Letter by Letter: Manuscript Transcription and Historical Imagination

Slow scholarship? Cultural studies and television historiography

“…As historian Emily K. Abel writes in her contribution to Open to Disruption , “What is slow to a sociologist is fast to a historian … historians weave together in-depth analyses of material from disparate sources to compose a coherent narrative … [that] takes a long time” (2014: 197). Or as medievalist Karen Louise Jolly has written, “most historical research is a complex process of moving between text and theory, source and thought” (2019: 131). In my case, these patterns were further abetted by the voluminousness of soap opera texts.…”

“…Pragmatically speaking, I used non-linear, digital tools to manage my materials and to structure my narrative, a practice that felt essential for such work (Levine, 2016). These tools helped me to order the full book chronologically but to dwell in each era across multiple chapters.…”