The Mirror and the Tool
What it feels like to have AI help now that I did not have then.
After writing about my retirement from academic writing, I pasted my Google Scholar profile into a chat the other night and asked the AI to help me organize it. Within minutes it had grouped roughly 130 publications into thematic clusters that, looking back, do describe my career. Public access computing as a global comparative project. ICT4D evaluation as an ongoing critical interrogation. Migrant information practices at the US-Mexico border. Fotohistorias as a method that traveled across all of it. Technology refusal as a counter-narrative. Five overlapping arcs I never described to myself in quite those terms while I was writing the papers.
I want to be careful here. The arcs were real. I lived them. Co-authors recur in the file because we worked together for years, in Colombia and Chiapas and Seattle and the borderlands. The themes were not invented after the fact. But seeing them laid out as a clean taxonomy is unsettling. More than twenty years of work, organized in an afternoon by a system that did not exist when most of it happened.
The temptation is to feel that I could have been so much more productive if this kind of help had existed earlier. Maybe. I might have written more papers, finished books faster, kept clearer notes, found collaborators sooner, seen the through-lines while they were still forming. There is a real ache in that thought.
But I am not sure the work would have been the same work. The clusters are visible now because I walked the path that produced them. If I had known the shape in advance I might have walked a different path, or stopped walking when the map looked complete. Some of what made the academic career mine was the not-knowing, the years of following one question into another without anyone, certainly not a machine, telling me where it would lead.
The novels are different. They are recent. The four pillars on the website were not the architecture I started with. They emerged in conversation, partly with the machine, partly with the work itself as it accumulated. Adventures Through Time, Power and Resistance, Knowledge and Discovery, Family Place and Belonging. Now there is a catalog, a marketing tracker, an operations dashboard that tells me which manuscripts are in which revision pass and what is waiting on whom. I open the file and the work looks like a publishing operation. It is, I suppose. But it did not feel that way while I was writing the books.
The dashboards and the Scholar file feel different from each other. The dashboards organize work I am still doing. The Scholar file organizes work that is finished. One is a tool. The other is a mirror, and what is reflected is both familiar and strange.
I do not regret the path. I am noticing, though, that the path is now visible to me in a way it was not while I was on it. That is what the help has done. It has not given me back the years. It has given me a vocabulary for what those years were.