Weeks 55 & 56: Filling a gap

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	92,759
Words typed these fortnight:	1,681
Words lost these fortnight:	0
Total increase:	1,681
Days I managed to write this fortnight:	2

Apologies for the lack of Triskele in this blog, I have run out of time to add the bits and anyway I need to finish this section and then do it. What I have been doing is trying to put together a section on using the sociological theory that I am doing to understand worship. In this I am not looking at the standard theories of ritual but am picking up ideas of identity. The intriguing thing is that the Reformed Tradition actually is honest enough to suggest that this is precisely what is going on in worship. That is that worship is the fulfilment of what we were intended to be. Humans were designed by God to be worshipping animals, it is due to the fall that we fail to do this regularly and that society is not designed around worship.

It must be remembered that Reformed Worship is also centred on God, worship is done because God and God alone is worth worshipping. The iconoclasm is not centrally about destroying pictures, images or such that are there, it is about removing that which attract false worship. That can equally be success,  money, social norms  or a celebrity. That which attracts what rightly belongs to God is an idol and needs destruction. As such it is a very ascetic tradition and nowhere is this more seen as within the ritual of worship. It means building theory onto what the ritual is doing rather than developing a much broader analysis is a bit like trying to work out how a car works by reading the highway code instructions on maintenance.

However the tendency within the tradition is to turn the whole thing into a matter of theology and to concentrate on the sermon and what is preached. It is thought if you get your theology of worship right and have sound sermons then you have things sussed. Again this is reductivist and fails to take on the many and varied ways people interact within the worship. The sermon is the start of the process as far as the congregation is concerned and people are interacting internally with it.


Anyway the piece needs another few hours on it before it is ready to be sent to my supervisor. Then there is sorting out what I will do over Christmas. The task is to take something I can do without carrying a huge number of books around. The introductions sounds like a good idea.

So you have theoretically a twin poles pulling at worship. Worship is in some ways the apotheosis of what it is to be human and yet at the same time it stretches out towards the divine.

December 12 Supervision: I am officially writing up

The photo was taken as I was leaving Birmingham University Edgebaston Campus. The tree was a casualty of last winters storms and has since been carved. Today it worked as a focus of this photo in the increasing dusk as after 4:00 pm I headed to University Station. I rarely see the dusk in Birmingham as my supervisions are middle of the day, so this and the January ones are the limited.

Actually this supervision was a lot harder work than many of mine since I started writing up. That is not to say my supervisor thought the work was not good enough. If anything he thought that what was coming was good but there is a huge gulf been good as an idea and right for submission and he wanted to go through the ways what I was doing was not right on the page. This included my need to interact more with the theorists. It now appears that it is only some theorists that I need to do that with and those are the crucial ones. I can do it with a couple a lot better than what I have done quite easily and that will make it a stronger thesis. Then there is developing what the thesis is dealing with. Part of me wants to go back and do that right now but I think I have other items that need removing off the to do list..

This chapter as my last substantive actually means that I am now officially writing up, and  that means the finishing line is in view. The only snag is that due to changes with my home congregation, our minister is leaving, my decision to return to the eldership no longer looks as if it is soft but as if it is hard. I also may have other responsibilities that may come out of this event that may need fitting in around what I am already doing although I suspect they will not start until the Autumn if they do. Therefore I am really needing to get this in a state to submit around Easter. This I know is optimistic given the work involved. Some of it is still drafting, indeed I have a piece of drafting that I need to do before Christmas. This unfortunately means that I will give less time to St Andrews Sheffield at present than they would like. This is coming particularly hard for them as we are going through a period of other losses and expect will continue to until our minister leaves.

So this year Christmas will be another working Christmas. I still have to decide what work I will take up with me at New Year but I know I will need to as I have a supervision on 9th January.  Before I stop for Christmas I need to write a piece on what the Reformed tradition "thinks" it is doing in worship. This is intriguing mix of theology and sociology but I think is possible to pull off. The problem being that most sociology of worship concentrates on ritual. Reformed worship is not without ritual and symbolism but the style is Rational, which makes an analysis based on the ideas of ritual difficult to use as analytic tools. So if it is not ritual, what are we doing? I think I have an answer but that draws on theology.

