Staying at the bleeding edge of technology can shift the content toward the category of becoming ephemeral instead of it being foundational. Written content that covers the moment can be fleeting and pass from useful to stale at any moment. Content that is foundational makes a contribution to the underlying academy of academic thought on the subject. Those efforts in the pursuit of studying something to lay a foundation are different from the efforts to observe and report on the phenomenon as it develops. A lot of my efforts fall into the exploratory research side of things. However, most of what I end up producing on this weblog is probably not in either of those categories. It is something decidedly different. My efforts to write are about thinking out loud and for better or worse they are probably somewhere in the middle of those two previously enumerated constructs of ephemeral and foundational content. It is entirely possible that a weblog post from time to time will go one way or the other, but most of them are going to be highly ephemeral in nature. That is the natural conclusion of sitting down and writing about whatever comes to mind. Using a stream of consciousness method to kickstart writing everyday will be inherently ephemeral. It would be a truly interesting case study if things went the other way. Each post represents my thoughts at the moment. Some of it or more likely part of an argument contained in a post might at some point end up published.
Yesterday, I logged in and used EndNote online. I thought maybe a copy of the software had been installed on this computer, but it appears to have been lost at some point. It was the first time this year that I wanted to use the software. Instead of managing citations the right way it always seems that they end up getting worked one paper at a time instead of comprehensively in a system that manages that type of academic content: references or citations. The reason I wanted to go back and use EndNote was my renewed focus on reading something academic every day. You have to take the time to read everyday. Seriously, take the time to read everyday. If you are reading this second paragraph of prose from July 8, 2020, then you are probably an active reader and my plea to read everyday is unnecessary. My office contains a library of three full bookshelves that from time to time overflow. I am currently reading this book, “Graesser, L. H., & Keng, W. L. (2020). Foundations of deep reinforcement learning : theory and practice in Python. Boston: Pearson Addison-Wesley.” I’m putting a deeper focus on both reading academic works and writing in an academic style. That is where spending a little bit of time reading every day and making sure the citations are collected in EndNote becomes so important. This might be a time in my career where I’m going to spend 90% of my available time reading and only 10% of that time writing.
Interrupted. School.