There are few moments in academic life that so successfully simulate the futility of human endeavour as staring at a loading bar while 120,000 rows of data grind through a script like a constipated tortoise. It is a sort of epistemological purgatory: not quite Dante’s Inferno, but certainly the lesser-known ninth circle of Microsoft Excel. And here I am, a very occasional tourist in the land of empirical research trapped in this bleak waiting room of science, watching nothing happen in real time. I don’t do this often. Every two or three years, something compels me to wander outside the agreeable pastures of black-letter law into the pixelated trenches of data cleaning, coding, and praying that the file won’t crash. It is like jury duty or visiting relatives in hospital: necessary, slightly noble, best kept brief. This time, it is an ambitious little research project involving a mountain of institutional data. Somewhere in this digital mulch is the thing I’m looking for, like a signal, a pattern, a proof of something that will eventually look tidy in a bar chart, but before I can write the sexy bits I must engage in this act of penance. There is no shortcut. The data must be processed, and what’s more, I must keep an eye on the processing.
That’s the cruel part. It’s not that it takes long; it’s that it takes long and I can’t even look away. No reading, no emails, no Netflix. This is worse than Victorian chimney-sweeping: it’s twenty-first-century software babysitting. I’m basically sitting at my desk like a low-rent philosopher-janitor, tending the machine, ready to intervene at the first sign of script failure, as if my computer were a fussy Victorian child with a weak constitution and a tendency to faint when I look away.
I am, of course, lucky, because I am not a data scientist, I do not work in economics, psychology, or political science, where the slow parade of empirical research is not a one-off inconvenience but a career. I don’t spend every day ankle-deep in CSV files with headers like “Response_ID” and “q37_LIKERT_OTHER”. I merely visit the field like an in-law who brings bad wine and leaves early, bu still, even my rare forays into this world provoke an existential twitch. Because when it comes down to it, this isn’t research to me - it’s basically maintenance. It’s the academic equivalent of waiting for the washing machine to finish its spin cycle while a fox tries to steal my socks. I’m not learning anything. I’m not producing anything. I’m waiting for the possibility of insight, guarding it like a grumpy old dog who would rather be napping.
I could, theoretically, automate more of this, but my laptop is approximately the same age as the Napoleonic Wars, and screams like a wounded cat every time I ask it to do something clever. When I start running a large dataset, I lose all access to tabs, browsers, folders, money, food, dignity. Even the cursor judders like it’s having a nervous breakdown. The fan kicks in, making that frantic “we-are-going-to-space” sound, and the whole machine becomes a sort of aluminium pressure cooker. One wrong click and it all collapses taking hours of unsaved work with it, like a miniature Pompeii. It’s moments like these that give me newfound respect for those who do this for a living. Not admiration, mind you – respect, like one might feel for a professional snake-milker or deep-sea diver: an acknowledgment of the necessary courage, coupled with a firm belief that such work should be undertaken by other people. At the end of the day, someone must do this thankless work of quantifying the unquantifiable, structuring chaos, filtering noise from signal. Just not me, ideally. Or not again for another three years.
One may might ask why don’t I distract yourself while it runs. Why not watch something, open a podcast, pretend you’re multitasking like a cheerful tech CEO – sorry, “entrepreneur”, as one now says on Instagram?
Because I can’t. Because I must be present. Not emotionally – I have no emotions left at this point - but physically, vigilantly, like a nightwatchman in one of Kafka’s novels. If the machine crashes, someone must notice. And that someone is me, bleary-eyed and clearly under-caffeinated, peering at a screen where the same four numbers have been flashing for twenty minutes, just waiting for a tiny green tick to appear. It is the most boring form of suspense ever invented: “Data Loading: 97%”. In that remaining 3% lives all the fear.
This is not what anyone imagines when they picture research. Students think I’m out there breaking intellectual ground, arguing in panel discussions, writing in sun-dappled libraries, surrounded by books and ideas (or perhaps they think I’m poolside sipping margaritas, some of them seem to think that we have 6 months holidays between teaching terms). What they don’t see are these airless afternoons where research is indistinguishable from IT support.