Otters

A long time ago now, the wonderful Liz Gloyn introduced me to the idea of the Research Otter and I have happily been ottering away since. An Otter, in this context, is a (hopefully) wonderful idea that you have and cannot, for whatever reason, use at the moment, but you don’t want to lose forever.  You collect these in whatever way you wish to, and then they are there for you to come back to later.


I am currently working on an R&R, for a delightfully weird and personal article (when it comes out, you will immediately know that this is the article I am referencing). This article is one I wrote in a frenzied 10 days late last year and shot off to a journal I hoped would be amenable to publishing something like it. I realised, as I am sitting and thinking more purposefully and clearly about this article during revision, that this was an Otter that I didn’t put away. Rather, I set aside the work I was doing at the time (something I’ve been working on for the better part of three years, and which also received an R&R, and is my next job to tackle), and lived this weird and personal article. 
Obviously, this cannot be the fate of all Otters. Some of my current Otters are nothing more than a whisp of a thought. ‘Pharmakos Ritual/Taylor Swift Vigilante Shit – Hera’, reads one. ‘Demeter: suppliants touch her – votive reliefs, Eleusis’ reads another. ‘Funeral Oration: visual/tactile/love/monuments’, proclaims a third. I could probably sit down and work these things out, and one day I will. They are all ideas that, although perhaps don’t seem it, spark something in my brain.


And, as I work on this R&R, I have added several more Otters to the list. Things that I do want to work on, things that may come out of this current piece or may deviate from it. 
I suppose what I am trying to say is that research is not what I expected when I began researching as an Undergraduate staring down the barrel of a 25,000-word Honours thesis. It is not (just) sitting in a library and reading things, and then having thoughts and writing them down. Rather, it’s a weird collaboration between your past, present, and future selves, other scholars (some of whom you will never meet, some of whom you will disagree with, some of whom may become your friends). 


And that’s quite wonderful.