my portable brain
Mar. 2nd, 2016 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aryanhwyIt was around 6 years ago that we decided to retire our desktops in favor of dedicated laptops. With docks, the experience at home wasn't all that different -- we'd come home from the office, put our laptops in the docks, and then have full monitors, full keyboards, external mice, etc.
My keyboard, which got me through all of grad school both in the US and in the Netherlands, not to mention regularly caking up with cat hair, finally gave up the ghost when Gwen was a month or two old (when the 'tab' button no longer works, you know it's unusable), at which point I was just TOO TIRED. Too tired to research alternatives, too tired to find out if there were any computer stores in Tilburg to try things out in person, too tired to care.
Fastforward 4+ years, and guess who still hasn't replaced her keyboard, and thus hasn't used her dock or her external monitor in that period? (And, yes, that monitor sat on my desk, unloved for about 3 of them, until finally, after we moved to Durham, Joel decided it was too old and sold it). Part of the reason I continued to have little impetus to replace the keyboard in the intervening time is that I rarely had time when I could be "tied" to a desk -- instead, if Gwen was around, I found it much more convenient to have the flexibility of bringing the laptop with me wherever she was.
At Durham, I was given a desktop, but it's a) Windows, b) doesn't know me, c) so locked down I couldn't install any of the programs I want/need, etc., so I basically use it to play music, retrieve scans from the scanner, and watch snooker. I bring my laptop out every day, and usually plunk it down on a pile of books, to bring it to the right height, on my desk.
I've long been a fan of extended mind/embodied cognition theories wherein external scaffolding, such as technology, are not merely tools that we make use of but somehow become a part of the architecture of our minds. I used to jokingly say that I store my beer preferences in Joel. More generally, people are increasingly relying on technology for the storage of facts; it doesn't matter if I don't know what the atomic weight of baryllium is, if I know where to retrieve this fact from my external storage. I feel that my laptop is rather like my glasses -- I can function without both, but not well, and not happily.
In the last few months my research pendulum has swung from the onomastics side of things back to the hard logic side of things; I've had to write (and rewrite) definitions, come up with lemmas, prove things, etc., and in doing so I've been spending more and more time in front of the whiteboard. It's not that I really do anything all that different when I'm writing on the board vs. writing on paper vs. typing on the computer -- but for some reason (part of it is the standing up; part of it is the moving around; part of it is the ease with which things can be erased and restored) I find I think differently when I'm in front of the board: I'm much more likely to get clear thoughts typed up if I first draft them on the whiteboard.
Where the board is hung in my office, I can see it from my desk (even though it's on a wall 90 degrees from my desk, and on the other side). So, once things have been outlined on the board, in principle, I could sit at the desk and do the relevant transcription, but I'm finding I don't. Instead -- and this is why I am glad I have a laptop -- I either plunk my comfy chair in front of the whiteboard and work there, or I balance the laptop on top of the printer, and type/write/transcribe standing up.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately because I can feel the processes working differently. I don't really have any conclusions to draw, simply observations.
My keyboard, which got me through all of grad school both in the US and in the Netherlands, not to mention regularly caking up with cat hair, finally gave up the ghost when Gwen was a month or two old (when the 'tab' button no longer works, you know it's unusable), at which point I was just TOO TIRED. Too tired to research alternatives, too tired to find out if there were any computer stores in Tilburg to try things out in person, too tired to care.
Fastforward 4+ years, and guess who still hasn't replaced her keyboard, and thus hasn't used her dock or her external monitor in that period? (And, yes, that monitor sat on my desk, unloved for about 3 of them, until finally, after we moved to Durham, Joel decided it was too old and sold it). Part of the reason I continued to have little impetus to replace the keyboard in the intervening time is that I rarely had time when I could be "tied" to a desk -- instead, if Gwen was around, I found it much more convenient to have the flexibility of bringing the laptop with me wherever she was.
At Durham, I was given a desktop, but it's a) Windows, b) doesn't know me, c) so locked down I couldn't install any of the programs I want/need, etc., so I basically use it to play music, retrieve scans from the scanner, and watch snooker. I bring my laptop out every day, and usually plunk it down on a pile of books, to bring it to the right height, on my desk.
I've long been a fan of extended mind/embodied cognition theories wherein external scaffolding, such as technology, are not merely tools that we make use of but somehow become a part of the architecture of our minds. I used to jokingly say that I store my beer preferences in Joel. More generally, people are increasingly relying on technology for the storage of facts; it doesn't matter if I don't know what the atomic weight of baryllium is, if I know where to retrieve this fact from my external storage. I feel that my laptop is rather like my glasses -- I can function without both, but not well, and not happily.
In the last few months my research pendulum has swung from the onomastics side of things back to the hard logic side of things; I've had to write (and rewrite) definitions, come up with lemmas, prove things, etc., and in doing so I've been spending more and more time in front of the whiteboard. It's not that I really do anything all that different when I'm writing on the board vs. writing on paper vs. typing on the computer -- but for some reason (part of it is the standing up; part of it is the moving around; part of it is the ease with which things can be erased and restored) I find I think differently when I'm in front of the board: I'm much more likely to get clear thoughts typed up if I first draft them on the whiteboard.
Where the board is hung in my office, I can see it from my desk (even though it's on a wall 90 degrees from my desk, and on the other side). So, once things have been outlined on the board, in principle, I could sit at the desk and do the relevant transcription, but I'm finding I don't. Instead -- and this is why I am glad I have a laptop -- I either plunk my comfy chair in front of the whiteboard and work there, or I balance the laptop on top of the printer, and type/write/transcribe standing up.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately because I can feel the processes working differently. I don't really have any conclusions to draw, simply observations.
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Date: 2016-03-05 08:59 pm (UTC)My ability to write academic stuff is pretty completely dependent on sitting at the dining table, I find. I can do find-the-detail research work anywhere, but I can't write longer academic prose anywhere else. I can do work stuff at the table, at my desk in work, and somewhat slowly from the couch - slowly because I am somewhat covered in cats there. I can also work perfectly well from anywhere that has a table, but not from bed. For fiction writing (which hasn't happened much lately, really), I can write absolutely anywhere, but it has to be on a laptop. For poetry, I can only write it longhand, often with much scribbling, and then transcribe it. And for game notes for my campaigns, again, longhand only. All of these are purely driven by habit and initial circumstance, but they are now quite solidly true.