Yesterday I listened to this podcast with Phil Cousineau because it came up in the dice roll of my driving playlist (I haven’t read the book underlying the discussion here, so no endorsements, just gesticulations).
This episode detailed the idea of treating travel as a pilgrimage: intentional, respectful, journey-focused. I was plunged back into memory. I recognized the idea of treating travel as a form of modern-day pilgrimage. I also recognized pilgrimage, not-so-modern-day, because back when I was a young teenager in a highly religious context I did one. Several days of marching under banners and several nights of camping, the first hiking boots I ever owned paired as was the fashion of my peers, with an ankle-length denim skirt that was awful and heavy for hiking. Perhaps that was my first experience with true weariness, and the memories I have are shot through with the euphoria that comes with accomplishment you can hardly believe you accomplished. Running in a field where we had stopped for lunch, huddling in a tent with my childhood best friend at night, coming into the church at the end of the pilgrimage grimy, filthy, days on the road turned into glory. We who were always expected to be scrubbed clean and arrayed in dresses every Sunday, allowed to be filthy entering the church this one time. Perhaps this was my first experience with being allowed to work, being a person journeying rather than a frozen statue.
Of course this memory is also shot through with my many existential and philosophical pilgrimages taken (both by choice and by expulsion) since. Recognition of the violent and genocidal histories of the lands over which we walked. The many horrific legacies I wanted to walk away from, not toward. Nothing about the idea of pilgrimage that I want to reference here is religious. Take this as philosophical, not religious. But it was startling to make the connection (I had never made it before) to this memory of long walks underneath banners and the blazing sun, and all of the days of hiking that I still do now. Gotcha, your developmental trajectory sometimes says in your ear. Values and philosophies and belief systems are like that. We learn patterns earlier than we realize, and we use them for ends we never could’ve imagined when we learned them.
Perhaps it was for this reason as I was listening that I connected this whole we-should-take-pilgrimages idea to my citation practice as well. Citation as Pilgrimage, is what I thought. I have felt like I’ve been on a journey. I have been reading research papers continually as I write my book. Dense, slippery, great chunks of papery reading, reading reading reading. They swim around my head as I go to sleep, participant lists and theories. They drift under my fingertips on the ipad that my wife has lent me as a means of buoying my reading-under-duress, my galloping manuscript journey. I traverse the mountains of new research areas, I slip back into the known valleys of old ones, and I question whether I like them, whether I believe them, whether I have faith. And of course the constant din outside of my little camping tent is the scientific establishment breaking down, my friends, my loved ones suffering. I read research papers interrupted with thoughts about whether the students who write them will be ok. Whether any of us will be ok.
One of the specific ideas mentioned in this episode clicked in my head with citations as well: the long-held many-cultures notion that it is the duty of the traveler who succeeds to come back and share with those at the beginning of the trail. You are required to pass along what you have learned to others embarking on the journey you have survived. This communal and socially shared obligation is an uncomfortable fit in an isolation-biased world. Do you owe other people your knowledge? I think my answer is yes. We do owe each other. Why? Because my mind was built with other people’s knowledge. Another memory: when I was a teenager trying hard to learn things out of books, I wrote a pretty meta meditation about books and the act of reading, an idea that I later turned into a paper in a psychology class in college that was about books when books were rare and reading as a form of communal social action. When consuming books in groups might have been more normal than reading alone. Being in the literature was about inhabiting and belonging, not just about plucking content out and fashioning it into new content.
So citing others and making those citations visible and legible and choice-filled and not automatic, but finely read, is a practice that keeps me sane. Sometimes a really obnoxious thing that gets said about people like me (not-the-usual-kind-of-software people having software opinions) is that you should know your place but the funny thing is that I think I do. Knowing my place in the literature is what gives me ground. Knowing our place, you know? People often make note of the fact that I am an applied researcher in an applied world (a leader, even!) and that I still perform large literature reviews (how can you read?). People (and don’t worry if you have been one of them, I recognize that we shout at each other from different hiking trails, try hard to give good directions) have also told me to leave those off. Very scientific, very dry, very full of other people’s ideas. Not cool to give credit, the isolation biased capitalist competition monster hisses. Unfortunately I have made it a point of pride to cite other people and maintain these lists despite living so far outside of the incentive structures of academia. It puts me on the map, it puts me on other people’s maps. Over the last three years of being a VP of Research at a technology company I have read a lot of reports that don’t seem to have any authors and that write into being ideas without any previous literature, ideas without reference. My pilgrimage is outside of industry practices.
