5 posts tagged “dissertation”

I've updated the progress meter in the sidebar to be out of a more realistic 100,000 words, rather than the 56,000 or so I will likely need for my finished draft.  My progress goes less quickly (and hence is a bit less inspiring for me to watch) with this method, but it's more likely to be an accurate measure.

Today, I intended to work from home in the morning, and to spend the afternoon helping someone move.  When I checked my email this morning, though, it turned out that she didn't need help today after all.  Which should have been great, because that left me more time to work.

Instead, though, it sent me into a downward spiral of procrastination and no work.  Probably because I felt like I had lots of time, and hadn't left the house.  Sigh.

And then, what was to be a slow-cooked chili ended up not, so much, because the stupid burners on my stupid stove don't stay plugged in (or connected or whatever).  Grr.  Not loving the electric stove just now.  Or ever, really.

So, I'm back from a truly wonderful Thanksgiving weekend (though Victor lost a day to food poisoning - BOO).  (Photos here.)

Victor convinced me to go in to the office with him more frequently, which so far has been awesome.  I have an actual deadline coming up - I promised my dissertation buddy I'd get a new chapter to her by the 8th - so I'm particularly motivated right now.  Also, I'm working on having a more consistent schedule, because that's been the most productive strategy for me so far.

I'm tracking what's working and what's not in my daily freewriting, which has turned out to be wonderfully useful.  My basic schedule involves writing my own stuff (arguments, questions, insights) while I'm at SP during the day (I mentally refer to this as "BS writing" - hehe) and then writing material directly from my primary sources while I'm at home in the evening (my mental tag for that writing is "skeleton writing," because it provides the structure but none of the meat).

So far, part one of that plan's been working pretty well - years of graduate education have given me the ability to spin out my own thoughts and arguments pretty much endlessly - but the second part has yet to actually happen.  I might end up having skeleton writing just take place on the weekends, so that I don't need to worry about writing at night when I get home.  We will see.

So, today the "working at Victor's office" experiment began in earnest, and all I can really say is that this is the awesome-est, best idea ever.  I worked a full day, with time out for what will likely be by new gym here in Bellevue.  I read a bit of one of my "core" secondary sources, but mainly used RefWorks+ JSTOR to locate references for the two chapters I'm working on.  Damn, I have a lot of reading to do!

I ended up spending most of today hanging out with Tom, a friend and former co-worker from the U of M.  We walked around downtown and the market in a vaguely touristy way.  I remembered a few times that I'd planned to take pictures.

Then I had a longish wait for the bus to get home, and ended up making some really useful progress on figuring how to approach the dissertation, esp. with regard to secondary reading/research that's chapter-specific.  How to handle the secondary sources for individual chapters has been a tough problem for me to tackle because of the structure of my dissertation, and it's something I've been putting off all month.

My dissertation is going to be a collection of essays, essentially, which all focus on a central topic.  Each chapter looks at a different time period and body of historiography (for instance, the third chapter is about the 1920s and 30s, when the Harvey Company branched out into "Indian Detours" and the secondary sources for that chapter deal with the history of tourism in the Southwest).  [For an overview of the Harvey Company, see this wikipedia article; I don't entirely agree with its presentation, but until I write my own overview... it's what I have to link to ;-]

I'd been going around in circles with regard to secondary lit., because my dissertation touches on too many fields for me to do a full lit. review in the introduction as is typical.  My solution is simple (and, ok, fairly obvious) - I'll footnote a short lit review for each chapter in each chapter, as appropriate.  I'm not entirely clear on why, but I feel much much better about actually starting to review my secondary research now.  Whew.