Sunday, March 12, 2006

Movement History Site Updated

As I occasionally mention in posts on this site, the central focus of my productive life at the moment is not actually blogging but in fact trying to produce a book and perhaps other things with oral history interviews I did with 50 long-time activists in various social movements across Canada. In the last six months I have not done a good job at all of keeping that project's web site updated. Today, finally, I have changed that. Here is the text from today's long overdue update:

After the longest gap in site updates in the history of the project, we're back. The gap in updates has not meant a lack of work, however. Back in the fall the project received a thumbs down from the publisher I'd been talking to so far -- not exactly happy news, but not exactly uncommon when you're trying to get a book published, either. Much of the time since then has been spent developing a new vision for the book and then trying to put it into practice. This meant about half of what had so far been written as of my last update had to be discarded. The rest plus a bunch of new stuff has been cut, pasted, stitched, and sewn into a new model intro and three new model chapters. This material is out with trusted colleagues and allies and friends for comment on the new structure. Once I have their input I will make decisions about further changes, produce an updated book proposal, and send it off to a different publisher. In the meantime, I am following some advice from my partner and putting thought and effort into thinking about other, smaller and less involved outputs that could be created from all this wonderful interview material -- I'll be sure to post to the site when/if anything comes of those efforts!


Please visit the site to learn more about the project!

2 comments:

rabfish said...

hmm, thinking about smaller outputs from the interviews is a wonderful idea. Go SR!

What sorts of smaller outputs have you considered so far?

Scott Neigh said...

Short, thematic articles for Canadian alt/indy print publications. Short, interview-based articles for the same. Longer, theme-based academicish articles for related journals, or possibly interview-based articles for similar kinds of sources. Not sure what else. I'm open to suggestions!

Right now I have one specific idea falling into the first category that I'm going to try. One chapter that fit into the previous version of the book but has no place in the new vision might make a good longer article, if suitably rewritten and if I can come up with a reasonable venue for it.