So this week, your music information specialist found it necessary to post links about the Edinburgh Festivals, Glasgow’s Piping Live (and the launch of the Piping Centre’s ‘Noting the Tradition’ project, which I attended), and various research-support projects that I’ve come across.  Like #phdchat, on Twitter.  There’s also a #phdchat wiki on pbworks, and now there’s a blogspot blog, too.  I feel a bit like an octopus, reaching out to grab all these interesting ideas to pass on, in the hope they’ll appeal to our staff and student readers.

This is all well and good, but eventually I reach the stage where I feel I’m constantly connected.  It’s all useful stuff, but the more I draw into my web, the more I feel I’m only engaging with things at the most surface level.  At this point, I need to turn the computer and mobile phone off before I go bonkers!  Mind you, http://WhittakerLive.blogspot.com is looking good these days, and I like to think interest in it is increasing.  I’m also getting to “know” quite a few people with similar professional interests to my own.

At the end of my week off, I find I’ve got quite a bit of domesticity done, burned a few calories at the leisure centre, not to mention writing a conference report and turning a presentation into a journal article.  Result!  If I could just find the strength of mind to keep away from the internet for the weekend, I’d probably feel more rested when I get back to the office.  Being a workaholic isn’t always a good thing …

I needed a research subject that interested and motivated me, because fitting in part-time study on top of a full-time professional job was going to be challenging.  (I’ll blog about that another time.)  I was self-funded, so there was no pressure on me to pursue any particular research path, but I still needed to justify my research to myself as something that would be useful and relevant to me in my work.

I also had in mind the library research trips I’d been accustomed to make during my Exeter research days.  Who remembers microfilms?  Ughh!  But the reality was that, before the digital age, you either had to get a microfilm of a manuscript, or you made a trip to go and study it in person.  Remembering those time-consuming trips from Exeter to Shrewsbury, London and Oxbridge, and conscious that I still wouldn’t be able to get digitised copies of everything that interested me, I needed relatively easy access to the majority of my sources.  Most of my Scottish materials were accessible within a day-trip – and that’s quite important when you’ve got a family waiting for you at home!

And actually, I could trace a common thread between the Masters’ plainsong research and what I was doing now – tenuous, I’ll grant you, but both dealt with the transmission of repertoires in some sense.  The difference was that I was now considering cultural issues as well – and that was fascinating.

So my subject was chosen partly out of pragmatism, partly out of passion, and partly … well, why does anyone do research?  For the same reason that people climb mountains.  Because they’re there!