Week 54: First Draft of the final substative chapter done

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	92,759
Words typed these week:	3,555
Words lost these week:	0
Total increase:	3,555
Days I managed to write this week:	3

There is an incredible feeling of having got to this stage. I have a thesis and what is more it written down on paper. The last chapter has been more of a big dipper ride than most. The big question was could I bring it altogether to make sense at the end. I feel I have done so, but I found as I tried to make progress that with wanting to create an argument I had first to go backwards and state things that would otherwise have been irrelevant to this thesis. It was also scary that although I had an idea I did not know that I could bring it off. What had to happen was a whole host of diversions and excursions that seemed to be going off at all sort of tangents had to be pulled together in a synthesis that made them to fall together into a whole. In the last section (apart from the concluding paragraph) I finally get to one of the big issues that has driven my thesis. It is there but I am struggling towards it. Technically I have tomorrow on my timetable to get to this point. A day under the timetable is as good as week at the moment.

This does not mean I am finished. I have a substantive first draft and means I am finally on the writing up stage. I have some major work to do on at least two chapters. The one on worship needs a theory section put on the front, intriguingly I think I am going to have to draw more on the tradition than in other chapters and it has occurred to me that this might be right. The other one is that the chapter on the tradition needs a complete rewrite with the description and theory integrated. My methodology chapter needs to be cut by half at least. There are some obvious cuts and I will need to remove some arguments I am indulging in. Then there are the Introduction and Conclusion to do. Oddly enough I began to realise some of what I needed to put into the conclusion only as I got to the final part. I need to discuss to the extent to which I think the Reformed Tradition is similar to other traditions, I am pretty cautious of generalising from it.

Another intriguing is that once again I have ended up dealing with theorists of globalisation and nationalism. This doctorate is about the small scale and the local but theorists who have been most useful through out were working on a much bigger scale.

Ever so often I want to answer the question are you postmodern with the response no I am Reformed. There are surprising reflections from one to other that it is difficult for me to tell what in my thought is there because I was raised Reformed and what has come because of my more recent engagement with thinkers who are often characterised as Postmodern through working with social theory.

Week 52 and 53: Slow but steady progress

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	89,204
Words typed these weeks:	2802
Words lost these weeks:	0
Total increase:	2802
Days I managed to write this fortnight:	6

Yes I know I should have reported last week and didn't. Apologies, I thought there were about two hundred words more to add that needed adding on the Monday and then I did not get around to doing it and the rest of the week took over. In fact I still have those notes to add. Progress has been slow, getting time to work on it has been difficult but I think I have crossed the mid chapter crisis successfully. Indeed Friday when I only added about a thousand words was the day when I did a lot of thinking about how I structured the chapter and made quite a few adjustments to what I had already written. This means that in some ways I have a structure for the rest of the chapter that should make filling the gap rather easy. The trick was to change the structure of what I wrote last week so that the next section seemed to reflect it and create a path to work through. I think I have managed the change from some fairly technical scientific understanding into creating a space where I can explore that understanding

This coming week which is hectic work wise I have to write another 3,000 words to get to the end of the chapter. There is quite a bit that I can draw on to create these words I just have to be careful how I treat it. I am beginning to realise that the question my supervisor set me half way through my thesis is actually answered by it, until I got to reviewing the structure of this chapter I felt I had missed it, but actually in the last section of the last chapter it will be there. So hard work but in all truth the end at least as far as the argument goes is in sight.

