Processing the Archives

Originally posted 1/18/2024 on LL

I feel like the new year is off to a pretty good start. I've begun making some changes to my routine that I'm tracking every day in a new planner I've bought. So far, these changes are mostly related to eating, exercise, teaching, and posting content to Substack. I want to add several more ongoing projects, and work on them fairly regularly rather than putting them off and then doing a binge to catch up. In order to make that work, I need to make sure I have the information I need at my fingertips, so I can pick it up and work on it without a lot of searching or going to the only place I can access the files, etc. I'm transferring files from my "Archive of Everything" backup drive to a new solid-state drive with a USB-C connector, so I can carry it around with me. About half a terabyte of the 3.7 TB on that archive disk. That should give me some content to integrate into my own note system and share online.

Making the sources I used in my book and what I'm finding in my ongoing research available online is something I've talked about a bit on Substack already (partly in comments to someone else's post who suggested it). I think this is something researchers ought to do, so that others could benefit from the sources we uncover. So I'll probably begin adding sources from my archive as well as sources from current research to my Substack and my own website. I also saved quite a lot of interesting articles and scans of texts over the years -- some of which I've never circled back to process. I'm looking forward to that, as well!

Another of the things I need to do is begin getting all the stuff I've stored on the "Onedrive" at BSU off it, and deleting files I no longer need. My access to stuff on this cloud storage has been spotty, to say the least. So I'm probably better off getting what I need off there ASAP. I don't plan to leave an archive of content on the university's servers. Maybe that's petty, but if they can't be bothered to employ me, they don't need to be using my lecture videos or instructions on how to use Pressbooks or Hypothesis or Obsidian.

In any case, you can expect to see more source material and general history finding its way onto MakingHistory. I'll try to set up a regular routine, where I carve out some time nearly every day, to process this info, now that I'll have it at my fingertips.