Born from old ideas - or, Archive everything

 
archive everything 

- Karl Steel, in a tweet that I forgot to archive by screenshot 


When I started my PhD in 2014, I had learned a few important things from my MA degree. For instance, I had learned the value of keeping an archive of notes and drafts and half-baked ideas. And, perhaps more importantly, I had learned to do so more logically and well-structured than I had done during my MA - a period in which my method was mingled with some madness, or perhaps it is more accurate to call it mess. From an early point in my PhD, I began to keep neatly organised folders on my computer, as well as a less neatly organised and extensive archive of handwritten notes, print-outs, and ephemera that lost its tenuous organisational solidity when I moved my things from Denmark to Norway at the end of my Danish sojourn in 2019. It was this practice that made the tweet by the medievalist Karl Steel - quoted in the epigraph - resonate very strongly with me when I first read it sometime in 2015 or 2016, if memory serves. The tweet, which I quote from memory, came at a very poignant time, as I remember digging through my notes for the kernel of an idea that I had finally found a way to turn into something substantial. Although I forget exactly which of my ideas it was, the feeling of triumph as I was justified in keeping even the most insignificant-seeming of notes, stays with me to this day. 

A few years after, or last week to be somewhat more precise, this sensation was rekindled in me, as I was scrambling to finish drafts for two articles that may or may not be printed, but which are at least out of my hands for the time being. The articles had begun some months apart, and in my mind the only thing they had in common was that they needed to be done within the same week, and that I was the one who had to finish them, or at least hammer them into a shape that warranted sending them off to the respective editors. However, once I had shipped them off and let them out of my immediate care, I came to realise that these two texts had something else in common, namely that they were both born out of old ideas. 

Like all scholars, I often get ideas for articles that I would like to do, or things I would like to include in articles at some point. Like many scholars, I imagine, I eventually come to the realisation that several of those ideas are not substantial enough for an entire article, or too small or insignificant to warrant the time required to do the necessary research, or too big to be done within the constraints of time and other obligations that always direct how I prioritise my work. And, like some scholars, I keep my ideas in a computer document, which has now grown in length to the point that I would need several lifetimes - and some very careless editors - to be allowed to publish all of them. Luckily, however, I also find that some of these ideas can be developed, either as an article of its own or as part of another article. 

The whole point of my document with ideas of various complexity has always been a conviction that those ideas might some day result in something concrete, although when that someday would come was not for me to know. The articles I submitted last week, however, both came from that document, and both started as ideas formulated in a rather confused, brief and incomplete way - more as a cryptic note rather than a fully-fledged idea. However, as ideas mature, they often get mixed in with other ideas, or they get transplanted into a framework where they can develop further. These are trajectories that usually depend on a mixture of time, accrued learning and experience, and chance. Of these three, perhaps chance is the most important, and it was absolutely chance that threw me into situations where I was invited to submit something to publications whose themes and subjects made me recall those ideas for which I thought I would never find a suitable outlet. Even though I might still have to do a lot with these texts to get them into shape, and even though I might still get rejected, these text have enabled me to develop my fledgling ideas into something material, and that is a crucial step. The compulsion to archive everything has, indeed, paid off.