There were some very kind responses — both here and on Facebook — to the very short talk that I shared in this space last week. And one of the things those kind responses made me think about was how often those of us who work in academic settings put things out into the world in (semi-)public ways that almost immediately disappear from view. Conference papers, workshop presentations, brown bag talks, class lectures, and so on. To be sure, some of these texts get fleshed out and polished up and become publications. In the YouTube era, some of these moments may get captured on video and shared more publicly. And, of course, many of these moments — probably most of them — don’t really need to live on after they’re over.

But I think some of these texts may be worth the effort to pull them up out of the archives, brush the (digital) dust off of them, and put them back out into the world again. I can’t vouch for other academics, but I’ve had more than a few such moments where I planned to get something more than just a conference paper or two out of a chunk of research and writing . . . and then something happened that pushed that project to the side, and I never got back to it. Or where there was never any expectation that a talk I was going to give would blossom into something bigger, but there was still something in the talk that I’d wished might have been heard by more than the half dozen people who showed up for the panel.

And so this post is simply a set-up for a series of occasional dips into my personal archive so that I can share a few of those lost “gems.” Even if they’re only gems in my own mind, and even if sharing them here only manages to spread some old texts to another half dozen people beyond those who originally heard them.