It’s been a difficult month or two. I’ve had a lot of health things go wrong and that has been both stressful in terms of worrying about not being able to work (no sick leave for contractors) and dealing with the most pain I’ve ever had. But here we are again. More notes, more chat about where things are right now. Let’s kick off.
Work work
I’m working on something interesting at the moment that we’re about to start development work on. How do you classify emails for the future? How do you deal with massive unsorted piles of data that need to be sorted. There’s a lot of the implementation of that that I’m going to talk about as the project goes along, but for the moment, I’d like to say how interesting I’ve found this. Archives are full of power. That power is often tempered often by how hard they can be to find and use. The internet is making some massive changes to our proximity to large amounts of data. Imagining a civil service with a digitally supported institutional memory requires a lot of consequence scanning. I’m going to put together a proper reading list and ideas blog on this soon.
Academic work
I resubmitted my PRS upgrade document this week. It’s 17.5k words and I think it is a lot better than it was earlier in the summer. I am really bricking it though, I am worried about failing at this hurdle and that being the end of it all. One of the things I am finding is how hard it is to adjust your work to the imagined audience of your examiners while simultaneously making it legible to the average reader. And I want to put the majority of this essay up on the DPhil site so that people I’m researching can honestly see what I’m proposing and where I’m coming from. But I have to pass first. And I am waiting on that, with every email giving me the fear.
Community
I’m out of the loop and I’m tired. I’ve been ill. I’ve been largely off the booze for two months (had a maximum of two pints). I’m getting ill with something else painful at the moment. I can’t come to your evening event. Your whole day conference fills me with dread of having to hide pain while sitting in an audience. It keeps making me feel like crap that I can’t get involved with stuff at the moment and that the spaces that there are online are FOI policed, so you can’t actually talk about good stuff in case the Mail finds out.
The disconnect between how bad the state of things is right now and the continued “this is fine”ism.
Just that.
Dog
