimed to be as much about the cultivation of a scientific way of thinking - insight into the scientific mind for 'outsiders'.

Overwhelmingly, however, anything that looked likely was either a compendium of scientific 'facts' designed to sell to the "Brainiac: Science Abuse" crowd with titles like Why Do Men Have Nipples? and taglines like "What your science teacher DIDN'T tell you!" The aforementioned books on infographics have a similar feel: dense with very visual information but with little to link them. It's like reading a novel abridged and posted on Twitter. Are you learning something? Sure. But is it deep learning you can transfer to other contexts? That is doubtful. In some ways, not only is this what my book is not, it's what my book sets out to remedy; the shallow, passive acceptance of facts presented in uncomplicated ways, which authors assume is okay because it's for the 'uninitiated'. Though I suppose it's likely to end up shelved here (or with philosophy?), my book should give people the tools to question this, social science books, news, political arguments, art criticism etc. Emma used the colourful phrase 'crap detector', which is partly true, but it is also about breaking down the idea/assumption that if you aren't part of the discipline you can't deconstruct an argument.

Emma helped me clarify what I mean by this. She said it's about allowing/enabling people to deconstruct an argument by a scientist, for example, on their own terms. As in, it isn't about a mathematician reading a social science paper and saying, 'Well, that was a logical leap and therefore invalid.' Rather it's saying these are the conventions and criteria for validity that this discipline has established. Does it meet those criteria? Y/N Where does the argument break down? Tied to this are the epistemological questions: are there really 'facts'? If so, why do 'facts' change over time? What is knowledge? What can we know? But there's also the practical element of giving people a key to the maps of different disciplines and conventions, such as academic writing, journalism, infographics etc.

This feels like an absolutely monumental undertaking and it is ambitious in the extreme, but it isn't intended to be a definitive work on any of the topics; I intend to provide a lot of suggestions for further reading. However, it should be a useful and engaging starting point. My own starting point may be with something like intellectual histories of disciplines - historiography, history of philosophy, history of science, history of criticism, etc. - as well as books on conventions for journalism, academia etc. and books on rhetorical techniques. I want to break down the imaginary barriers between disciplines and make readers feel empowered to investigate and question ANYTHING.
...
[Written later:] Rather than 'peering behind the curtain' [of other disciplines], [the book is about] arguing that the curtain is a false construct and the only barriers to understanding linguistic and conventional assumptions perpetuated to protect specialist knowledge. This is not to say experts are useless or don't exist. On the contrary, [I believe that] they should have the confidence in their own expertise to both allow their work to be questioned and to be able to explain it clearly to individuals who are not aware of the assumptions made in that discipline [e.g. 'outsiders'].
...
[In a list of areas to research:]
- History of epistemology: shows us that what we consider knowable ([within our] paradigm) shapes not only what is 'known' in disciplines but the very idea of disciplines and their relationships to each other [(their layout)]. Removing the assumptions that place FACTS at the centre of knowledge and disciplines at odds with one another allows one the freedom to investigate first principles and underlying assumptions within any framework. However, it's a 'threshold concept' and therefore very difficult to come to terms with, rather like identifying and subsequently questioning privilege. One could say that the current dominant epistemological paradigm privileges expertise and facts over trans-literacies, experiential learning etc. People working w/in that paradigm, e.g. academics, need to question that privilege.
...
"How we know what we know" : The mechanisms through which knowledge is created, both within the current paradigms and how those paradigms came to be.

Thursday 2 January 2014

Time management: Pay yourself first

A pie chart showing various activities and the time spent on each
Where does the time go? Image by cmcbrown on Flickr


The title of this post comes from my High School Economics teacher, Mr. Shannon. From his list of what I'm sure were very astute financial tips, most of which are long-forgotten, this one has always stuck in my mind most firmly. I found myself thinking about it while considering how I'm going to balance my time over the coming year between work, roller derby, my personal life and working on career development and my book.

The idea behind "Pay yourself first" is this: as you earn money, no matter how small the amount, always put something aside into a savings account before spending it on the month to month costs, a new outfit or whatever (I've not been brilliant at doing this lately, but that is beside the point).

Time management is all about priorities. Of course some priorities are non-negotiable. I will always need to turn up to my full-time job, and I will always need to get exercise. However, it is the negotiable, unstructured time that needs to be carefully managed, particularly if you have some kind of non-work project, skill, etc. that you want to make progress with. It is extremely easy to lose hours to surfing the internet, watching TV, browsing in a bookshop etc. All of that is fine, even necessary sometimes, but it can be the enemy of anything you want to do outside the normal spheres of work, home, friends and clubs/sports/organisations.

That's why I think it's a good idea to "Pay yourself first" - make regularly scheduled time for those other projects like professional development reading, writing your book, perfecting your cooking, practicing piano, or whatever it is you want to make progress with in your own time - and STICK WITH IT. Treat that time as non-negotiable. You may feel like you're missing out on time with friends, or TV you want to watch (seriously, just binge watch it when it comes out on DVD, guys), or whatever, but you picked your priorities so you only have yourself to blame.

My partner suggested that we have a "professional development hour" once a week where we read or write something tangentially job-related and then discuss it with each other. I'm hoping we actually do this because it means that is time during which I can't do anything else but make progress on my own things and I'll have the chance to reflect by talking to my very smart and sympathetic partner about it. Hopefully I'll be better at that than the financial version.