If you know me you’re probably one of two camps one being oh that explains a lot or, more likely, what are you talking about? And yes, this is about my Stickelchen project. Actually. All my projects. There’s a saying that perfectionism is the enemy of good enough. But for me it isn’t. I’ve got plenty of good enough out of my system. No where this all started was in editing a good enough essay and reading that I wrote something like “it’s known” and me asking… is it? By whom? And how can I repeat what I’ve read from this source when I haven’t read their sources? So I started prodding every single archive and every open access source, inter loaned articles. And that is how I started my Stickelchen essay (currently at 17 pages with no inline images.)

I had pretty much every single mss number for every single citation of work published from the 19thC on and yet I still was working with an absence of evidence. I had every section of my essay annotated as “check this.” Because most of the archives were summaries and standardised ones at that. And some of it is wrong. And do you know how scary it is to say “this is wrong?” Because it is.

So each time I disagreed with modern takes I found myself fact checking myself. I could have kept going back to ancient languages, which is where the perfectionism comes in. Each time I thought I could stop I had that same question of myself- am I sure I’ve interpreted this, have I missed context?

And thus the 19 year odyssey to prove myself wrong. I had someone say I could just pretend I didn’t figure out I was sharing the same misconceptions, but I can’t. I actually found it exciting, still do, to unpick this because it’s still a kind of discovery.

But yeah. I could have made a very short essay and published it as “more research is needed.” But I wanted to do that research. I reread my Stickelchen “essay” in hospital to just check in on the style- picking a style is harder than it seems. But that’s what I mean about how the closer to excellence you get the more investment in everything but your content you need.

My essay is good enough. But I want it to be excellent. Especially if I want to be taken seriously with my other papers. They all came out of this really, so it’s super foundational.

Also? I keep finding pockets of newly digitised sources! This last week I found several works to fold into my timeline of images of women of the North Rhine.

I’m having difficulties with file managers. For example Microsoft thinks the average user has 30K files and a “power” user has 400K so their indexer taps out at 1M… chaps- I think you’ll find system files and all the apps make up the bulk of both of these. I filtered out system files and I have about 2M. Some of these are current and old versions of apps. Do you know how long it takes to do multiple malware scans? It’s a lot.

So yes I could have stopped at good enough. But I really am passionate about this.