Dammit I’m mad.
    Evil is a deed as I live.
    God, am I reviled? I rise, my bed on a sun, I melt.
    To be not one man emanating is sad. I piss.
    Alas, it is so late. Who stops to help?
    Man, it is hot. I’m in it. I tell.
    I am not a devil. I level “Mad Dog”.
    Ah, say burning is, as a deified gulp,
    In my halo of a mired rum tin.
    I erase many men. Oh, to be man, a sin.
    Is evil in a clam? In a trap?
    No. It is open. On it I was stuck.
    Rats peed on hope. Elsewhere dips a web.
    Be still if I fill its ebb.
    Ew, a spider… eh?
    We sleep. Oh no!
    Deep, stark cuts saw it in one position.
    Part animal, can I live? Sin is a name.
    Both, one… my names are in it.
    Murder? I’m a fool.
    A hymn I plug, deified as a sign in ruby ash,
    A Goddam level I lived at.
    On mail let it in. I’m it.
    Oh, sit in ample hot spots. Oh wet!
    A loss it is alas (sip). I’d assign it a name.
    Name not one bottle minus an ode by me:
    “Sir, I deliver. I’m a dog”
    Evil is a deed as I live.
    Dammit I’m mad.

I have no idea who wrote this or who sent it to me, but it's probably one of the world's longest palindromes, and I've wanted to post it for a long time. Happy New Year to you all!

Update: After intensive research (I googled the first two lines), I found out who wrote the palindrome: It was Demetri Martin.

Looking back on my 2009, there is one topic dominating: My master thesis. Sure, a lot of other things happened in 2009 too - I co-founded Sandbox, which has developed greatly in the last months; I wrote a blog on new media and technology; and more. But still, 2009 was for me clearly the Year of the Thesis. So now, two months after having handed it in and with the end of the year approaching, it seems like a good time to ask myself what I actually learned from writing the thesis.

First, some background: I'm studying in a university system that is not split into bachelor and master. This means that the master thesis (which is called "licenciate") is the only big paper I had to write and thus carries more weight. I had decided already in 2008 to write my thesis in medieval history. It was also clear to me that it would look into "propaganda" in the Middle Ages, a topic I had touched upon a few years earlier in a class on the crusades. After some research, I decided to look at propaganda in letters written during the Investiture Contest, the big and defining struggle between the papacy and the German empire in the 11th and 12th century.

But apart from now knowing a lot about a certain period in European history that not many other people care about - what did I learn? Here's my (probably incomplete) list:

Perseverance pays off: I worked on my thesis for almost ten months, during which my life was, well, pretty dull. I went to university, read books, and wrote. (I occasionally switched places though.) Most of the texts I read were interesting, but not fascinating, and I was progressing slowly, if at all. I was haunted by self-doubts; often, it felt like I had made no headway at all or, even worse, had gone in the completely wrong direction. Only at the very end, when I was writing my conclusion (while also preparing to move, researching two articles, and coming down with the flu) I realized that I'd actually done a lot of work; and I felt like having a deep knowledge of the topic I was writing about.

Definitions, or: Think hard about what you want to think about. While doing research for my thesis, I encountered two problems: I realized that "propaganda" was a modern term, inexistent in the 11th century (it was coined in the 17th, but got the meaning it has today only in the 20th century), and that even the modern scientific definitions of "propaganda" remain rather unclear. The phenomenon I intended to research was not only unkown in the period I wanted to look at, but also ill-defined today - a historian's nightmare. To solve the problem, I first derived a set of criteria for propaganda from modern scientific literature, and then assessed the relevance of each criterium for the 11th century. This provided me with a theoretical framework for analyzing propaganda in the Middle Ages. The part of my thesis describing this framework is only 20 pages long (compared to almost 100 pages of source analysis), but I spent almost an equal amount of time on both these parts. I'm convinced that this paid off - having spent so much time developing the framework, I knew exactly what I was looking for.

