…or, a self-indulgent post without a central point.

My work here is done. For now. Return trips will be required. If I were an eighteenth-century Methodist, I would record everything I’ve done in obsessive detail as a form of self-discipline. Instead, I’ve only recorded a few things obsessively. For instance:

• Miles walked (14 days X 4 miles a day) = 56
• Notes taken (in words): 65,000
• Hours in library: 76
• Postcards bought: 2

I have found much useful material that will go a long way towards the completion of my book. I also have a very strong sense of what I want to look like on my future trips. Everyone here keeps asking me 1) when it will be published and 2) who is going to publish it. My answers? 1) Some time in the next five years or I won’t get tenure, and 2) I don’t know, but wouldn’t Oxford University Press be nice?

One of the greatest things about being here has been talking over coffee and/or lunch with other scholars who are studying Methodism in the eighteenth-century. I don’t think that I’ve ever been around this many at one time. Yesterday, for example, I was taken to lunch at the members-only Portico Library and had a very nice conversation over fish & chips and mushy peas. Today, more Thai food (this time a delish tofu concoction) and one last conversation with a PhD candidate from Oxford University.

It’s sunny and warm today. Downtown Manchester is crowded with people out and about, mostly shopping it seems. I’m going to try to find a relatively quiet place to get something cool to drink and read. My flight leaves tomorrow morning. After a night in Baltimore, I’ll be back in KC by Monday.

I had some delicious Pad Thai at Tampopo last night. Again with the servers carrying wireless PDAs, but this time they were on the Palm OS. I wrote the following on my Palm while sipping my Kirin and waiting on my food.

Because of the work in which I’m currently engaged, pulling documents out of the past to try to understand them in a contemporary context, I’m thinking about the nature of archives, and what they might look like in the future.

Specifically, what will be the future of archival literary research? Will libraries like the one in which I’m working continue to maintain archives? What will the document/artifact trail left behind by today’s writers and artists look like?

I’m reading diaries, correspondence, and even readers’ marginal comments and marks made in printed material. But if these historical figures had communicated by email, kept weblogs, and read the Bible and the news online, instead of in printed form, imagine how much this would change the practice of studying this material. Certainly email and weblogs can be archived and saved, but what role would libraries play in doing this? And rather than there being a single digital Methodist Archive, for example, it seems that you could have as many copies made of this hypothetical data as you like. Would it lose its importance if it was always available to anyone at any time? Would there be a need for scholars to explore the archive, where access has traditionally be restricted, and synthesize their findings for an audience without access? Additionally, would we maintain the devices upon which the material was originally recorded so that we could fully understand the context in which it was produced, distributed, and received? As Matt’s post on “Darknet Nostalgia” makes clear, something important is lost when the interface changes.

Aside from writing, consider the other activity at stake here: reading. Surely the scholar will need new tools, new methodologies, to recover the deleted browser cache and untangle its mysteries, speculate about the page at the other end of the broken link, or explain the connections between trackbacked blog entries spanning a dozen sites. And where did the reader record what she thought about her reading? Which portions of the text were most important to her?

We need to have a conversation about these issues. The future of the work we do depends on it.

There’s a main wordherders page, and there are now three wordherdering sites: mine, Jason’s, and Mike’s. More to come, I believe.

I’ve made this joke before but…

Yah! Get along little wordies!!

…I can’t resist making it again.

My routine here, like clockwork, has been to get up around 6:45, eat an unbelievably massive breakfast at the place I’m staying — because it’s good, and because it’s included in the price of my room — then walk the two miles or so to this cafe to answer emails, read other folks’ sites, and update my own.

Meanwhile, everyone in the states that I know reads the site is fast asleep either five (on the east coast), six (in middle America), or eight (west coast, if David is reading) behind. I can compose my posts with leisure, knowing that it will be hours before anyone gets up and logs on to see what I’ve written. Hang on, I believe some folks in England and Australia also read my site from time to time. Well, that complicates my simple little argument, doesn’t it?

What I’m getting at is the fact that, as a post I read on someone’s site weeks ago said, somewhere in the world, someone is writing something interesting on their site at almost any hour of the day.

I lived in Europe from 1979 to 1983, and then again in 1984 and 1985. I still remember the very day we flew over to Belgium. I woke up in the middle of the night in the hotel and experienced my first real insomnia for a few hours. Of course the time zone difference helped. Looking out at the road lit by orange-tinged sodium street lights, which I had never seen before, I felt like I was on the other side of the world, rather than just a quarter of the way around it. Over the next few years, it still felt like America was a long way away, and one of the defining experiences contributing to this feeling was the telephone. Trans-Atlantic long distance was extremely expensive in either direction, at least that’s what my parents said; I never saw any phone bills. And there was a slight, half-second delay to every utterance; you could hear a faint repetition of what you just said as you talked to the person on the other end. I probably had less than ten such conversations in the five years I lived overseas. America was practically gone during those years, and I did not communicate very much with family or friends while I was gone.

By contrast, on this trip I can call L on my phone card every day for 14 cents a minute, and it sounds like I’m making a call from the same city, instead of from across the ocean: no delay, no static. I’m emailing regularly with friends and colleagues, and as you can see, I’m updating my blog regularly. All of this combines to make me feel like I really haven’t travelled that far at all.

I think that like a lot of things he argued, Marshall McCluhan’s concept of the global village brought together through mass communication is undertheorized, but from a personal perspective, my experience is much different now than it was twenty-odd years ago.

I have found some wifi hotspots, but none that I can or want to use. Several Starbucks seem to offer T-mobile’s service, which is too expensive. I can buy an hour at the Easy Internet Cafe for 50p in the morning, a pound in the afternoon, but the Starbucks across St. Ann’s square from the cafe wants to charge me about 12p a minute for WiFi. This doesn’t really make any sense, does it? I mean, what’s the equipment cost? I provide the computer and the wireless card. All they’re doing is giving me access to an Internet connection. There’s also a strong wifi signal flooding the reading room of the library where I spend my days. I can’t get anywhere using it, though. Perhaps it’s just a local network.

I get a little kick out of thinking of the wireless signals bouncing around the nineteenth-century library or the eighteenth-century church a stone’s throw from Starbucks.

There are some cool forms of communication here that are not unknown in America, but just not as common as here. Earlier I mentioned the phone booths that double as Internet kiosk. These are everywhere, though I’ve yet to see someone actually use them since that blog entry I made using one. On Albert Square, there’s a (non-enclosed) kiosk call “i-plus information,” which is a free access point that allows you to send an email (not from your own account; and you can’t check your email), check the BBC news, and check the weather. It uses a tough, touch-sensitive screen and it has thick plexiglass plates on either side and over the top to shield you from the elements. I’ve only seen one person using this, though.

Finally, their mobile phones. Text-messaging seems like it’s done more commonly here than in America. Well, at least there are a number of tv shows and ads that say “Text blah-blah-blah” to enter a contest or to vote for something. Also, there’s an ad campaign going on right now to promote a mobile phone service that allows you to send video messages to other people on the service. Wow. That’s a lot of bandwidth.

I know it’s bad cultural studies practice to generalize based on limited observation, so I won’t say these technologies characterize English culture or even Manchester culture, but these are the things I’ve observed.