Week 51: Sorting out the changes in Mathematics

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	86,402
Words typed this week:	1985
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	1985
Days I managed to write this week:	4

This week I have been trying to sort the story of the changes in Mathematics in the twentieth century. The thing is that I basically agree with the Wikipedia article:

"The development and continual improvement of computers, at first mechanical analog machines and then digital electronic machines, allowed industry to deal with larger and larger amounts of data to facilitate mass production and distribution and communication, and new areas of mathematics were developed to deal with this: Alan Turing's computability theory; complexity theory; Claude Shannon's information theory; signal processing; data analysis; optimization and other areas of operations research. In the preceding centuries much mathematical focus was on calculus and continuous functions, but the rise of computing and communication networks led to an increasing importance of discrete concepts and the expansion of combinatorics including graph theory. The speed and data processing abilities of computers also enabled the handling of mathematical problems that were too time-consuming to deal with by pencil and paper calculations, leading to areas such as numerical analysis and symbolic computation. Some of the most important methods and algorithms of the 20th century are: the simplex algorithm, the Fast Fourier Transform, error-correcting codes, the Kalman filter from control theory and the RSA algorithm of public-key cryptography."

The problem was when I actually got to looking at the more recognised resources they seemed to think that the history of Mathematics finished at the end of the Second World War. Indeed when I went to one of the few books that covered later than that, what you tended to get immediately before is a history of largely dead white men, what you got post First World War was far more a communal history which includes ideas such as the role of computers but also group publishing of text books (Nicholas Bourbaki anyone). I wish I could clearly argue that this showed a real change the way the work was done but I am also aware of a change of author within the text and suspect this change coincides too neatly with the change of author.

I avoided the history of mathematics when I was an undergraduate, having been forced to do some work on it if only in passing as part of my thesis I am glad of it. It appears that this is one of the last areas where the history is told around the stories of individual people and history is not looked at as group endeavour where there were many players both more or less important. This actually makes the histories quite repetitive as you get bits repeated as it integrates with each player. Plus individuals tended to cross over many different areas so that you can end up switching topics rather too easily as you follow life stories of individuals. I suspect that a research group based approach might be more productive rather than dealing with just figure heads.



Oh well the next challenge is to explore the nature of currents and flows and see what the mathematics tells us about them. This will then get a basis for going back into my thesis proper and developing what is going on within the congregations.

Week 50 : Starting on final substantivel chapter

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	84,417
Words typed this week:	1453
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	1453
Days I managed to write this week:	4

As you can see I have started making progress on the final substantive chapter of my thesis. I probably had more words I could type this week but decided not to I had just got to a natural break in the argument and so I have the next section of the argument to develop on from.  This actually means that I have crossed the very difficult part of this chapter. Social Science has a love-hate relationship with science. The problem being that I and I think quite a few other scientists do not recognise their description of how science is done, as the task we do when we do science. It seems to be concerned with things like the nature of truth that most scientist do not spend time worrying about. We are far more like crafts-persons/artists than philosophers and what we are doing is following the discipline we are trained in and seeing where it leads. If you fulfil the requirements of the discipline then your research is valid. Please note that I have used "valid" and not "truth" there. We are often well aware that we are entering a debate about "truth" and even if our research is "valid" that does not mean that the communal consensus will accept our interpretation of it. Validity gets us a hearing only.

However social science also uses science in a completely different way and that is a source of metaphor for understanding knowledge. Some of these metaphors have been used as justification for "scientific methodology", however some have been openly cited as ways of thinking about things. It is this latter line that I am taking in this chapter but in order to get there I also need to take people into the mathematics of the metaphor in greater depth than most social scientists normally do. The reason for this is as we explore the mathematics we begin to understand better the implications of the metaphor and where we need to give our attention within the social science. The metaphors we think with are not neutral but allow us to see some things clearer than others

Week 49: No progress

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	82,964
Words typed this week:	0
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	0
Days I managed to write this week:	1

All right so I did well last week, but this week no progress at all except a bit of writing one day which was not worth writing up. So I had better do better this coming week and actually get something written. I think it helps that I have at least decided where to start writing and I can see how that goes.

October Supervision: At Last a chapter my supervisor is structurally happy with

The board announces my train home

Well I thought I was going to break my fine weather when I am in Birmingham rule, it was so windy and wet when I left home at Sheffield, but by the time I got to Birmingham it was dry and this afternoon the sun even came out. The other news is at last Birmingham University has managed to bill me for this years fees correctly. It has been tiresome in the extreme this year and I still have to pay. The amount is not bad but I need to find an old email which tells me how to. I may still well end up ringing them up to pay over the phone. It may well be easier. I was going to do it in person but what looked like the nearest entrance to the office also was right next to a room where exams were happening!

