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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 desires Charlotte