It’s funny how things work out sometimes…
I was drawn to the Public History program at Western in part because I thought that a program that required students to actively reflect on the process of becoming practitioners of history was supremely interesting and right up my alley. I like to think about process, and I identify with what E.M. Forster once wrote, and that is: “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” Writing is for me (as for others, I imagine) a process of not only refining my thoughts on a particular topic but also discovering them. (As an undergraduate, I waited for theses to emerge in my papers -- sometimes, I confess, near the end of the drafting process -- with as much apprehension as a 10-year-old staring at a Magic 8-Ball after she’s asked some all-important life question…like: Is Tyler really the one I’m going to marry?)
...and yet, here I am, “slogging” (both in the literal sense and as a spin-off to Andrew’s apt amalgamation) my way through my first introductory post, after having spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking up a two-and-a-half word blog title.
Perhaps it’s because I’m a little distracted by all the thoughts and opinions about academic blogging that I’ve read this past week. The good, the bad, and the in-between. I wonder who (besides my Public History colleagues) will actually read this blog and for whom exactly I’m writing. I wonder if I’ll have anything original to add in an already proliferating blogosphere. (I appreciated Matthew’s comment about the burden that originality poses.) And I wonder if my posts will deteriorate by mid-November into navel-gazing comments about breakfast (hopefully not, as I tend to skip it).
Mostly, I wonder how I will navigate the rather alien terrain of the digital world, from blogging to web-building, when, as an appreciator of old things, I’ve mostly not kept up with the new. (I just sent my first ever text message last week; the iPhone, frankly, scares me.) Nevertheless, I hope somehow to be able to speak what Manan Ahmed calls "future-ese," to be able to learn (some of) the language of the programmer over the course of this year so that I can begin to "re-imagine", as Ahmed has exhorted, the old in new ways. I’m excited, if duly daunted, by the prospects.
Now where’s a Magic 8-Ball when one needs it?
About Me
- Vicky Tran
- I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia with a double major in History and English Literature. I hail from Vancouver and I’ve lived there all my conscious life. (I say “conscious” because I was born in Vietnam, but came to Canada when I had just turned 3 and sadly do not have even one memory of my birthplace.) I’ve never lived through an Ontario summer, nor an Ontario winter (a fact which has so far elicited pitiful looks from kind and slightly bemused souls). But, I thought that a chance to spend a year thinking about the things I’m fascinated by – history, story-telling, historiography, memory, culture, language, writing, and design – with other like-minded folks at Western would far outweigh any climate shock I might experience here in London. Or so I hope. :)
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