Also the computer network was up so I was able to check my scholar alerts. Let me be honest now I am no longer really following these. That is I am only jumping if something major comes out and in this case it was a book on “Ethnography and Ecclesiology”. Should be right up the line of my thesis.

Supervision was interesting, we did not just cover the topics on agenda, we also for the first time really started talking about what happened after my thesis. The question is pertinent as I am almost ideally placed to a be an amateur expert, but the space of for these in the discourse has been eroded in the last twenty years with the increased division between the academy and the seminary. That means fewer niches for those who cling somewhere between church and academia and that has a knock on effect on people like myself who are driven by passion for a topic rather than wanting a career path. Mind you I might have just git first hint of who my external maybe.

Then we got onto discussing several areas within my chapter. I have not as yet brought up gender within my thesis but there is in this chapter a clear point where it matters. I may decide to gloss because I am not sure I can tackle this without blowing someone anonymity in a way that they would feel unfairly put the spotlight on them. Gender does play a part but usually in the roles people are given. However I can and did break those rules and I was not alone in doing that in either congregations. Hmm it is going to be interesting. It maybe worth checking back over the chapters. I am also going to have to put footnotes because there is a good chance my examiners will not read it from start to finish (or the central chapters in order). This is a pain as the argument flows through the chapter structure as well as the text. They are NOT in random order and when I am explicit about the pattern it should be as if the person realises that it reflects the journey they have been on reading the text.

So next Supervision is December, as my supervisor is very busy end of November. I should at that time have a draft of the final theory chapter and thus be ready to enter writing up! It should be an interesting month as the work is significantly different even from the last two theory chapters and a level more abstract. It also intriguingly uses the fact that I am mathematician, but pushes me into areas of maths I tended to avoid as an undergraduate. Actually more accurately be said strong social pressure was put on me to study as they were outside my direct interest. One because it was in the discipline I tended to avoid except at its most theoretical and the other because it was populist and I felt I wanted to do proper maths. I have read up and though I am no longer mathematically fit enough to do the calculus automatically I can follow the argument and understand what is happening. For those who are not mathematical trained, a skilled mathematician can look at an equation and work out what the next step would be to turn it into a useful form. This is a highly developed form of brain pattern recognition working similar to recognising times tables, numbers that sum to make another and prime factors of a number. If you do not practice it and I haven’t for over twenty years it becomes weak. I can go "Oh Yeah" I remember that when somebody does one, but don't expect me to do it for myself.

I also saw a large rook sitting on its own on the end of one of the platforms at Birmingham New Street on my way home. The sort of thing that gets you murmuring "that is a large rook or is it... but surely you don't get ravens at Birmingham New Street".

So for this coming month, that I keep on writing, I do they other things I need to and that I have this chapter written on time.

Week 48: Crossing 80,000 word mark

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	82,964
Words typed this week:	5614
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	5164
Days I managed to write this week:	3

Right that is over 80,000 words. So my thesis is now officially TOO LONG. Indeed it is almost 3,000 words too long. What is more it is going to get longer before it gets shorter. I have another almost 10,000 words to write before I can start editing down the too long chapters. At present my chapters on location, community and worship are 50% longer than they need to be and the methodology is around 100% too long. However I have another chapter to write before I can start chopping. This one on flows.

The other thing is the 5,516 words written this weekend. Given how slow I was before the holiday it really looks as if the holiday has done me good. However you might like to consider that I spent a lot of time reviewing the data chapters and such while away in preparation for this writing. This gave me a set of notes on which it was based and the 5,516 came easier than the previous writing.

So the then I have now finished my chapter on belonging and need to move onto the big theory one. This has been looking at small theory or I will be if my supervisor agrees on Tuesday.

Finally one point, this post also marks a year of writing. In that I have written over 80,000 words. Is it possible to write up a thesis in a year full time. It certainly looks like it from here.

