The Down Side of Tech Research: Nailing Jello to the Wall
Over the weekend the press was all abuzz with the discovery of a new Robert Frost poem. Robert Stilling, a PhD student at the University of Virginia, discovered the poem written on the inside cover of a book donated to the university library as part of a larger collection. Congratulations to Mr. Stilling, of course. But as I listened to the NPR story this weekend I couldn’t help but slam my head against my steering wheel, lamenting the down side of being an academic who researches technology-related phenomenon.
I have two degrees in literature and I fondly remember my dreams of someday finding the unpublished Canterbury Tale or that scrap of paper where Shakespeare admitted he was a fraud or some other Indiana Jones-like world-changing academic discovery upon which many an academic career has been built. Granted, I was a naïve student back then, but all the same those dreams are rather dashed now that I’ve been drawn into the seductive world of virtual environments, social networks, tags, and other cutting edge research.
Don’t get me wrong. I love what I do. However, chasing down the importance of tag (like del.icio.us tags), as I’m doing this week for a conference presentation, sometimes feels like trying to nail jello to the wall. And it’s fast jello; and it’s greased up; and it bites sometimes. The more research time I commit to a tech topic the more it changes in front of my eyes and by the time I’ve written something that I think really exposes an important idea…well it’s Schrödinger’s cat all over again.
But bring on the squidgy stuff. I’m ready. I can take it. And if all else fails, I’ve got a back up career in jello wrestling.
October 9th, 2006 at 6:35 am
Intellagirl,
great post, and I hear you about Jello needing to be nailed to a wall, when it comes to tech-related academia.
Remember, in (pro?) wrestling, all you need to get is a three-count; so perhaps that means trying to get sleeper hold on this “jelloe” is not a good idea?