This is (almost) verbatim text from a journal entry I wrote for a seminar I took on immersive documentary. I thought it was interesting enough to put here, even though parts of it might not make sense if you haven’t read the works I’m talking about. For context, my class had previously read an essay called “Disaster City” by Barrett Swanson, in which Swanson participates in a disaster recovery simulation, explores his personal fascination with disaster scenarios, and explores the blurring between reality and fiction that occurs in those simulations. A lot of our conversation had to do with rituals and performative preparedness and how they can be used to enable cognitive avoidance of the root causes of certain issues, creating a false sense of safety for the person practising (or even observing) the rituals.

You know the drill. In the last episode I did of this series, I said the next one would be coming shortly, huh?

Yeah, right. I lied. These come out when they come out.

So I’ve been saying for a while that reading academic papers is a skill. However, what I didn’t realize is that having a pretty good idea of how to read a paper from one discipline doesn’t quite map to knowing how to approach a paper from another field. Academic papers are all confusing nightmares, but papers from different disciplines are nightmarish in different ways, which means that while some parts of the basic reading approach can stay the same, others will have to be discarded or relearned.

When I first started doing this writeup, I did not expect to still be working on it 6 months later. Finishing this was a long, long overdue task for a while. This is the second write-up I’ve done of a talk I’ve given. The first one I did was for “How to be a Talentless Hack in Public”, which I published in zine form first, before then publishing the text on this blog several months later.

One of the things that has been repeatedly drilled into me over the past year or so is the fact that if you want people to do things for you, you’re most likely going to have to harass them. (I don’t mean literal harassment, by the way – please don’t commit a criminal offense and say I encouraged you.) This is true especially when working with highly busy people like managers and professors. If you want something, you can’t just assume they’ll intuit that and give it to you – you have to ask (and assume they’ll forget, then ask them again). If you need them to do something for you, you’ll need to remind them, and inform them of the deadline, likely multiple times. Everyone has their own problems to worry about and the thing you need might not be top of mind. The burden of remembering is on you.