Sunday, May 17, 2009

What About The Drafts?

It is definitely the end of semester. All the blogs I regularly read have suddenly sprung to life en masse. As well as getting my regular fixes again, it is nice to know in a very tangible way that it's not just me who gets overwhelmingly swamped. Yes, I only teach as an adjunct, but this is also the start of fieldwork season at The Regular Gig. It has required much overtime this year (better than a pink-slip, lemme tell you what), so I've been crispy.

As part of her end-of-semester and Spring cleaning, Dr. Crazy is tossing out reams of paper. Including her dissertation drafts. Now, I'm a tosser. I don't keep drafts. But I keep hearing about people who DO keep drafts. I'd love to know why... I mean, maybe keep a first draft for nostaligia, to compare how horrendous it was compared to The Final Product. But are there other reasons I'm missing?

4 comments:

Bavardess said...

I admit I'm a terrible hoarder of old paper as well. I might toss very early drafts, but I usually keep the later ones. Often, it's because I've had to cut chunks of good stuff in the final version to meet a word limit and I always think 'maybe that will come in useful somewhere else some time'. Really, I should probably just burn the whole lot...

I hope you'll be able to post about your summer fieldwork. Being an archaeologist was always one of my go-to 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' answers, and I'm still fascinated by it.

Digger said...

Summer fieldwork so far = 13 shovel test pits in a gravel parking lot. No site; in fact, hardly any artifacts at all. Thankfully, the gravel wasn't as evil to deal with as it could have been. The day was gorgeous, about 20C, sunny, and the view beyond the parking lot was pretty. Of course I wasn't wearing a hat, so it's my first sunburn this year as well (I will, eventually, learn). Now, to write it up, on a crazy-fast deadline!

I'll try to write what I can; it's a tough topic to handle as I need to juggle my pseudonimity with client confidentiality and site protection. Much of the work I do is on behalf of developers, who don't cotton much to having their prospective development locations revealed. And I don't cotton much to revealing site locations to potential looters (not to mention it would violate every Statement of Ethics I've agreed to as an archaeologist!). So, those are the reasons for any vagueness in the archaeology department.

JaneB said...

Yeah, trying to write about site work must be really complicated - I look forward to seeing what you manage though!

I tend to keep drafts because I often vacillate between one version and another, so I don't like to get rid of them all... that said, I do try to purge the PAPER ones at the end of the writing, and just keep digital ones.

Digger said...

JaneB, thanks for the note. And, um... -Digital- Drafts? [blink]

Yanno, sometimes the simplest things never occur to me. Cheers!