Postdoc creative diary - oct22 / june23

This repository contains collateral content from my postdoctoral research on collaborative ethnographies, conducted from fall 2022 to early 2024, and paused due to a shift in grant funding, a revised research plan and a transition to a new university. Despite these later changes, initial nine months (oct22-june23) of consistent engagement in this project allowed for a quite consistent yet highly experimental / pseudo-artistic daily practice of (mainly) self-reflective writing.

The primary language of these notes is (mother language) Spanish, with occasional entries in (sister language) Catalan and in (friendly language) English. They reflect a period rich in planning, evolving expectations and the exploration of new literature and data collection methods, as well as disperse and underdeveloped exercises as sort of (un)situated epistemology, rapid proto-writing and sporadic auto-skepticism. A recurrent focus of these reflections, after a retrospective reading, moves around ideas like the development of new methods for situated, on-spot collaborative content generation; the development of ethnography-oriented chapbooks through pliegos.net; or new tools and roles of digital affordances for paper printing and reading, among many others. This was accompanied by a persistent obsession (until date, and everywhere) with the capabilities of new large language models, the speed of these and the new radical derived implications for academic and cultural AI-ctivity.

Another recurrent use I did of this self-researtech process was the intensive exploration of the affordances of my reMarkable e-Ink writing tablet, playing with its features to some coherence limits trying to enhance my process of creative writing. It took a rare type of constant dedication altogether but it was fun. Finally the practice of making / doing these diaries ended during the summer break of 2023, after which over a couple of days I reread, highlighted and refined when needed the entries now shared here raw as quali-visual data.