Link Roundup: August 5, 2024
August 5, 2024
This week’s articles emphasize the importance of archival work and offer an interesting writing-process heuristic.
As always, I generate summaries using AI and edit those summaries for accuracy and usefulness. Then, I offer some thoughts of my own.
Tameez, “To preserve their work — and drafts of history — journalists take archiving into their own hands”
Generated Summary (ChatGPT)
The article discusses how journalists are increasingly taking control of archiving their work due to concerns over the longevity and accessibility of their content. With traditional news archives often at risk due to financial instability, ownership changes, or technology issues, journalists are turning to personal efforts and digital tools to preserve their reporting. These efforts ensure that their work, which serves as historical records, remains accessible to the public and future generations, even if media organizations fail to maintain their archives.
My Thoughts
The creation of archives was one of the two primary areas of focus in my doctoral work. The other one was (so-called “new”) media theory, so it should be clear that this article speaks to my interests. The seeming daily occurrence of news sites going dark and its intersection with the lack of archival efforts was something I hadn’t considered but seems particularly salient after reading the article.
As I’ve discussed in another post, there have been significant shifts in how archives are seen across disciplines. Whereas archives used to be considered passive, objective containers of the past, they are often seen today as active sites where memory is made, not simply reflected. And as this article demonstrates, the way that LLMs are trained on available, existing resources only further complicates archival work.
What happens, the article asks, when a news article is brought into an LLM but is then deleted from the web, leaving only its trace in the “knowledge” of an AI system? It’s a fascinating question. In regards to that and many other questions, archival science and related humanities fields are well-suited to offer insights into and warnings about knowledge-making in the post-AI landscape.
dnbt777, “How to Build Anything Extremely Quickly”
Generated Summary (ChatGPT)
The article advocates for “outline speed-running” as a method to rapidly build projects by creating detailed, recursive outlines and then quickly filling them in without worrying about perfection. This approach contrasts with the slower “loading-bar” method, where tasks are completed sequentially and refined as you go. By focusing on speed and deferring perfection to the end, this method can lead to a significant increase in productivity and quality, reducing stress and improving outcomes.
My Thoughts
It’s becoming unintentionally common for me to include shorter articles that touch on productivity and writing in these link roundups. In part, that’s because I read Hacker News regularly, where these conversations are common. It’s also the case that I’m just attracted to these sorts of ideas… in complicated ways. On one hand, the field of Writing Studies tends to agree that writing is best understood and taught as a series of processes rather than using product-based models such as the now-outdated Current-Traditional Rhetoric. In that regard, this article’s focus on process is interesting and insightful.
At the same time, though, I sometimes worry that too much focus on process creates a different misunderstanding, where writing is put into the terms of “optimization.” I have a post in the works about this, but it’s enough to say here that process optimization feels fundamentally at odds with writing-as-thinking and, sometimes, with actually getting things done at all. More to come on this topic later in the week.
That said, I do like this article. The idea of “loading-bar writing” (writing from the beginning of a document to its end) is a useful metaphor and one I’ll likely share with my students this semester. I agree with the author that it is often (if not always) a poor and inefficient writing practice. Additionally, I think the idea of recursive outlining is useful, and the author’s discussion of it aligns with interesting historical conversations about media and thinking processes. Regardless of my hang-ups, the article is short and worth a read.