When the Writing Doesn't Come Easy

I spent all day yesterday trying to write a few short paragraphs about one document. It's a report from October 1946 that Oscar Janowsky gave on the progress of the JWB Survey, and it outlines some of the major questions that arose throughout the process of interviewing staff and Board members at hundreds of JCCs across the country. Several months ago I took extensive notes on the document, and so when I sat down to write yesterday I already knew the gist of the report. I decided to re-read it anyways, because it seemed important and substantial and like it was worth a second look. 

In a sense, that was the correct decision. The progress report represents a pivotal moment when Janowsky realized that the initial, guiding question of the Survey ("what is the objective of Jewish Center work?") should have been "what is Jewish about the Jewish Center?" It's the first moment when Janowsky publicly shared his inclination that the JCC should have an "affirmative" Jewish purpose and should incorporate Jewish content into his program. This ultimately was what he recommended in his final report, and so this progress report is evidence of his evolution towards that belief. 

Re-reading the document was inspiring--what a rich, multifaceted text! I felt like every word should be carefully paraphrased or quoted in my chapter because it so flawlessly articulated why the Jewish Center needed to have an explicitly Jewish purpose. Then I started writing. I wrote a few sentences and deleted them all. I re-read paragraphs of the progress report and tried once more to paraphrase the main points. I deleted all those sentences too. Again and again I attempted to convey the questions that Janowsky raised without cutting and pasting them directly into my narrative. And again and again I became confused.

I finally realized that I had been seduced by discovery. My attempts to summarize Janowsky's arguments revealed a tentativeness--anecdotes stood in for arguments and analysis. My struggle was an extension of Janowsky's own effort to synthesize all of his questions and observations. The complexity that awed me upon my first re-reading was slowly exposed to be perplexity. 

This is not a knock against the author, nor a dismissal of the document. It's a comment on the way that narrative can trick our minds. Hunting for a good story, I perceived coherence where there was inconsistency. I liked Janowsky's anecdotes, I liked the narrative he created to argue for affirmative Jewish content, and I thought that both would support my own narrative explaining this historical event. Ultimately, I used the anecdotes and argument in my own narrative--I just had to moderate my claims to reflect their intricacy and not my own awe.  

#dayofdh

Coincidentally, I am spending this year's Day of Digital Humanities at Carnegie Mellon's inaugural DH Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty. I thought I'd take this opportunity to round-up the ways that I use digital technologies on a regular basis to write my dissertation and network with other historians. I define DH as: the use of digital technologies to further research and debate on questions that help us understand what it means to be human. The following tools help me accomplish humanistic research and to then share my findings with other historians.

1. DEVONthink Pro Office

The scope of my project is only possible because of the capabilities of my database. In a single dissertation I examine three neighborhoods and three community institutions over 35 years, from the perspective of single individuals all the way up to a national organization. The amount and range of sources required to cover all of this space and time is overwhelming without a way to organize and search documents by topic, by year, by author, by archival collection, or by keyword. Even though assembling a database was a significant time commitment, I can now easily sort and find all of my documents as I write. Every time I move to a new topic I can pull up all of the documents that I tagged with related dates and keywords--for example, when I was writing about Jewish social group work yesterday I reviewed all of the documents I had previously tagged with "group work," "adjustment," and "Jewish social work." Without the database, I would be reading through pages of archival notes to identify relevant documents and then navigating through folders on my hard drive to find the corresponding PDF file. A digital database is more efficient and more effectively aids in historical discovery. 

2. Scrivener

I don't think writing on a laptop qualifies as practicing digital humanities, but I do have a digital tool that allows me to do a better job at writing history--with Scrivener I can better structure my argument than I could with Microsoft Word (practically an analog tool at this point). While others have reviewed Scrivener far better than I ever could, it's been an invaluable tool for wrangling a large, multi-chapter writing project. 

3. Google N-gram Viewer

I recently began teaching myself how to do corpus analysis, a methodology used to analyze bodies of texts in order to understand how the usage of words changes over time--in frequency and in meaning. Until I finish learning how to use some of the more sophisticated tools, I've been playing around with Google N-gram viewer. 

This line graph visually represents the frequency with which the phrase "Jewish social work" was used out of the total words published in each year between 1900 and the present. It helps me better understand when this professional subspecialty emerged (it confirmed what I saw in my sources) and in what years it was most popular. It provides a simple way to observe the rise and fall of a profession, in so far as written discussion correlates with the popularity or relevance of the occupation. 

4. Digital Archives

The bulk of my sources come from physical, paper documents that I find in the archive. I have to go and find them, searching by hand through boxes and folders. I'm never quite sure what I'm going to find. It's hard, fun work, but it's a process that's limited by time and energy. Digital archives provide a precise, easy, and convenient way to supplement these documents. With keyword or author searches, I can access digitized documents related to my dissertation. It's not perfect--I still have to go through the results and pick out what's not relevant--but it expands my source base without having to leave the house. More sources means more diversity of perspectives, and that makes for better interpretations of past events. The digital archives I most often consult are the Berman Jewish Policy Archive, the Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project, and Google Books. 

5. Blog

I blog several days per week about my dissertation and about the experience of being a doctoral candidate. I value the opportunity to share my findings and offer advice about being a novice historian. It's a delightful break from work that is independent and isolating. It provides a forum for debate and collaboration, which contributes to a more thoughtful interpretation of past events.

6. Twitter

I've used Twitter for many years, but recently I've committed to using it more regularly for professional purposes. It's the perfect venue to observe trending interests amongst historians, discover new publications, and ask and answer colleague's questions. 

