Why a blog?
Documenting the work, decisions, and detours that rarely appear in an academic CV.
This fall, I am beginning a PhD in linguistics at Université Laval. It seems like an appropriate moment to begin documenting some of the work that will go into it.
An academic CV will eventually record the visible results: articles published, presentations given, courses taught, grants received, and degrees completed. It may show where a project ended, but rarely how it began or what happened along the way.
That is what I would like this blog to preserve.
What the CV leaves out
The academic CV is a strange genre. It presents a career as a succession of completed achievements, arranged neatly under headings and in reverse chronological order.
Research does not usually happen that way.
A published article may have begun as a question that was abandoned, reframed, and rebuilt several times. A corpus may have required months of searching, negotiations over access, and technical work that disappears entirely from the final publication. A conference presentation may reflect an analysis that later proved inadequate. A grant proposal may contain the first version of an idea that eventually became something quite different.
None of this belongs on a CV. Much of it does not belong in an article either.
Yet these choices, failed approaches, technical obstacles, and changes of direction are often where the real intellectual work happens. They show not only what a researcher has produced, but how a research programme takes shape.
Without some record, they are remarkably easy to forget.
A record of work in progress
This blog will therefore serve partly as a research journal—although a selective and public one.
I expect to write about projects while they are still developing: why I chose a particular question, how a method changed, what made a dataset difficult to obtain, or why an apparently promising approach did not work. Some posts may document substantial milestones. Others may concern relatively small decisions whose importance becomes apparent only later.
The aim is not to provide a complete record of everything I do. Nor will every project be suitable for discussion before it is finished. Research sometimes involves confidential material, unpublished collaborations, or ideas that are not yet ready to be made public.
But there remains a great deal that can be documented without revealing results prematurely.
Writing about a project may also force me to clarify it. It is easy to believe that an idea is coherent while it remains in one’s head—or buried in a collection of notes, tables, scripts, and half-finished diagrams. Explaining why a decision was made requires a more explicit account of the problem it was intended to solve.
In that sense, the blog is not merely a record of the research. Writing may become part of the research process itself.
The practical work behind research
I also want to write about the technical and organizational work that supports academic projects.
Research increasingly depends on tools that are only partially visible in the resulting publications: reference managers, programming languages, corpus software, statistical packages, annotation platforms, version-control systems, and publishing workflows. Learning to use these tools often involves a mixture of documentation, experimentation, error messages, and advice scattered across the internet.
Some of the most useful things I have read online have been modest accounts of how another researcher solved a specific problem. They did not necessarily introduce a new method or make a grand argument. They simply explained what worked, what did not, and what they would do differently next time.
I hope to contribute a few such accounts.
My recent studies in computer science have made these practical questions particularly important to me. I am interested not only in using computational methods for linguistic research, but also in creating workflows that are transparent, reproducible, and manageable over the lifetime of a project.
That may lead to posts about building corpora, cleaning bibliographic records, automating repetitive tasks, publishing with open-source tools, or discovering that a supposedly simple technical solution is considerably less simple than advertised.
Decisions and changes of direction
There is another kind of information that rarely appears in formal academic writing: the reasoning behind professional decisions.
Why pursue one project rather than another? Why submit to a particular journal? Why accept—or decline—a role? When should a project be expanded, reduced, postponed, or abandoned? How does one decide which new skills are worth learning?
These decisions are often consequential, but their outcomes appear on a CV without explanation. The eventual entry may make the path look deliberate even when it involved substantial uncertainty.
I do not expect this blog to turn uncertainty into certainty. I am also wary of presenting personal experience as universal advice. Academic careers vary too much for that, and people often construct tidy explanations for decisions only after learning how things turned out.
Still, there may be value in recording what a decision looked like at the time it was made: what information was available, what alternatives seemed plausible, and what considerations ultimately mattered.
Future me may occasionally discover that present me was badly mistaken. That is also part of the record.
Not quite a professional brand
Academic websites are often described as exercises in professional visibility or personal branding. Those considerations are real. A website makes it easier for people to find one’s publications, learn about current projects, or make contact.
But a blog consisting only of polished announcements would reproduce the limitations of the CV in a more colourful format.
I would rather use this space to provide some context around the finished products. Publications and presentations will certainly appear here, but so will the less visible work surrounding them: planning, revising, troubleshooting, learning, and occasionally starting over.
The result may be less polished than a conventional professional profile. It should, however, be more accurate.
A place to begin
I do not know what this blog will look like in several years. It may become primarily a record of my doctoral research. It may expand to include teaching, academic publishing, programming, or reflections on the institutions in which research takes place.
Like the projects it documents, it will probably change direction.
For now, its purpose is simple: to preserve some of the work, decisions, and detours that would otherwise disappear behind the final line on a CV.