But neither are academic practices entirely right for me, for my citations include the grey literature, blogposts, sometimes, swirling and important directions like weather from the community of software practitioners and thinkers who offer me something to think about, although I am still learning to do it. I try to think about how I can pass along what I have learned to other people traversing the papers, reading the artifacts I am leaving behind. For instance theory, which is present both in empirical form but also as folk theory from a beloved practitioner, and I think we all know which one of those is usually more enduring and impactful. So for me, my pilgrimage across the landscape of software commentary and software thinking battlefields is not just for fellow academicians, fellow scientists. Sometimes you cite something because you want to say I want you to know that I know. I want you to know that I listened. Grimy, worn from days of hiking, you come into the sacred spaces of the scientific paper and you bring all your dirt and tea and quiet conversations in the hallways of tech conferences with exhausted people with you. Because I learned that my route, my pilgrimage, was going to take me very far outside of the ivory tower.
Who are your people, then, for whom you are doing citation? The people who will walk the road you will walk, or the people who already have. The people who you find when you battle up a hill as I did several years ago in Scotland with my lungs hurting (they hurt all the time back then) and found three girls sitting on rocks on the other side of it taking pictures, and I took pictures of them for them because that’s what you do for strangers on the trail, one minute you are alone on the face of this small rocky planet struggling against the interior tissues of your own chest cavity and the next moment you are thinking about the angles of a stranger’s face because you want them to be happy and you know you don’t always like the photos people take of you and you pride yourself on taking very good photos of strangers. They are happy; they exult. I feel pride; I feel like a big sister. This memory is with me as much as the fine crunch of rocks and the ice cold air and the ancient hills. It is instant, this kind of connection, it is like a fundamental force, less feeling for than feeling with.
To travel and hike alone as a queer woman of no great physical stature and with traitorously irritating lungs in the world can be a fearful thing. But the other side of hiking alone is experiencing the thin skin between you and other people and sometimes what is on the other side is deep care. Immediate access to the heart. I can't stop traveling alone for those chances. I have been taken care of a great many times in both Scotland and Wales. Recently, a while after my long walk or possibly pilgrimage in Scotland, I drove to Wales where I had never been before and took a steep walk. It was the kind of place where the bottom of the hill could be sunny and the top could be sheeting down rain turning into ice, and I was dressed like someone who had been to a conference and stuffed a San Diegan’s version of a coat into whatever space was leftover from conference clothes (another kind of pilgrimage, with its own gear). So I was badly cold at the summit of this hike, and my lungs were giving out on me. I wondered if I should go back down. I sat down hard on a large flat rock with an asthma attack trying to crawl up my throat from the inside, and rain and tears on my face. I felt infinitely, incredibly alone. I felt the rage of illness and uncertain, whiplashing, unpredictable disability. I felt scared. Why had I even come here? How stupid was it to try? Then an old Welsh man walked sprightly around the bend and looked at me with such kindness. “Taking a little rest now,” he said, perhaps someone who did this hike every day, and yet he carried that familiarity like a blanket for me, “Nothing wrong with that. You’re nearly there. Nothing wrong with stopping, just for a bit.”
During my qualifying exam–which is a gatekeeping kind of ritual in graduate school where they drape you all over in meritocracy, or whatever; before you were just a student and then you become a candidate–I cited a famous set of experiments that had been retracted for fraud. It was outside of my subdiscipline and I knew the first thing and not the second. One of my interrogators visibly recoiled in his chair when he saw the citation (one of many) on the slides I was using to illustrate the literature review I'd conducted. The first biting question out of his mouth was: how could you not know? I felt drenched in shame, smothered in it, like someone had emptied a steaming tray of lasagna on top of me. I had, truly, no idea, obviously I had just read some citations and trusted them. I stumbled over an answer, I promised repentance. My arguments did not hinge on the particular findings of that particular study; I had thought I was doing The Thing To Do, which is cite the things everyone else cited. I was just learning, and learning is associative. I did not have a citation practice, I just had a citation reaction back then. Information travels unequally and inequitably about these things: credit for the powerful travels fast, retraction of that power travels quietly and slowly through the social networks that I was not a part of. So you see, I understand that science is not inherently good. It is just inherently human. The papers had been in the journals I was reading, the retractions came only later in small print and small blogs and via the people that my interrogator spoke with at conferences. It was not really a statement about my literature review, it was a statement about whether I had gone to the right parties at a conference, and I hadn’t.