In the coming year, I aspire to master two more digital tools. As I mentioned before, I want to improve my corpus analysis skills. The second methodology I want to explore is historical mapping, so I can visually represent changes in the neighborhoods I study. I look forward to blogging about the process of learning these new techniques and digital humanities tools!

Send Off Your Darlings...

Yesterday I hovered my cursor over eight paragraphs of writing, highlighted them, and clicked delete. I did it swiftly, with assuredness, and I did not whine or cry. This moment represents extraordinary growth as a writer and as an adult woman. I made a painful choice with the confidence that it would ultimately yield the optimal outcome--in this case, narrative coherence. 

In the year after graduating college, I started a writing group with some friends. We were all in our first jobs and missed the best parts of an academic life--debating, new ideas, critical reading and creative writing. We each had our own shtick--I churned out personal essays, another friend wrote feminist short stories, my roommate practiced magazine-style pieces--and our workshops were lively debates between prose minimalists and maximalists, sentimentalists and brutalists, realists and absurdists. If my first undergraduate seminar taught me how to write and my first graduate seminar taught me how to argue, it was this writing group that taught me how to edit my own work. My friend Sarah urged me to practice deleting. "Murder your darlings," she would say, and I would spend the next ten minutes defending the paragraph in question and justifying its inclusion in the essay. She was always right, and I would come around eventually. The paragraph would be cut and pasted into a new Word document and saved "just in case." They always stayed murdered.

Flashing back to the present, yesterday I realized that I had taken a major misstep in the current section of my dissertation. My first chapter argues that Jewish social workers used their professional credentials to keep Jewish Community Centers under their control (and out of the control of rabbis). In order to demonstrate what these credentials were and how Jewish social workers achieved them, I had decided to write a linear narrative that first explained the professionalization of social work, then the subspecialty of Jewish social work, and then the even more particular specialty of social work in Jewish Centers. I imagined it working like a funnel. First would come the most general, national part of the story. Then would come the close-up on Jewish welfare workers. Finally, the lens would narrow once more onto workers in one distinct kind of agency. 

Weeks passed, I wrote several pages about social work professionalization, and then I started trying to define "Jewish social work." It forced me to go back and find exactly when this moniker was first used, and in the process of searching through old charity publications from 1900-1910 it became clear that my funnel model did not work. "Social work" and "Jewish social work" arose at the same time and were mutually constitutive. To describe a linear progression from the former to the latter was to obscure the influence that Jewish charity work had on the field as a whole. The other problem was that my chapter was supposed to focus on Jewish social workers, but I had diluted that focus by turning my attention to the Protestant evangelical "ladies bountiful" and  scientific charity workers and psychiatrists who were also trying to achieve professional credentials. It turned out that I had mistaken a pyramid for a funnel. I did not actually have a tool for narrowing down something larger. I had a clunky pyramid that put the lowest common denominator at eye level and strained your neck when you tried to peer up at the nuances. 

So, I did what I had to do to fix it. I muttered a blue streak that any sailor would be proud of, took a deep breath, and cut out the eight paragraphs of digression. I moved them into a new document and will use them later for an article I want to write on the topic of social work professionalization. Now I am starting to re-write this history using a sailboat as my model--I'm tacking back and forth between the specific (Jewish social work) to the general (non-sectarian social work). This leaves the focus on the Jewish workers, but provides context for their decisions and their arguments. 

I told this to my friend Jessica over dinner last night, and she objected to the characterization of this process as "murder." "It's sending your words to a foster home," she said, "while you get your house in order." It's true that sometimes they stay there forever, permanently adopted by the Word document that you will never open again. More often, however, these darlings make their way back when you're ready to use them. It's not a perfect analogy--the foster care system is obviously much more traumatic for children and families than the process of writing is for authors--but it gives me the illusion that I exist in a writerly utopia where the crime rate is low and a safety net exists to help me survive a spot of trouble. 

Wind Down, Gear Up

As I watch my colleagues fighting their way across the finish line of the spring semester, I feel like my year is just now getting started. Perhaps that's because it's been almost a year since I defended my dissertation prospectus, became ABD, and began researching and writing my dissertation. I also had a fellowship this year that released me from my teaching duties, and so I never felt particularly moored to the rhythm of the academic calendar. If the Jewish new year coincides with the commencement of the academic year in the fall, and the Gregorian calendar resets in January, then it just feels right to celebrate some kind of New Year in the spring. May has become my Dissertation New Year, a time to be inspired by the accomplishments of the last twelve months and an opportunity to make resolutions for the next phase.

I am starting two major projects in the coming weeks. The first is an oral history project at the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood. I will interview staff and members who have been affiliated with the agency since the 1960s or 1970s. These oral histories will provide additional perspectives on the events that took place at the Y and in Washington Heights during these tumultuous decades. My travel and time in New York will be supported by a generous grant from the American Academy for Jewish Research. 

The second project is a bit out of left field, but I'm very excited about it. I will be conducting a corpus analysis to identify when the term "ghetto" was adopted by African Americans to describe  segregated urban neighborhoods in the United States. I will write about this in more detail in the coming weeks, because corpus analysis is not a methodology commonly used by American historians. It's part of an increasingly popular field called the digital humanities, and I've recently had the opportunity to learn about and practice methods for using digital tools in scholarly research and dissemination.

I feel rejuvenated by these new undertakings. Each is its own education and brings with it a new set of logistics. It's crazy but fun, and somehow I'm still managing to write my dissertation in fits and starts. Stay tuned for more.