Back from Holiday and time to be getting back to writing

Well that is Dora shaking her head telling me not to do it, she would really rather I stayed up with her and took her for long walks at least twice a week. I do not own her, but she seems to think I am the fun senior female in her pack.

Anyway I am back from holiday, and though I am not going to post a word count this week as though my official length has changed somewhat it is quite small. However I have spent lots of time preparing for writing the central bit of my chapter on belonging. This is important. It seems to me that at the core of a congregations identity is the question "What does it mean to belong?" That is both a question congregation try to decide for themselves and one that individuals negotiate as individuals. What I have therefore to do is demonstrate the "work" that both congregations and individuals do to sustain that sense of belonging or not belonging. For anything to be defined there must be a boundary but often that boundary is mutable and changes according to situation.

I have spent the mornings of my holiday trawling through the descriptive chapters looking for bits and pieces that are there that relate to this work. I am hoping that that lays a good groundwork for writing  as I need to write 6,000 words next weekend so as to have the belonging chapter drafted. So I will be in thesis purdah. I expect I will do it but it is going to take an effort.

Week 47: Writing up cut short due to holiday

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	77,350
Words typed this week:	1082
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	1082
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Well just over a thousand words is not good progress but the fact I was writing every day made a difference. It did not produce words but it did get me to go in specific directions. The first draft is awfully bitty and I expect to have to do some serious organising of the theory section when I get back but I think I have down all I want to say even if it is not a smoothly created argument yet. I still have one theorist to put in but there is space for him.

The really good news is that I think I have sorted out what social constructionism actually is and therefore I can argue that it looks specifically at the work that is done by members of the congregation in order to create the tradition/discourse/flow that is the identity of the congregation. I am therefore in a position to go on holiday and do the work abstracting the stuff from my descriptive sections with which to organise around the central arguments of this chapter. I am going to be a lot more explicit about my interpretation in this chapter and see if that works better. I have about 5000 words to do it in and I am still trying to organise my thoughts about how best to tackle it. I suspect in three pieces. The first that looks at the types of behaviour that are associated with belonging. The second which looks at the ways people actually signal their belonging and the third that looks at the ways the community invites people to belong and marks boundaries.

Now I really do need to think about doing something about getting organised for holiday properly!

Week 46: Small count hides quite a bit of work

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	76,268
Words typed this week:	372
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	372
Days I managed to write this week:	1

There are exactly four more green bits of tissue paper on the triskele this week. The increase is quite small this week and I know I should be writing more but it has been a real struggle to get this far. That said I did read a whole book yesterday and I spent quite a bit of time during the week actually working on something else in the tradition chapter plus there has been a lot of organising bits and pieces I need to do so that I can keep working while I am on holiday.

One of the reasons it is so slow is that I am having to put together the theory as I go, this is stuff I know but that I have not spent time reading around and I need it now because I have to give another angle to my argument about belonging. This is taking me to theorists who are normally used in subjects like social psychology, conversational analysis and so on. These are very different theorists to the big social theorists that I have spent most of my time with and yet to portray belonging we need to look at these.  That means this week I really need to get my head around social constructionism and the difference between English and American Schools of this. I suspect I will go with the English who are not so optimistic about the role an individual can play in creating reality.

It should also be noted that I had a cold during the week and was definitely below par.

Week 45: Summer cold slows progress

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	75,896
Words typed this week:	1715
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	0
Days I managed to write this week:	0

This week the words have been slow, that is in some ways not surprising it has been the start of a new chapter and that is always slow and I have also had a cold. I failed to realise I had a cold when I started writing and so I was getting rather down about the amount of work I was managing to do and how limited my concentration was. In fact I am slightly further on than this but this was as far as I got last night.

This chapter is about belonging and looks at the connection between the individual and the congregation. It needs to look at this both from the perspective of the congregation and the perspective of the individual. Sociology tends to be a big to small dynamic and so I am hoping that Social Constructivism which is technically part of Social Psychology may produce a better understanding of the work the individual is doing.