Love your data (and organize it): Writing a master thesis in history is basically an exercise in managing large amounts of complex data: The literature on the subject you need to consult, and the sources you want to analyze. Because it's a lot of data, it takes a lot of time to look at. And because it takes a lot of time, you start to forget things. Therefore, it's crucial to organize your data meticulously and be really, really careful with it. I forced myself to take very detailed notes on all the texts I read into a literature database (which slows down reading a lot). I analyzed my sources (around 80 letters) by creating an Excel sheet that had a column for each aspect of the analysis. Information about distribution of the letters were aggregated in a separate Excel file. When I started my work, I made a backup copy of all this data to my Dropbox every day. At the end, I had become so worried about losing data that I also backed it up on a USB stick and mailed it to my Gmail address.

I just re-read parts of my thesis for the first time after having handed it in. I was a bit shocked, because I had already forgotten so much of it, but also a bit proud, because what I read actually made a lot of sense to me. I hope it still does when I re-read it in one year, or ten.

PS. The picture above is from Wikimedia Commons and shows King Henry IV. asking abbot Hugh of Cluny and Matilda of Tuscany for mediation in his conflict with the pope.

I'm just back from a debriefing of the year 2009 with Fabian in the beautiful Swiss mountains. We do this every year - take off one day to look back and assess what was important.

One question we ask each other is which topics were relevant for us in the last year. Here's my list, with some additional explanations:

1. Deep knowledge. I spent the better part of 2009 writing my master thesis (on propaganda in the Middle Ages). In the 9 months I worked on that, I dug deep into the topic of my thesis. I became an expert in a very narrow (and not really relevant) field, which allowed me to gain, probably for the first time in my life, something I call deep knowledge: A profound understanding of a topic that allows you to actually create knowledge yourself. I enjoyed this very much, and I hope to be able to do that again at least once in a while over the next years.

2. Structure brings calmness. For a long time I thought that the more you have to do, the more stressed you are. But when faced with the daunting  task of writing my thesis, I had to organize myself and give a clear structure to my work day. The result: I was more efficient, managed not only to write the thesis, but also do some Sandbox work, write a blog, teach a class and exercise (more or less) regularly. And I actually felt calmer, not more stressed. Since I have handed in my thesis, my life has become less structured again - and I have become both less efficient and more stressed.

3. It's about staying connected. I met and talked to many people this year, but I rarely managed to stay connected with them and build up meaningful relationships. I think that in an increasingly networked world, it's not about just connecting to someone anymore (that's mostly easy); it's about keeping up the connection and make it meaningful. Value comes not from having thousands of Facebook friends, but from being able to interact with many of them on a personal level. Fabian told me about how he cooks once a week at his place in NYC and invites people he meets to join him there. I think this is a wonderful way of not just connecting, but staying connected.

4. Storytelling. I've been fascinated by storytelling lately; and I've come to realize that it is the common denominator (or one of the common denominators) of many of the things I'm passionate about.

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe: every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

This quote by John Donne prefaces Ernest Hemingways For Whom the Bell Tolls that I just started reading.

(This is just some link-gathering for an article I'm planning to write about Xobni, an Outlook plugin that doesn't fix, but improve e-mail).

I liked this story from the FT on the rise and fall (well, mostly fall) of MySpace. The basic narrative (yes, I'm a bit obsessed with storytelling at the moment) seems to be one that is heard very often: Small startup becomes insanely successful and subsequently gets bought by a big corporation. Then the culture clash begins: The startup people complain about the bureaucracy of the big corporation, while the managers are unhappy with a lack of strategic focus. Add less-than-expected revenues and a more agile competitor (in this case, Facebook) to the mix, and the whole thing falls apart.

***

It also occurred to me how complex my process of "digesting" information has become. I read a tweet about this article on my iPhone and saved it for later reading with Instapaper (using Tweetie 2). The next day, I went through my list of unread items on Instapaper (again on my phone) and read the article. Later, in front of my computer, I went through my list of saved items on Instapaper, bookmarking the ones I found to be interesting on Delicious, assigning a tag reminding me to blog about it. - Of course, the process is not always that complicated; often, things just catch my eye, I read them, and that's it. But I stil think that these processes have become incredibly more complex and demanding with the web; and I think we should spend more time thinking about how to design them.