Everyday Life and Research

This summer something unexpected occurred. I experience working during summer always as very pleasant. Fewer working hours, going to the lake after hours, no meetings or urgent mails to respond to. It’s usually a time were I can set realistic goals and have a nice rhythm going after my things. This meant that, next to my ongoing side-quest on Everything is a Video Game if You Are Brave Enough1, I had ample time to work on my first paper Observing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphics2. That project didn’t only include writing, but also working a lot on the Video Game History Screenshots dataset (VHS-D). Now, what was unexpected is the phenomenological experience of that kind of working rhythm, as it kind of normalized working on my Dissertation.

In a recent chat with Florence, I realized (once more), that I’m really at the very beginning of working in another setting. That means among other things that I’m missing the experience on how to handle difficult situations. After doing web- and software development for a good 20 years, practically nothing would make me break a sweat - from dealing with clients to fucking up productive systems - simply because I had to do these things more than once and survived it. Regarding doing research as a job, I have practically no such experience at all. I did a few conference presentations and wrote some texts which got published, but in terms of pragmatic everyday things, I’m still lacking. How do I know that I worked enough, that my research is of acceptable quality, when is corpus saturation reached, or what are the practical steps to Analysing Visual Clusterings? A lot of the pragmatic steps in humanities research are left vaguely, and have to be obtained through word of mouth or through experience. It’s almost as if academia still operates as that these things should occur naturally to the scientist.

Anyway, this summer I got the feeling, that I’m getting used to do researcherly things as a job. Having routine, knowing the people in the office, being able to outline and following a plan, making it actionable and measurable, doing boring things. That really helps me. It doesn’t lessen the stress, but it changes how I can handle it. It normalizes research as work and takes it of the anxietal pedestal. Likewise, it also helps to incorporate experiences, which in turn helps recognize future stressful situations as something that I already overcame in similar form. The beauty of research as an everyday activity.

Next to normalizing research, I also had the pleasure of finding the time and energy to binge-game The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap and a bunch of obscure indie-games. During playing Zelda, I sometimes wasn’t quite sure if I didn’t already play that game, déjà vus. But I also have no complete recollection that I actually played the game. It still was tremendous and easy fun, though. The list of indie-games included:

Late August is also the beginning of the end of summer and with it comes a slight melancholia. NTS has a fantastic collection of listener playlists concerning summer and heat: Supporter Radio - Heatwave | NTS. One of my favorites capturing the upcoming late-summer melancholia is melt zone w/ Sinziana Velicescu 27th August 2024 | Listen on NTS.

Log

  1. I don’t push the texts I’m writing into the website anymore, so some links will be broken online.↩︎

  2. Ditto…↩︎