The other thing is that I am beginning to realise that writing theory is very different from writing data description and I am much slower at writing theory as I need to go back and forward between the literature and the writing as I need to be careful I get it right. This means that I can spend an hour or two for just 200 words because most of the time is spent reading and writing. The good news is that since my supervision mid week I know what I was missing from my theory section that was making it so short, I was forgetting to show how others had used the theorist I was using. I will need to put that in but it does mean with this chapter that I am putting that in right from the start.

I have a second go at theory this week, needing to put together something on the "work" an individual does to maintain an identity of a group and then something on power between the individual and the group. I also would like to get registered this week with the University of Birmingham, they still have not got me sorted.

September Supervision and Tradition chapter in draft

Break at New Street to write this blog

Well just five weeks after the last supervision and I am back with another chapter in draft! Yes really written between two supervisions. What is more with this chapter I am far happier as the argument of the whole thesis is beginning to take form. Oh there have been ideas before but they have been implicit and not explicit. Last time I actually sat down and started writing something on theory behind it all and with chapter which is the first of the theory chapters I have been making the transition from writing mainly description to focusing on the theory. 

This chapter was shorter than previous chapters coming in around 10,000 word mark. That also was illuminating; I write 10,000 words better than I write 15,000. I seem to sprawl with 15,000 and get lost in creating the quantity, which results in overwrites, too much detail and not enough focus. The arguments get relegated to side portion. 10,000 I can sustain an argument for (or almost can, there were signs of the sprawl coming in but I was able to nip those before they got out of control). That said the middle two sections need integrating in to each other rather than being separate. I think I may have to look at how I do this. 

 

There are other caveats, I need to show a knowledge of the critiques of my theorists. I am unusual in that I have gone back to the big names, not relied on secondary opinion but I also need to show I am aware of the debate. This means more reading I am afraid but it can wait for the finalising edit form. As I suspect that one of the members at one of the placements churches wants to read this chapter in particular I may still send it to my proof readers to look through.

Other than that, before the next supervision I need to have a draft of my chapter on belonging, my cunning plan is to do the theory over the coming two weekends and then while I am away take my three descriptive chapters and basically try and work through them to see what I have relevant to the two themes that are running through it. It will be returning again and again to two themes and working them through from each of the chapters.

Two irritants I am still not registered for next year although my supervisor has filled in the relevant paper work twice. I will check again tonight when I get in and see if anything has happened and if not chase the person who was dealing with the query. Secondly I could not log in due to the login servers not being available. This was irritating as it meant I could not check for papers but I suspect there really is not going to be anything major.

Week 44: Productive non writing week

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	74,181
Words typed this week:	0
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	0
Days I managed to write this week:	0

I have not been writing this week because I needed time to do other bits of my thesis. So I have done the post proof reading edit on the worship chapter and that meant it was also time to send that out to my placement churches. The editing was fairly straightforward. I worked through one on Thursday and one on Friday and combined them to check that I had sorted things. I think I have. However if anyone has a verb that explains what a minister does when they adapt a piece of liturgy for use in their own setting and yet the piece remains distinctly related to the original, then please let me know. It is a bit like hearing a piece of music that is titled "variations on a theme by XXX". I used "riffs" neither of my proof readers like it but the other verbs suggested imply quite strongly doing this within worship.

The getting the chapters out was also more work and more expense than I had expected. A full toner was used (costing over £8 pounds) partly at least because my machine does not automatically do double sided so I was making mistakes in trying to get it too. Secondly I need to get them bound £4 each and then there is postage and I will have to send them recorded delivery as this is the only paper copy. There is of course paper as well.

This week I have a supervision and I start the chapter on belonging. It is going to be fun at least in part because it does not have the same story piece that the chapter on Tradition happened but rather I have to make the effort to draw more on the data from the first three chapters and probably a bit of the tradition I also have a supervision on Tuesday so we shall see how things are going.

Week 43: Another chapter written this time on tradition

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	74181
Words typed this week:	3545
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	0
Days I managed to write this week:	3

Yes this feels impressive. I am actually smiling as I type this blog, I have spent much of the bank holiday weekend working on this chapter and I have it finished. I know what the argument I am making in this chapter and I am starting to think both on how it draws on the previous chapters and will in turn be drawn upon in the final chapter.

