I love research—especially organizing what I find.
I’ve tried a half-dozen or more platforms for sorting my book notes, my archival finds, my newspaper downloads, and my web clippings. Each platform—whether EndNote, Zotero, Evernote, Joplin, Tropy, or others—helps you categorize, tag, and visualize your resources. Many people suggest choosing a research platform and sticking with it. I rather like migrating to and fro (except for that one time I thought I lost everything but didn’t—that was rough). Categories shift, sources gain or lose importance, notes spark memories, and new assemblages emerge. It’s a creative process.
I’m taking about this now because (a) I’m knee-deep in one such source migration and (b) I think organizing academic research can be a good reflection on our role as organizers, or co-creators, in the world.
We didn’t make the world, you and I, but we do an awful lot of work to make sense of it. We’ve named things for quite a while (i.e. Genesis 2:19-20). We also create new categories of things. We make things to sit on and call them chairs, for example. We also turn rolling fields into gridded cities, chemicals into plastics, and news clippings into books.
We (often) make sense of what we stumble upon by organizing.
Now, Plato would say that there’s a world of essences out there—that there’s a perfect essence of chair (to keep going with chairs), and when we make chairs we simply bring that essence into the world. I’ve bickered with a friend about this for years. I tend to think there’s no essence of chair. But I’m entirely open to being wrong.
My point is that, when doing research—well before writing—we are co-creating. We didn’t make the newspaper or the letter in the archive. But we organize those fragments of the world in a novel way. We encounter existing traces and try to assemble them into coherence.
I think there’s something deeply human about that process. It has limits, for sure. The Evernote library’s fate remains subject to server crashes and user error no matter how beautifully sorted it may be. But, like writing itself, we’re still internally compelled to try anyways.
We all have various ways of organizing our worlds to make meaning. Do you keep bookmarks on your browser? Do you jot down quotes and thoughts in a notebook? How about subscriptions to podcasts, newsletters (like this one!), Twitter feeds, or newspapers? Or perhaps you’re just a bit OCD and need all your pens organized according to ROY-G-BIV.
As I go through my research now, I wonder if it might be useful for us to look at those other areas where we organize those bits and pieces we find along the way and try to make sense of them as a whole. What kind of world does your organizing reveal? What does it indicate about your values?
Nevertheless, I think our little acts of sorting and brief attempts to organize things, especially abstract things like knowledge, have a part in the making the world sacred. God tells us to tend the garden, to name the beasts of the field and birds of the air, to come to know and grow with the Lord’s world and works.
I know that there are many people we could talk about on this theme—Thomas Aquinas, Foucault, Christopher Dawson, Michael Polanyi, and perhaps we’ll revisit them in a future post—but right now research beckons.
I know that this newsletter has suffered a bit of mission creep—moving from formal book reviews to freer pieces like this. That’s why, after next week, I’m going to close out season one of Ascending Bookstacks. It’ll be back, after an intense phase of dissertation writing, sometime early in 2022.
Next week we’ll have one more post, a reflection on what this journey through books with Catholic social teaching has meant and some thoughts for future posts.
That’s it for today, though!
See you tomorrow.