When is returning to old work more than repetition?

A piece of old work comes back into use.

The situation around it has changed. There may be new data, new tools or a different question.

Does the work itself now need to change?

In April 2014, Keith Lyons faced a practical version of that judgement.

SlideShare was about to discontinue the audio service attached to presentations. Keith had used that service across teaching, coaching and open-education material. The slides would remain online. The accompanying audio would disappear.

In Slidecasts, Keith began moving the audio elsewhere. He also started thinking about other ways presentation and explanation might travel together when the presenter was not in the room.

Something had changed.

But it is important to notice what had not changed.

The presentations themselves had not suddenly become wrong. Their arguments had not been overturned by new evidence. Keith did not need to rewrite their intellectual content simply because a platform had changed its service.

The immediate problem was preservation.

That distinction is easy to miss.

Old work often comes back into view because something around it has changed.

The temptation is to treat the return itself as a reason to update the analysis.

It isn't.

Before changing old work, there is a more basic question:

What has actually changed?

When stability is useful

A few months before Slidecasts, another Ashes series was about to begin.

In Batting for the Ashes 2013–2014, Keith returned to batting-partnership profiles from earlier Ashes series. He wanted to see whether Australia's pattern of low partnerships would change and whether England would continue building larger ones.

The earlier analysis was already available.

During the 2013 series in England, Keith had used ESPNcricinfo data to follow partnerships match by match and compare them with the 2010–11 series. That work remains visible in Batting Partnerships 2013 Ashes’ Series.

When the next series began, the circumstances were new.

But the value of the previous analysis was precisely that Keith didn't redesign it.

The older profiles provided a baseline. If every new series brought a new way of measuring the same thing, comparison would become harder rather than better.

This is an important restraint for anyone who works with recurring data.

Imagine reopening last season's analysis after another year of competition. You may have new data, new software and new questions. None of that automatically means your original categories or measures should change.

Sometimes they should.

Sometimes changing them would destroy the comparison you came back for.

Revision is not automatically the more sophisticated choice.

Sometimes continuity is the correct analytical judgement.

When an old practice becomes newly questionable

In December 2011, Keith returned to older practice for a different reason.

A LinkedIn alert had introduced him to the Performa Sports app. In Observation +, he placed emerging real-time and near-real-time tools beside the much older conditions under which he had begun working in performance analysis.

His earlier tools included hand notation and cine film.

Now performance information, replay and visualisations were becoming available through digital applications, sometimes directly to audiences during sport.

Keith called the emerging territory “observation +”.

The interesting part is not that the new technology made the old practice obsolete.

It didn't.

Instead, the changed environment raised questions the older setting had not raised in quite the same way.

How should live observation be supported when so much information is available? How should people filter it? What does immediate access do to reflection and learning? What might need to be studied?

The old practice now gives Keith something to compare the new environment with.

Changed conditions have made questions of access, timing, information volume and the observer's role newly visible.

This is different from the Ashes example.

There, keeping the analysis stable supported comparison.

Here, the world around an old practice has changed enough to make different questions worth asking of it.

That distinction travels well beyond sport.

An old evaluation method may still work perfectly well, for example, while a changed teaching environment exposes assumptions that once went unnoticed. The sensible response is not necessarily to throw away the old method. It may be to ask what the new setting is revealing about it.

The practical issue is not simply whether something is old.

It is what you now need the old work to help you understand.

When the same material gets a different job

In May 2014, Keith returned to his analysis of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

The route back was indirect.

In Ecologies of Performance, Keith was reflecting on a rugby coaches' conference and questions about patterns of performance and useful information for coaches. Work by James Grayson, Bruno Travassos and colleagues, Ed Feng and David Dormagen brought football data, ecological dynamics, ranking, prediction and simulation into the discussion.

Those ideas belong to the people Keith named.

What we can inspect in Clyde Street is what happened when they led him back to his own earlier work.

One part of that earlier material survives in Goals Scored at the 2010 FIFA World Cup, where Keith had assembled a goal-by-goal account of the tournament and made explicit decisions about how goals would be grouped by time.

Four years later, he was no longer looking only at what happened in 2010.

The newer questions made him ask what the old observations might now be good for. How robust were they? Could they be brought into conversation with different approaches? Could they offer information useful to coaches?

The old data have not changed.

What Keith was asking of them had.

That is another common reason old analysis comes back into use.

You may reopen a dataset collected to answer one question because someone now needs a different answer from it. You may return to an old report because it is being used for a purpose nobody had in mind when it was written.

The question then is not merely whether the original analysis was good.

It is whether it can support the new job you are giving it.

Sometimes it can.

Sometimes the new question requires different evidence or a different analysis.

And sometimes the old material can help, but only if we are clear about what it was originally designed to do.

When the judgement changes

The clearest change in this Clyde Street trail happens away from elite sport.

In 2015, Braidwood was discussing where to locate a skate park.

Keith wrote about the issue in A Community Supporting Playfulness. At the time, he favoured a central site in Ryrie Park. He was interested in play, young people's place in the community and what the visibility of a facility might communicate.

A month later, in A Community Discussing Playfulness, Keith continued the discussion after hearing skate-park designer Jason McNamee speak. Examples from other communities reinforced his interest in a prominent location.

The skate park was not built in Ryrie Park.

Years passed.

The Recreation Ground changed. Amenities, lighting, sporting facilities, drainage and parking were upgraded. The community discussion about a skate park returned, now with other possible sites in view.

In 2019, Keith revisited the issue in Rethinking play in a community.

This time, something more substantial had changed.

By 2019, after the Recreation Ground had been upgraded, Keith described a “complete change in my thinking” about the park and visibility.

His underlying concern with play and community had not disappeared.

The judgement about the site had changed under conditions that were no longer the same.

Keith also made his own position visible. He noted his connection with skateboarding and the fact that he lived near McKellar Park and valued it as a green space used across generations.

This is the strongest revision in the trail.

It should not become a rule that changed circumstances always require changed conclusions.

The other Clyde Street cases show why.

Sometimes circumstances change and the analysis should stay stable.

Sometimes the old work needs preserving rather than rewriting.

Sometimes a new setting raises a new question.

Sometimes old material is being asked to do a different job.

And sometimes the original judgement really does need reconsidering.

Before you change the analysis

That is what makes returning to old work a judgement problem rather than a routine update.

The practical question is not:

How old is this analysis?

Nor is it:

How much has the world changed since I made it?

It is:

Which part of the problem has changed enough to matter?

Suppose you reopen an analysis from last season.

Perhaps the new season simply gives you more observations to compare against the same measure.

Perhaps the performance environment has changed enough that the old assumptions need examining.

Perhaps the coach is now asking a different question from the one the analysis was built to answer.

Perhaps better evidence is available.

Or perhaps the conditions underlying your original conclusion have changed so much that the judgement itself deserves another look.

Those possibilities require different responses.

Sometimes the right response will be to keep something stable because comparison depends on it. Sometimes a new question exposes the limits of an old analysis. New evidence may weaken an earlier conclusion. A change of purpose may mean that old material can help only part of the way. And several of these things can happen at once.

The point is not to sort every return neatly into a category. It is to ask which changes matter for the claim or decision you are now trying to make.

The point is not to preserve old work for its own sake.

It is also not to revise it simply to demonstrate that you have moved on.

Clyde Street gives us examples of both continuity and change, and that is what makes the trail useful. Keith did not offer a universal rule for deciding between them. The posts let us inspect several different returns and see that “things are different now” is not yet an analytical argument.

Before changing old work, work out what has actually changed.

Then decide what that change requires from the analysis.

The question I would carry into the next return is: