About this Notebook

This notebook is an attempt to make the humanities research process more open. I'm following the lead of notebooks by people like Jason Heppler, W. Caleb McDaniel, Mark Madsen, Shawn Graham, and from the sciences, Carl Boettiger.

If you've somehow arrived here looking for my regular website: thanks and welcome! That site lives over here.

As an instruction librarian who has researched a range of interdisciplinary subjects and taught composition courses, I feel that it'd benefit all of us—as we move between and blur the roles of enthusiasts, scholars, students, researchers, makers, writers, etc.—to be more open about processes. I've long claimed that libraries are the intellectual "maker space" of academies. An open research notebook like this is one way to perform that "maker" process clearly.

At least as of 2016-05, I'm using a very lightweight version of the new MLA Style, 8th edition. This is an intentional choice, a move to underscore that library & information studies can be performed with humanities tools. For now I'll also attempt to provide links to WorldCat and at least one other place for each source I write up—unless it's a book, in which case WorldCat is enough. On a simple level, this aims to promote access. It's also intended to acknowledge which sources are open access, which authors have generously labored to make their work available through an institutional or personal repository, and which sources lie behind paywalls that I am lucky enough to have sufficient information privilege to access. Working at a community college, I'm keenly aware of information privilege and hope this practice will highlight the insidious ways even those of us in library & information studies perpetuate societal inequalities around access. If you happen to be an author of one of these sources and have an open access version available online that I've missed, please let me know via Twitter or email and I will happily update my notes with a link!