Now I have written it I can see that this chapter is very much about the big approach to the idea of identity, the next one is going to be about the small approach to the idea of identity, about the ways in which members shape themselves and the congregation in  order to create its identity. I hope to be able to do something similar with it.

The final chapter therefore works out on how to blend and work the whole thing together so as to create an understanding that encompasses both the big and the small. I am being forced into tackling this because I have studied congregation and congregations are neither as small as individuals nor as large as nations. The big scale stuff works very well when looking at a large scale but often fails to deal with the small scale things and the small scale things down build up too well for the large scale. There are similarities but an adequate understanding of what is going on in a congregation has to find a way to meld the two in a way that makes sense.

I am however taking this coming week off writing, not off thesis just writing, instead I will be correcting my final data chapter and sending all of them off to the congregations. As well as preparing for my next supervision. That seems to me to be plenty to do in the week. Oh I also would like to be able to sort out my registering for the University next year but that depends on the University.

Week 42: Better progress on the history narrative of the tradition

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	70636
Words typed this week:	2975
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	0
Days I managed to write this week:	4

I know that chart seems to have come along a lot since last time but please remember that last weeks was no updated but I have done this week. The increase of 2975 is mainly writing history of the tradition. Some things have been very satisfying with doing this. I have actually spent quite a bit of time checking dates and such and what can be said is that I basically had the narrative in the right order even when I did not know the dates off the top of my head. I probably need to put more Scottish stuff in. The Campbellites as seceders from the Presbyterian churches for instance, rather than just a random American sect.

More difficult has been the task has been the knowing when to cite and when to write. I have a tendency  to want to put "William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066 at Hastings (Yeatman, R.J and Appleby S, 1931)", I am at present working on the idea that if my source is Wikipedia it does not need to be cited, if I want to cite something I need to find another source (this is not difficult). Most of the time that means I do not cite anything much. However I do have a tendency to check and double check. This is really a sign that I am slightly out of my area and do not know where I have to cite and where I do not need to.

I have two things still to do, firstly put in more Scottish history, there are bits missing that might be useful (such as secession of the Campbellites) and also the twentieth century. There really is not much to say of the Twentieth century other than stead decline. Maybe a bit about ecumenism but also the loss of civic space due to various things. Democracy and the democratic agenda might also be of interest, what do you do when people outside the church are not used to functioning on committees and your church does.

Finally no I do not have only 10,000 words to write, I have overwritten a lot. At least not too badly on this last piece, I think I may need to loose 1000 but I need to write the next section and then come back. Also at present I am very tired and getting the words out is not easy, I really hope with my extended weekend next weekend I am able to both rest and get this chapter into some sort of shape.


Yeatman R.J & Appleby S (1964 reprint) "1066 and All That" London: Penguin

Week 41: Struggling with emphasis and detail

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	67,661
Words typed this week:	2363
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	0
Days I managed to write this week:	4

I know that is last weeks photo and I will change the picture later!
 
It looks like I am getting back into my stride but this is detailed work, very detailed work. I think I have the basics of my argument around the nature of tradition  having actually sat down and revised Foucault, Weber and Althusser but I could do with some depth on the nature of collective memory as I need to work out whether there is anything more there than I already have. I suspect there isn't but I would still be interested in any theory of collective memory that is not solely word based.

The other thing is writing the tradition is very detailed work. It is not that I do not know it, but that usually I know it and don't bother with sources. I am therefore having to chase various sources to give a hint to the fact it is not just me stating things. The other thing is I have maybe four thousand words to write an account of it and that is it. So I have to be very selective. Am I for instance going to include John Owen. He is without doubt important, but what emphasis do I put on Ecclesiology within the discussion. Something are important lay involvement for instance but mainly necessity drives the English Reformed Church into it style of church government and we are far more pragmatic than our Scottish neighbours about it.

Week 40: Slow progress as I change writing mode

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	64,103
Words typed this week:	1195
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	0
Days I managed to write this week:	3

Slow progress this week, I think there are a number of reasons for this. Firstly I have had a supervision, this does not always cut down the number of words written but when it happens mid-week and marks a change of direction in what I need to be writing then I technically only get half the week to write the experimental stuff. This means the ideas are not flowing at all well by the end of the week.

