Blog Post #3

I’ve been struggling with how to name my blog posts. I have approximately 1 billion ideas for blog posts, but I just can’t get myself to write a title. Why is writing 10 paragraphs easier than writing 5 to 10 words?

To understand my issue, I started to think about the other things I’ve had to write a title for. The most significant projects I’ve ever named are museum exhibitions and their titles are, obviously, very important. The first exhibition I ever titled was called Boomalli Prints & Paper: Making Space as an Art Collective. This one was fairly straight forward; the first part of the title articulates the art collective’s name and the media that the exhibition focused on, while the second part came from a quote by one of the artists in the show. I only came up with the title after my co-curators I conducted hours of interviews with the artists.

The second exhibition that I titled was Performing Country. This exhibition was much more open ended than the first one. Instead of an exhibition that focused on a specific collective and medium, I was attempting to connect a diverse range of media from communities all across Australia. I really struggled with this one. I worked on this exhibition for about 10 months, and I don’t think I came up with the title until I was 8 months in. And that title ended up being 2 words. It was perfect though! I think this is the one I’m most proud of. It was attention-grabbing, it encapsulated the concepts that I was working with, and it used a term (“Country,” which refers to Indigenous ancestral homelands) that the artists themselves would identify with (which is always the most important thing).

The most recent exhibition that I named was called Issuing Modernisms. This exhibition is currently on view at the Special Collections Library and includes print media from the 1910s to 1940s. The goal of Issuing Modernisms was to investigate the ways that print media informed the construction of the modern American identity. The word “issuing” in the title took on multiple meanings: it was not only a gesture to the medium, with “issuing” being a word associated with the distribution of print, but also an allusion to the complicated ways these printed objects reinforced and constructed repressive ideas about gender, sexuality, and race. I liked this title a lot. It similarly took me months and many searches through a thesaurus to come up with 2 words.

What I’ve learned from thinking about these processes is that I have to be really, really sure about something before I can title it. If a project or essay doesn’t have a title yet, it seems like it’s in an ongoing draft form that can change direction at any time. The minute it has a title, I feel like I suddenly assume some type of authority over those words. It feels final and wrong. Especially when I’m still in the learning process and I’m writing about a topic that is new to me. How can I title something that feels unfinished or ongoing?

This all sounds so dramatic because I’m struggling with titling a blog post, not my dissertation. I think this is symptomatic of other issues I’m having with the work I’m doing – I perpetually cannot commit to the end of a project, I always think I should be doing more and more work on it before it reaches its final form. As Professor Victoria Szabo said in her talk the other day, it’s hard to understand when digital humanities work is fully done. It seems like it can stretch on forever because there are always new pathways to follow. My only solution is to get over myself, understand that I did my best, and write that title…