Transcontinental
by James Lamb
January 2024
by James Lamb
January 2024
This is one of four playlists that emerged from an experiment where four academic authors documented and then reflected upon the ways that music shaped their writing spaces. They did this while separately working on book chapters for the edited collection, 'Postdigital Learning Spaces: Towards Convivial, Equitable and Sustainable Spaces of Learning'. Elsewhere on this site you will find the playlists compiled by David Overend, Genaro Oliveira and John Potter, the other authors involved in this project. The playlists are each presented alongside a reflective commentary, like the one below, that were written as part of the experiment. A fuller account of this exercise is offered within the Postdigital Learning Spaces book which is due to be published by Springer during summer 2024.
There were two stages to writing my chapter, which was an autoethnographic account of a transcontinental train journey between Scotland and Switzerland. I was interested in testing out whether the train journey could work as a productive learning space, and I explored this across four days of rail travel to and from an academic conference. During the journey I recorded field notes and short reflections that documented my surroundings, activities and experiences. A later stage of writing involved reorganising and refining this material to broadly match the conventions of an academic chapter.
Before all of this, though, I had prepared a playlist for my journey. This was done in a hurried and unsophisticated way, it being my final bit of packing the night before I was due to travel. Cloud storage and synching devices have never been a personal strong point, which means that over the years I’ve amassed thousands of burned and downloaded tracks within the iTunes library of an obsolete computer. It was from this library that I hastily copied music onto a USB drive, before merging them with an existing playlist on the laptop I was taking to Switzerland. I chose music that I felt would be conducive to working, or simply a source of pleasure. Goldfrapp’s Train was in there, although I inexplicably overlooked Kraftwerk’s Transeurope Express.
This new collection of music sat alongside existing ‘work playlists’ on my laptop: ‘AIR’, ‘Morricone’, ‘Best of 2021’. Film scores and television soundtracks also often help me to write: John Hopkins' Monsters and Clint Mansell's Moon.; Stranger Things and The Singing Detective. There was time to sample them all during my 30-plus hours of conference travel. I have other playlists in Mixcloud, although I didn’t access them during my transcontinental train journey,
For the most part, I create playlists to last around an hour, and have a rule where I’m not allowed to do anything but write or some other kind work until the music stops. The pleasure associated with listening to these collections acts as an enticement to sit down and write, before providing a kind of discipline in keeping me on task. In fact, in the case of Mixcloud the music never stops because one playlist is immediately followed by another, which sometimes brings the benefit of writing beyond the designated hour without noticing.
In general, I listen to music in the earlier stages of writing when I’m putting down ideas and writing in an exploratory way, but rarely when it comes to refining my thoughts and polishing the work to make it ready for a public audience. For me, music supports the creative stages of writing, but is less helpful when precision is required. This being the case, I regularly listened to music as I journeyed between Scotland and Switzerland, but rarely while ‘writing-up’ upon my return.
James Lamb is a lecturer in digital education at the University of Edinburgh, where he researches and teaches around the relationship between digital technologies and learning spaces.
There were two stages to writing my chapter, which was an autoethnographic account of a transcontinental train journey between Scotland and Switzerland. I was interested in testing out whether the train journey could work as a productive learning space, and I explored this across four days of rail travel to and from an academic conference. During the journey I recorded field notes and short reflections that documented my surroundings, activities and experiences. A later stage of writing involved reorganising and refining this material to broadly match the conventions of an academic chapter.
Before all of this, though, I had prepared a playlist for my journey. This was done in a hurried and unsophisticated way, it being my final bit of packing the night before I was due to travel. Cloud storage and synching devices have never been a personal strong point, which means that over the years I’ve amassed thousands of burned and downloaded tracks within the iTunes library of an obsolete computer. It was from this library that I hastily copied music onto a USB drive, before merging them with an existing playlist on the laptop I was taking to Switzerland. I chose music that I felt would be conducive to working, or simply a source of pleasure. Goldfrapp’s Train was in there, although I inexplicably overlooked Kraftwerk’s Transeurope Express.
This new collection of music sat alongside existing ‘work playlists’ on my laptop: ‘AIR’, ‘Morricone’, ‘Best of 2021’. Film scores and television soundtracks also often help me to write: John Hopkins' Monsters and Clint Mansell's Moon.; Stranger Things and The Singing Detective. There was time to sample them all during my 30-plus hours of conference travel. I have other playlists in Mixcloud, although I didn’t access them during my transcontinental train journey,
For the most part, I create playlists to last around an hour, and have a rule where I’m not allowed to do anything but write or some other kind work until the music stops. The pleasure associated with listening to these collections acts as an enticement to sit down and write, before providing a kind of discipline in keeping me on task. In fact, in the case of Mixcloud the music never stops because one playlist is immediately followed by another, which sometimes brings the benefit of writing beyond the designated hour without noticing.
In general, I listen to music in the earlier stages of writing when I’m putting down ideas and writing in an exploratory way, but rarely when it comes to refining my thoughts and polishing the work to make it ready for a public audience. For me, music supports the creative stages of writing, but is less helpful when precision is required. This being the case, I regularly listened to music as I journeyed between Scotland and Switzerland, but rarely while ‘writing-up’ upon my return.
James Lamb is a lecturer in digital education at the University of Edinburgh, where he researches and teaches around the relationship between digital technologies and learning spaces.
