The end of the writing is in sight at last – having spent an unnecessarily large amount of time on doing 1500 (ish) words about my project I have almost, almost got to the point where it might be sort of finished. It really has been extraordinarily difficult to compress everything I want to say into the official college format for assessment. I’ve got enough information in my head to write a thesis, never mind a short essay.
As part of the symptomatology of Lockdown Mental Paralysis I allowed myself to become obsessed with online research, and then of course I couldn’t bear not to put it into the essay. And then I had to take it all out. And put some of it back. And take it all out again. And look online for replacements. I have developed a strong sympathy for the seventeenth century antiquarian John Aubrey, whose data were stored on slips of paper scattered around his room, most of them annotated with notes to self – “find out more” “ask about this”.
Denis Wood writing about deep mapping in the 1980s: “As we began to turn the new data into maps, and then into spreads, they pushed us to go out and collect more stuff. The mapping drove the thinking, drove the collecting, drove the design; and all these things drove the mapping, pushing us into new subjects, forcing us to find or collect new data, and…it didn’t stop.” (Reference available on request. I am suffering from reference-typing-overload.)
The graphic component of the deep map has reached a point where it’s just about finished and can rest for a bit. Plenty of space on the paper for more work if required. Work in Progress photograph below.
