I have a draft post saved about goal post shifting, as someone who has been involved in multiple facets of costume and community I have a few thoughts.

It boils down to: I am an expert in my field. But I can’t rest on what I learned 10 years ago. I have to keep seeking out new information to be so.

I don’t expect people who don’t have the same foundation to be an expert, but I do expect experts to keep pushing in their field. And anyone who aims to be to do the same. Believe me there is no end point in research. Just endpoints in access.

I have also heard it’s harder now to achieve that level. I would argue that it really is not. It has always required a bloody minded persistence to follow paths of unsuccessful research and to find new ones.

There is a lot more information yes, but also a whole lot of new tools to sift through that information. There are now OCS scans of documents in scripts I couldn’t make head or tale of before. With these transcripts I can identify words that were not visible to me a decade ago.

Those of us held in regard as experts need to share those tools as well.

So that’s what I’m working on.  Figuring out how to describe what I do instinctively. But usually it’s started by throwing a word in a search engine and seeing what dictionaries have to say and how many peer reviwed articles it appears in 🙂

Also slowly working on finishing work on my Cleves projects 🙂 I think I’m getting a handle on the words of mystery based on breaking down how clothing must function based on how they sit in images.

And have a new thing to research so, yay!