I'll be honest, this has been a very strange month (when I say month, I'm
really talking about October but of course it's now November and I wouldn't
discount the last few days from that strangeness.).

When I approached Beryl and Sarah to host October's discussion I had certain
hopes or aims for the month, some of which I've achieved, some of which I've
had to discard and some of which I've failed at. For example, I intended to
spend the first week talking about mailing list culture itself, filling in
the gaps in my knowledge and considering the way lists are valuable art
historical archives. But, when everyone was so generous in sharing their own
list experiences and the initial topic spread beyond the first week I had to
take stock. Do I move onto the next writers or do I keep with this. Of
course a list can contain many threads of discussion, but you have to get a
balance - and for the first time I was learning exactly what it's like to be
a list moderator who has to make such decisions. Colleagues at my new
university suggested I step back and let the discussions play out. And I was
inclined to agree. After all, I really needed observe not just what people
thought about the history of lists, but also how lists are used now. It was
therefore every bit as important to me to learn who used what list and when,
as to discover that some people still really understand the list space while
others have sworn off lists for eternity or migrated to different platforms.
Plus, the initial success of October saw a rush of people unsubscribing.

A corollary of that was that it suddenly seemed wrong to share drafts of
what I'd written about list culture. I suppose this is an ethnographic
issue. How do you measure the impact you're having on what you observe? So
instead, I continued to speak to people off list about how they might
contribute (discussions that had been happening for some months as I was
keen to find a way to build a resource that might parallel or oppose the
book I'm writing with lots of voices.) Many people had told me in the months
before the discussion that they either didn't have the time required for
list discussion or they didn't like the format any more. Fair enough, I
thought, I'll pass on bites of the rest of the web and the discussion can
sprawl across different platforms as it sees fit. I was surprised to
discover, for example, that my Facebook page could host one of the most
successful discussion threads of the month - where I asked about Luther
Blissett and NN and got deluged with comments. I even got many private
messages and emails helping me build a better picture of what these entities
had done and meant at the time - and was given very useful advice on how to
proceed with due care and attention to those hurt by such actions.

This was extremely interesting for me not least because, during the month I
also did an interview on my own research practices with a PhD student at
UCL. I was invited to explain how I gather and protect material and even how
I work with topics where the histories are complex and or more oral. This
was the perfect example of trying to piece together a history I didn't
witness which effectively destroyed some of the archives that were recording
it. Not an easy thing to research and analyse, but here I was hosting a
discussion that was not only giving me the information I needed, but showing
me some definite methods for gathering that material and making me even more
aware of the politics of gathering such data. Indeed this also came out when
I discussed whether lists could be archived. I was planning on putting in a
funding application to make a test case and see whether data could be
restored tided up a bit. I had this vision of creating a way to keyword and
categorise list content so that newcomers could access long-buried texts.
But already I could see from people's comments that this was going to be too
divisive - if not too difficult a task.

One of the things that really struck me during the month was how much people
were talking about lists again - particularly off-list - and the way this
had partly performed a re-archivisation. Much of the history of lists is
actually stored in people. It's a very oral history. Although we have the
archives of texts, lists were built on human connections, face-to-face
meetings and discussions. Many people emailed me off list to tell me how
they'd been  reminiscing and this made me think about how, by
re-articulating that history, it was being taken forward anyway. OK, so we
don't end up with a more accessible archive, as such, but we do end up with
the relevant stories being passed on and that's more than a start.

On top of the challenge of the different topics I'd set out to discuss
(which, I noted, many thought were too broad for focused discussion), then
there was also a problem with getting different tribes of people to talk in
the same space. I tried desperately to get people like Paddy Johnston (from
artfcity fame) to talk about her own history as an art critical blogger, but
to no avail. I also tried to get the art history blogging community to talk
but this discussion thread suffered a very different and tragic fate (which
I'll come back to). People were telling me in email, on Facebook message and
via Twitter direct message that they didn't feel comfortable talking on a
list. Some of them said that all the reminiscing that had gone on - and
which was extremely useful to me for my research - had made them feel
excluded. They didn't see how their own online art writing connected
somehow. And then I brought in fabulous - or so I thought - examples of work
that examine everything from art-focsed discussion lists to Twitter and it
didn't really get picked up on. For example, for me, Lori Waxman's 60wrd/min
art critic is a fascinating project that makes art critical labour visible,
asks after the acceleration of all things art world (from faster writing to
faster viewing) and considers how writing contributes meaning and value to
works. By this point, having decided not to share my own rough drafts, I was
left second-guessing how to proceed. If Waxman's work isn't being discussed
would mine? 

And then, in the worst case imaginable of directly experiencing an aspect of
list/online life, I was knocked for six by losing an online collaborator.
Just as people had reminisced about the strong connections they'd made
online, through lists, a man I've written publicly and privately to and with
for several years passed away suddenly. By this point I found I was directly
experiencing what it's like to moderate (great research for the book), how
lists are still a complex and contested territory (great research for the
book) and then how intertwined our on and offline lives are (great research
for the......[insert collapsing on the floor emoticon here])

In fact, the death of Hasan Niyazi has gone on to become something I could
never have imagined. Firstly he was the gracious gatekeeper to the art
history blog camp. He'd surveyed the activities of some 30 or so art history
bloggers and we were working on a paper together. If I ever had any hope of
getting art history bloggers to talk about their work on this list it would
be through him. And so he passed just hours after writing a blog post to
them all asking them to join in. So not only did nobody ever take up his
call (actually that's not true, a few people did) but by the time we'd all
heard the news, we were onto more important things. Then I went AWOL from
this discussion, not just because I was grieving for a man I've never met
but because we - the community of people who had worked alongside him online
- were suddenly implicated in considering the legacy of his work. I'll be
honest, his work is waaaaaay off topic for me, and I did tease him about his
prose style and formal approach but I knew that as an outsider art
historian, he always saw such formal behaviour as the key to the door.
Anyway, not only are there his online projects to consider (and thankfully
he'd once thought to give his partner all his passwords) but then there's
the unfinished work - things he was working on with me and others and the
entire case study of the death of an art historian who works entirely
online. So while I was supposed to be talking to all of you, I was actually
in a Google Doc with the network of people brought even closer together by
Hasan's death, trying to work out a way forwards. Asking who would take on
which resource and ifwe could form a committee to agree on whether I can use
material we were producing together and indeed if everyone will permit me -
sometime in the future - to write about this curious and painful case study
in digital art history and online art discussion.

There is a wealth of information in this month's discussion that I've barely
scratched the surface of and I'd like to thank everyone who shared on-list
and off because you've provided more than I could have hoped  for (both in
terms of content and experience). I also hope you'll be willing to speak to
me privately in the coming months as I work through these links and ideas
and have more questions.

But for now I wish you all the unicorn chasing and cat herding your heart
desiresŠ

Charlotte