While I have watched the blogging phenomenon from the sidelines for many years, if you had asked me two weeks ago whether I was considering starting my own blog I would have said no. But here we are. What happened?

It started with my intention to write a conference proposal for Digital Humanities 2013 in Nebraska. I received approval from my boss, started doing some reading, jotted down a few ideas. I even wrote some paragraphs well before the deadline started to loom; but something wasn’t right. Against all expectations the deadline was extended due to Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the east cost of the United States. I had another 48 hours, and planned to spend it doing more reading and writing. Surely it was long enough.

It wasn’t. Yes, I had close to 1500 words (I tend toward the verbose, so hitting word counts has never been my issue). But it was just a series of facts, with no argument or insight. I felt like I didn’t have anything meaningful to say, so I held back and submitted nothing.

For the first time in my university career I had failed to produce something I was happy with in time for a deadline. It didn’t even have to be perfect, just good enough. It wasn’t. I outlined the reason in an email to my boss: “every day and week feels like a sprint from one end to the other … my time is taken up responding to emails, managing people, logistics, organisation, etc.” I had lost my headspace; lost my time to think. I wasn’t happy.

Context Junky is the result. This is my headspace.

You can find out more about me here:  http://www.mikejonesonline.com/contextjunky/about/

Or get a sense of some of my previous papers, reports and archival guides here: http://www.mikejonesonline.com/contextjunky/publications/

Otherwise, come back soon. The current plan is to post once a week, and we’ll take it from there.