Secondly there is the change in direction, or rather in the style of what I am writing. Last week I wrote a theoretical piece and this week I am starting to write the theoretical writing big time. In this I am engaging with a number of the big thinkers and begin to ask whether their ideas can be applied to the issues I am talking about. The intriguing thing is that because I am theorising at middle level I tend to find it difficult to find theorists who actually talk at the level I am working. There are plenty who work at the scale of the individual and plenty who work at the societal level but those who work theoretically between those two are few and far between. That is not to say there are not those who work at those levels but their main concern seems to be to provide solutions not necessarily to understand what is going on. It was my frustration with being told that A was the problem and if we did X+Y then Z would be the outcome and finding that though we tried our best to do X & Y, Z did not follow, in fact there were resistances to doing X & Y, which started me off on this research in the first place. I thought a proper diagnosis, i.e. one that treats a situation holistically rather than provides a quick answer might be a good starting point.

Anyway today was Althusser's turn and I managed to read the relevant article and write about it. Next the challenge is to look at Foucault. These provide partial but not complete answers and I am probably going to have to look at social memory as well. Really there is nobody who has theorised what a tradition is, it is accepted as unproblematic, but I am going to have to make it up as I go along because when I look at it, it is anything but unproblematic. It fits into my full working model but at the moment I am not ready to disclose that.

Oh the chapter which is on tradition has changed completely, it now therefore consists of section on what is a Tradition (capital T deliberate) a description of the precise tradition and finally the engagement by the congregations with the tradition. All that in 10,000 words instead of 15,000 on the middle section.

Supervision August: Another chapter in “draft” and another three to write

Notice outside the main library, no I did not go in,
but I liked the textured and weathered look of it

I know it is only the last day of July but this supervision was early to take into consideration the holidays and my next supervision is early September.

Right I took my documents to my supervisor this time, amongst them was a think piece. I do not usually do think pieces at the moment, but I was struggling with the fact that while I was writing lots of description, I was not finding it easy to integrate the theory with it. This struggle was particularly intense with the last chapter where the theorists were very few and far between. When you say you are having problems finding anyone to your supervisor and his reply to paraphrase is “Apart from me there isn’t really anyone” then this is not surprising. I have found a useful writer on ritual, I can use ritual not directly but I can talk of form, and form in worship is very closely related to ritual. What is contained within the form is not always the same even when the form looks the same. So you get within worship even that that is not hugely ritualistic a binary stars system where form and understanding circle around each other without being exactly the same.

Anyway I decided to instead start drafting an overview of the theory of my thesis. That started to get my supervisor excited, so now we have split the data chapters from the theory chapters and there are three of each. The three theory chapters mark an outward trajectory that goes from Tradition, through Belonging and on out to Flows within Identity. Anyone know a popular book on fluid dynamics that a way out of practice mathematician would understand? So where I thought I had one chapter to finish and another on Tradition to write I now have that chapter signed off (the change actually means that apart from a drawing together of threads that chapter is fully written). I also have a major selection job to do as I need to reduce my chapters down but I know now how to and writing my theory gives me the tools to cut it down effectively. Actually I pretty confident that I can write the chapter on tradition pretty quickly, maybe by next supervision, the chapter on belonging may well take longer though I think that is pretty straightforward to, which means the big challenge is the chapter on flow. This will need to bring together the various strands of the thesis and create an understanding what the whole thesis is.

Yes I am happy with this, a lot more happy than I was with the previous structure as it allows the descriptive analysis to appear in its own right although more selected rather than letting the theoretical discourse shape the whole thing.

Otherwise two unusual things happened today, it actually rained on me while I was in Birmingham, this is a big rarity, even on wet days I seem to dodge the showers and the wet days have been the minority. The other is even more surprising, I as usual booked a seat on the train but only yesterday and not only did I get a seat but a table seat and facing the direction of travel. For once the 5:00 pm train does not have every seat foll on leaving Birmingham (usually very few standing but all seats full).