Because humiliation is a powerful force in the memory formation of a social species, this is the only moment I remember from that milestone. I became a PhD candidate with that bitter taste in my mouth like the coin to the underworld. Some stranger, some powerful and famous man's mistake transmuted to my shame as if I had anything to do with him. I learned then that this shadow shaming is part of the economics of much citation, an expected mechanism.
This is the anti-example for my citation practice now. This was not the version of knowledge transfer I wanted. It wasn't one I could've endured. The 1980s dirty carpet seminar room with bad lighting and editors-in-chief going around each other in a forever game of musical chairs finding someone to leave out, science about careers rather than science about living. So on a mission to find my own different citation pilgrimage I began to do foolish things, non-academic things. During my postdoc I read low citation count papers and sent emails to authors saying that I liked them. I read qualitative. During my brief stint as a very bored analyst I put a reference list on a stakeholder brief and someone called me pompous for it which might have seemed true to them (I was just straight-out flat madness-inducing levels of bored, which can make you go the extra mile in ways that can seem like pompous), but what neither of us knew at the time was that I was working out the habits that would serve me on my citation pilgrimage. I didn't think anyone else was going to read those references. I just knew I had. You are required to pass along what you have learned to others embarking on the journey you have survived.
Now I’m good at it. Now I read scientific papers constantly, a stream of papers, I bombard my university friends for copies of things I can’t get, I pick the locks of those libraries constantly, you can take the girl out of the academia but you can’t take the academia out of the girl, take that elitism, running out the door with your methods such as I want them, no take-backsies. My wife (a professor) says that I read more papers than most professors, and I say that’s probably true because you have to be in five or six fields at once to do what I do. Citations from one field and another and me on a slackline between them not looking down. But I know how to benefit from this reading now. It is immensely valuable work; I have access to a form of knowledge that not a lot of people are willing to invest in. I take joy in fashioning the steps of translation that make this easier for people who have been on different journeys and now seek to enter some part of the trail I’ve been hiking for so many years alone: I like this study, I like these ideas, I have benefitted from them. I have a vast cathedral of memory and knowledge and I do not need you to think that I alone built it. I would like these people to succeed and I would like you to see that what you value in me is a network of the messages left by other travelers who did not know how I was going to use them, but wanted me to have that option because they felt they owed me something.
These days having moved from "what the hell are you doing in the sacred halls of research" to getting sales pitches aimed at people who Are Research, I regularly see advertisement for tools that claim to be AI (tools shimmed into the rather homogenous world of AI between the person and the model, really, always entities taking credit credit credit everywhere with no citation) that also purport to summarize all those pesky papers so you can cite them without reading them. Well, good luck babe. I get a mild chuckle out of the idea that all the people who didn't want to read papers before actually were. We who read know when you're not. I recently read a paper about gender and the perception and design of product features and they quoted Judith Butler but they cited a business school marketing study that put several MBA students in a scanner and made a mountain out of an artifact of group difference in the tradition of innate brain difference gender phrenology. Wild times out there in the reference sections. Go ahead and send your robots out into our pilgrimage; they won't form our memories.
Across fields, jobs, fallow and frightening times in my career, and a great many changes to how people see me, my citations travel with me. Some of my oldest often-relied on bodies of research work have become like touchstones. I recommend and recall specific papers, which forms a deeper kind of memory around them. I began at some point to push myself to better remember not just paper titles but names, so that in the transient moments of communication, unlike AI, I can say names. Memory is one of the treasures I have acquired on this pilgrimage, a persistent companion. By treating citation practice like a long walk I aspire to the kind of mindful attention that forms memory in the first place. When you walk, you think differently. And because it exists in opposition to all of this very personal, slow, and human hiking I have disdain for the faceless, credit-hogging, SEO-desperate content vulture behaviors of so many software-focused media, the grabs that steal studies and findings and barf out a summary of someone else's work, rigorous work, actual work, and try to game the only single thing you get when you do open science which is your name and ownership and pride of craft and pride of doing. These grabs are drones on the hiking trail and I abhor them.
That developmental echo in my ear again because I have returned, I see, to the teenage self and the pure intuition I had even back then that reading was going to be a central activity of mine and also that whatever reading is, whatever many things, it is a cultural practice, a skill, a thing to learn and relearn how to do. A choice. It is pilgrimage time, long walk time, travel away from the comfortable and repeating thought patterns. It is choosing effort despite our mind's cognitive miser, choosing walking despite my lungs hurting. It is worth noting that reading things well is a feminized skill and of course it is because it is necessary and they can't control it so they try to punish it. Oh well. Too bad. Good luck.
Now shh. The girls are reading.