The Content and Scope of the Blog

The Wired Researcher began with a mystery.

When I conceived the blog in 2012, I was researching a remarkable collection of Colonial American essays, songs, poems, and advertisements published pseudonymously under the name of “The Humourist” in the South-Carolina Gazette during 1753–1754.

The essays had never been reprinted as a complete series. Their author was unknown.

Well, almost unknown.

I had become 99 percent certain that I knew who wrote them, but I needed considerably more research before I could prove it. In that sense, The Wired Researcher began as a literary whodunit.

I set out to do three things: prepare a critical, annotated edition of The Humourist; develop a convincing case for authorial attribution; and, throughout the process, give the essays the kind of close reading that had always been central to my teaching.

I was—and remain—fond of something Robert Frost once said:

We go to college to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven’t learned in high school. Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us.

I shared that quotation with my students for years.

Learning to read—really read—gets to the heart of what I wanted my students to do. Reading isn’t simply reaching the end of a text. It means slowing down, looking closely, asking questions, making connections, and discovering what a text will yield when we give it our full attention.

Read critically. Think critically.

That’s precisely what I began doing here with The Humourist, sharing my research as it happened—my methods, challenges, frustrations, discoveries, and joys.

And the mystery?

It took a while.

The research ultimately led me to identify “The Humourist” as Alexander Gordon (c. 1692–1754), a Scottish antiquarian, Egyptologist, playwright, artist, scholar, and colonial administrator who spent the final years of his life in Charleston.

In 2025, Luminare Press published the result: Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina, the first complete publication of the essays in more than 270 years and the definitive edition of the series.

So the literary whodunit that gave birth to The Wired Researcher eventually got its answer.

But the blog kept going.

Over the years, its scope expanded beyond Gordon and beyond scholarship. The Wired Researcher became a place where research, literature, teaching, writing, gardening, technology, artificial intelligence, aging, spirituality, love, loss, humor, and the ordinary astonishments of daily life could all find their way onto the page.

What hasn’t changed is the impulse that started it all:

Look closely. Ask questions. Follow where they lead. And share what you discover along the way.

The Birth of the Blog

As the twelfth Librarian of Congress (1975–1987), Daniel J. Boorstin wanted to open the Library to the public and make its magnificent collections more accessible.

Toward that end—and with a full measure of symbolism—he put picnic tables and benches on Neptune Plaza. He initiated midday concerts there. He removed the chains from the majestic bronze doors at the west entrance to the Jefferson Building. When warned that opening those doors would create a draft, Boorstin reportedly replied:

“Great—that’s just what we need.”

At the time, I worked at the Library of Congress as an editor of the National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints, and I remember when those bronze doors were opened.

And, if memory serves me correctly, it was around that time that I heard Dr. Boorstin say something that has remained with me ever since:

You never know when an idea is about to be born.

Since hearing those words, I have always tried to remember when my own ideas were born.

I knew from the start that my research project would center on The Humourist. The Encyclopedia of the Essay (1997) places the essays in the tradition of Samuel Johnson’s Rambler and describes them as the only “full-fledged literary” works to have appeared in the South-Carolina Gazette. Decades earlier, J. A. Leo Lemay had observed in A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (1969) that the essays should be edited and published—and their author identified.

That was precisely what I intended to do.

What I did not know was that the research would give birth to a blog.

While working on an application for the Virginia Community College System’s Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship Program, I began thinking about how the project might benefit my colleagues and students.

And suddenly I thought:

“Blog it!”

A blog would let me share the research from the beginning and at every step along the way. I could capture the work as it happened: the methods, discoveries, false starts, frustrations, and moments when some tiny piece of evidence suddenly made everything look different.

Even better, I could do virtually what I had always done in the classroom: take readers inside the process of close reading and show what can happen when we slow down and pay attention.

And so, on January 8, 2012, the idea for the blog was born.

That same day, I came up with a working title:

The Wired Researcher.

I Googled it and was delighted to discover that no such blog appeared to exist.

As I often did, I emailed a former student—a lover of language, words, and ideas—to see what she thought.

She responded immediately:

The word “wired” will catch the attention of … The Young. They’ll think you are “hip.”

You’ll need a logo. You’ll need T-shirts with the logo on them. You need pens that say, “The Wired Researcher.” “Sold in libraries everywhere.” “Guaranteed to make study more exciting.” Oh, boy, I see tie-ins!

Clearly, she was every bit as wired as I was.

More than fourteen years later, the T-shirts still haven’t materialized.

The Wired Researcher has.