Like Skincare, but for Your Brain
E(i)ditorial — December 2018
2018 was an eventful year for Eidolon. We passed 1 million total views, ran special “issues” on tattoos and parenting, introduced two new columns, partnered with BAM, and celebrated various other minor milestones. But if you ask me, our banner achievement this year is that I finally re-color-coded my spreadsheets.
The Eidolon editorial team teases me about a lot of things, from the incoherent strings of emojis and gifs I use to respond when I wake up in California and discover they’ve been chatting for an hour already to my five-year-old son’s attempts to insert himself into our work meetings, but their absolute favorite target is my spreadsheets. Every time a task begins to look complex, someone slyly asks, “Donna, do you think this might need … a spreadsheet?” I deserve this mockery, because more often than not, I’ve already opened a new sheet in my browser and then I have to laugh awkwardly and pretend that the idea hadn’t already occurred to me.
Obviously, I have spreadsheets for Eidolon’s business side, as well as a spreadsheet with various content ideas and a spreadsheet for an article graveyard of pieces that were pitched to us but never came to be. But my masterpiece is our schedule spreadsheet, which has a sheet for our upcoming schedule (which is usually full at least two months in advance) and one with the title, author, and traffic on every one of the 400+ articles we’ve published.
There’s also a third sheet on this spreadsheet: a key for my unnecessarily (or was it?) extensive color-coding system. Early on I realized that colors would help my brain process that information and easily see some overall trends. The first iteration of the spreadsheet had color-coding for the articles (green for Greek content and red for Roman like Loebs, grey for articles that didn’t really fit in either) and colors for authors.
Every single time I have given spreadsheet access to a new team member, I’ve done so during an onboarding video chat, because A) it requires so much explanation and B) I really enjoy the look on people’s faces when they see it for the first time, which is a combination of “whoa” and “what kind of person have I signed on to work with, exactly?”
This color-coding scheme was fiddly and idiosyncratic, but it helped me make sure we had a good balance of authors at various stages in their careers and different kinds of content. I assume it helped my team, too, although I’m a little afraid to ask. And for a while, it worked.
But earlier this month, I decided that it was time to re-organize and color-code three and a half years’ worth of articles. The Greek-vs.-Roman distinction on content didn’t really make sense anymore, since we’ve shifted to doing so much more meta-commentary on Classics as a discipline. And even without that shift, articles about Homeric misquotations, Briseis’s agency in retellings of the Iliad, and a description of Graceland in the style of Pausanias were all green in spite of being very different kinds of pieces. Also, nobody except for me could keep track of what the colors for the different kinds of authors were, even though there was a key RIGHT THERE. Best of all, re-organizing is an immensely satisfying activity that makes me feel like I’m in control. One year ago, Jia Tolentino wrote an article about how in 2017 skincare became a coping mechanism; for me, spreadsheets perform a similar function, but for my brain.
So on one bright day when I couldn’t face 2018 any longer, I reset all of the cells on the spreadsheet to white and started afresh:
I re-colored, manually, every single article we’ve ever published, and I will not reveal here how long it took. Now all authors are either light, medium, or dark grey (for non-PhDs, non-tenured PhDs, and tenured faculty). Streamlining the color-coding for authors left me with so, so many more options for colors for our content. Articles are shaded by type. Our editorials are purple, because of our logo; high school pedagogy is maroon, because according to an extremely unscientific study of my memories, every single high school’s color is some variation of dark red. Levity is orange, because for some reason I associate orange with humor. (Clowns?) Et cetera.
The best part of this new system is that, scrolling through the years of content, I can see how Eidolon has grown and changed. In the first year or so, there were only regular articles and editorials. Our one-year anniversary marked our first “special issue,” on Helen and her eidolon. Gradually we introduced (and then expanded on) humorous content, individual columnists, then recurring features like our “Dispatches from the Front Lines” high school column and our “Philomela’s Tapestry” feature on sexual harassment in Classics. And I can also see what hasn’t changed: most of our authors are still PhDs without tenure, and we’ve maintained a steady pace of one or two articles per month by tenured professors.
I’m looking forward to sharing with our readers all of the exciting plans we have for 2019, including our upcoming special issue on food. I’m also hoping that I’ll get a chance to add a few more exciting categories of content (and therefore colors and shades) to my spreadsheet. I can’t wait.
Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton, and her writing has appeared in the TLS, the Washington Post, and Jezebel. Her book Not All Dead White Men (Harvard University Press), a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is available now.
