The beauty of it

“I am not a woman,” says Megwind, “I am a spirit, although the form of the thing is misleading I will admit.[..] You are taken with my form which I admit is beautiful,” says the girl, “but know that this form you see is not necessary but contingent, sometimes I am a fine brown-speckled egg and sometimes I am an escape of steam from a hole in the ground and sometimes I am an armadillo.”

“That is amazing,” says my grandfather, “a shape-shifter are you.”

“That is a thing I could do,” says Megwind, “if I choose.”

“Tell me,” says my grandfather, “could you change yourself into one million board feet of one-by-ten of the very poorest quality neatly stacked in railroad cars on a siding outside of Fort Riley, Kansas?”

“That is a thing I could do,” says the girl, “but I do not see the beauty of it.”

“The beauty of it,” says my grandfather, “is two cents a board foot.”

- Donald Barthelme, “Departures” (emphasis added)

Jeremy Boggs’ Scholars’ Lab Praxis Program DesignLab class today had fellows sharing quotes that resonated with them, from Frank Chimero’s Shape of Design. Many of their choices focused on the importance of beauty, creativity, magic in design choices/work, sitting alongside function (or being a part of functionality). This conversation added to my thinking on how I divide scholarly values, from specific current instantiations of those values. For example: the point of a dissertation isn’t a proto-monograph; it’s practicing building and sharing knowledge as an active member of a specific community.

Or, another example: during my dissertation research, I tried to separate foundational textual scholarship field values (e.g. around authority, methodology, documentation), from how traditional Scholarly Editions usually look. It’s useful to have Scholarly Edition as term of art; and it’s useful to imagine additional ways we can realize those same scholarly field values, that look very different (like my participatory digital Ulysses edition).

I’ve shorthanded for myself this kind of parsing what we’re trying to do with scholarship from how we most often go about that, this values vs. the popular form of those values we’ve settled on, as “values vs. their instantiations”. That last word is an awkward choice! but it’s where my brain settled. (In a forthcoming-imminently journal article, I talk more about this kind of comparison of motivating scholarly values vs. how scholars including me—for good reasons, often!—default to time-tested specific forms and methods for pursuing those values.)

Scholarly values can be realized via many many methods, forms. What I’m getting from Jeremy’s session today, and my Praxis Fellow colleagues’ interpretations of Chimero’s design book, is: how I often pursue creative rereads of scholarly values—using different methods/forms than norms—isn’t just about the best way I can reach the “functional” values of my scholarly fields. (I’d thought it was!)

What I’m doing is also adding to those values (at least how I frame them to myself), trying to include joy, experimentation, justice, community (and Chimero’s “magic”?) as equivalent scholarly values, fully alongside the more widely agreed on Values of a Given Scholarly Field (e.g. clearly communicating the methodology of digital edition interface design choices, is one such Field Value).

(Thanks to my colleagues Jeremy Boggs, Oriane Guiziou-Lamour, Kristin Hauge, Gramond McPherson, Emmy Monaghan, Amna Tarar, and Brandon Walsh for teaching me via today’s conversation!

This post is an expanded version of some Bluesky tweets I posted 9/26/2024 during the session.)