The tedium of research

Today was kind of a bummer, because I went all the way to Georgetown to discover that I had gotten my oral history participant's office hours wrong. OK, you know that because I've already posted it twice. I'll delete that. Blackberry blogging snafu.

Now I'm engaged in the tedium of research. No, folks, it's not all big ideas, unfortunately. (Although lately I have had a lot of big ideas, which result in me forgetting where my keys are, me dropping my check card in the hallway, much to the bemusement of my colleagues). Big ideas are great, but making them work requires tedium. For oral history, this tedium includes digging through archives, transcribing interviews, and, as I'm doing right now, scanning books that apparently only exist in the University of South Florida Library, are on loan to me from the University of Maryland, and which are already a week past due date. OK make that 10 days.

It's not all fun and games - it's deadlines and IRB approval and digging through papers that have no bearing on what you're doing. But I guess it is a labor of love, because despite the tedium I do love what I'm doing. And I'm sure there's an easier way to make PDFs out of my scans of this book, but because I'm thinking about The Next Big Idea I seem unable to figure out how.

Big Ideas become nothing without the tedious labor to make them work. And that's my Big Idea for the day.