Lessons

The best part about having any extended free time is that after the initial boredom and frustration has passed, you find that your intellectual senses become less dulled. I find that I am often taken with a urge to research and write more, not always when you might expect it. It can be as I'm trying to sleep at 3 in the morning. I can be playing a videogame and then I want to fire up JSTOR. Usually it can take the form of a trigger phrase on a TV programme that forms a link of research - anything from the news to stand-up comedy. It's wide and varying.

First and foremost I'm a historian. I love my area, and I still get a kick out of being published in university press. It flatters my ego to know I get quoted and used as source material in (extremely limited and specific) circumstances! I'm only human, and I dare-say there's plenty of people in the same boat as I am. Being a historian desensitises you to an extent, however. The Jewish Holocaust, the Balkan and Rwandan Genocides, the September 11 attacks - all horrific, all atrocities and yet I have to look at them with emotionless eyes. A historian who is worth their salt will emphasise a balanced viewpoint over anything else. They give the facts and can give their opinion but it has to be based on valid hypothesis and has to be justified with documentary evidence. That's why the best historians out there, aren't well known. The more obscure, usually the better they are. There's nothing wrong with Simon Schama, or David Starkey, don't get me wrong. Just sticking your nose in a book is better. And by and large, the ones whom don’t give their two cents are more informative than those that do, because personal bias tends to cloud fact-based conclusions.

Historians by and large are studious. They become engrossed in whatever they are reading/studying and very little else matters, if they’re dedicated to their craft. They will obsess with research and snatch every last detail. They will read, and then read over the next day. I’m very much an auditory and visual learner; kinaesthetic learning doesn’t really apply unless you go to archaeological or more practical fields. I’m very much the ‘bookish nerd’. The explosion of the Internet also revolutionised the way I study/studied because it was less questioning the motive of the writer, more the quality of the writing to begin with. Wikipedia anyone? There’s actually a great deal of factual information on there, and it takes a keen eye to separate the wheat from the chaff.

History is time consuming though. It takes hours to sift through material even if you skim, and preparing any large scale piece of writing takes vast preparation. I’ve been taught to teach that for every hour of actual writing you get on that piece of paper, at least six hours of research should have gone into it. It’s not a field where you can make stuff up and get away with it – if it’s false, you’d know. For instance I remember one assignment I marked where one of the students claimed Adolf Hitler started WWI. Blatantly wrong. Then you get more subtle errors – misquoted sources, misinterpretation of factual evidence. It’s sad to see but then it’s too intensive not to see the odd mistake. I’m not punitive when it comes to that.

I think I’m writing this because I’m just glad my creativity in the academic arts has been restored somewhat. I don’t feel as if I’m treading water, and I struggle to actually get down everything I’m thinking these days. It’s a good place to be in, mentally.