I go backwards and forwards on writing these. A lot of the times in contracting you are brought in to fix quite knotty and urgent problems that are essentially embarrassing to the organisation. And while there’s plenty of introspection that comes out of that, there is a strong urge not to do it in public, firstly because you’ll look silly (“why didn’t you do x?”) or because the aura of contracting is sometimes that you know all the answers and never have an off day.
It’s been a bit of an off year for me. I don’t remember much about this time last year, the exhaustion when I came out of hospital and the next few months of heavy steroids was really overwhelming. I remember Sym and Rose bringing their dog and some alcohol free beer, I remember the boiler catching fire. It all kicks in again around the time my daughter was born.
It’s a long way to say, I’ve been slowly bobbing up and down over the last year and haven’t had the space to try and write about stuff. And to be fair, the main focus of my notes has been research, and that’s also been pretty slow.
I’ve been doing interviews about the history of They Work For You. It has been interesting to talk to people because of the rhymes of patterns. People do a thing on the internet to make a point. Something is hacked together because it embarrasses government or because it is weird that it doesn’t already exist. This hack then becomes “infrastructure”. Also because I thought I knew the whole story before I started and I emphatically Did Not.
I’ve been using Aramis by Latour a lot with this. It’s a book about a programme to make automatic personal trains in Paris in the 70s and 80s. It is fascinating because basically all the discussion points that people use are the same as you get from the self-driving car hype machine now (and the same problems scupper both).
I’m also trying to write in a style called social biography - and I’m treating the Parliament Hansard API and TWFY as if they were actors in their own right. It’s not a style I’ve tried before, but it’s kind of useful for tracking the way that people feel about them.
So, I’m trying to start writing a chapter. And that’s quite hard. When do you know you have enough information to start? And when should you stop?
I was talking to a PhD friend about this. Most anthropology projects seem to run like waterfall. You do the research, you write the thing. A lot of time that was a product of practicality. You had to go to a place to research. With internet anthropology, that seems less of a distinction. I’m at home, I’m interviewing people on Zoom, my field site is in a Slack window next to my google doc. So I’m experimenting with iterative writing. Have a draft, continually varnish it with more interviews. Getting ideas down on “paper” is generating more ideas, and better research questions so I’m glad to be doing it.
I think what is going to be interesting about all that though is whether the examiners are going to accept changes to how you do the work. Maybe the pandemic will have an effect on accepted practice, it would be weird if it didn’t.
I’m working with Democracy Club to do a proper discovery into whether there is a data user need for a register/database of every elected politician. I’m doing 2 days a week-ish, spread out where there are hours. It’s working well for me. It has also brought up some stuff in my head about the frustration of doing discoveries elsewhere is that often the question asked is leading or that the right answer is “impossible”. As in, “it would require changing too many things to make this service work to meet user needs, and we won’t do that, so can you tone down the recommendations a bit?”. I was thinking of a friend who used to work at NAO and her reports had to be vetted by the subject. As in, you might do a year’s research on universal credit and then your findings had to be agreed by DWP. Sometimes research finds things that are unpalatable for an organisation or require more work. I’m glad to be working on a discovery right now where “we should not build this product” is an option along with the “how”.
I’m keeping an eye out for permanent jobs I can do. I hate writing cover letters. Writing applications makes me feel actively less happy, but it must be done.