Week 22: Major editing work on the location chapter

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far:36,185
Words typed this week: 0
Words lost this week: 1814
Total increase: -1814
Days I managed to write this week: 3

Yes that is last weeks photo and I am nearly 2000 words further behind than I was last week but it feels like progress! The truth is I have probably lost twice that number if not more words and put back in a fresh two to three thousand. However as it was not a case of just delete huge amounts and then typing in fresh but restructuring the old and using the new stuff to give it structure, I don't know what I deleted so can't estimate what I added. The task was a big one and I would say I was 90% of the way there with this chapter.

The real reason I am feeling more hopeful is I am beginning to see the way the thesis will hang together, the metaphor I started out with is developing and making a lot of structural and theoretical sense when applied to the data. This is important the scale at which I am working is a little explored scale in sociology. There is plenty of stuff that looks at big societal issues and there is plenty of stuff that looks at how individuals do things but groups have relatively little attention except as subsets of bigger society at least as far as identity goes.  I probably need to do more work on the actual metaphor, so I have ordered a book on fluid dynamics and am going to return to one of the fractal books I tried earlier.

Yes I know I gave up applied maths at Christmas in my second year of my first degree although if I am honest I did bits and pieces of it right through to final year thanks to having applied mathematicians as close friends and finding the department kept dropping the pure and statistical courses I wanted to do so having to make last minute changes. I think I skipped Prof Priest on the Sun but ended up doing a course on solving partial differential equations. You would also be  right in thinking that I never expected to have to use maths to complete my doctorate. However the one thing I have learnt is the more you understand the thing you are using as a metaphor the better you are able to work with it.

The next week is not going to produce a startling amount of progress as I am working on an appendix. My supervisor suggested that when I wanted to write up something in detail (three times in the whole thesis) that actually I should take those out and create case studies in the appendix. The thing is these actually need very very detailed writing and I need to go through two interviews at least to make sure I have the details right.

Week 7: Oh dear lost some words

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far: 15,965
Words typed this week: 2,868
Words lost this week: 1,286
Total increase:1,582
Days I managed to write this week: 4

Well I wrote over 2,000 words this week but I went to my supervision and my supervisor rightly pointed out that I was putting in words into sections where they did not belong.

One of these sections was probably about 200 words, the other of these sections was over a thousand, so I had to edit them both out and put them in oddments files incase I wanted to take the words and put them back in later in the right place. I hope I now have the right stuff in the methodology about autoethnography and I think I have most of my ethics written. My section on writing is off with the proof readers. Now all I have to do is decide what to do with the auto-ethnography as most of the section has been to the proof readers already.

Oh one of life's ironies looks like it is going to happen next week. On Wednesday the UCU is on strike. Most students seem to get unhappy about cancelled lectures and such. Me? Well I am a UCU member, so I won't be working, however I will be using the extra day to do more work on my thesis. It would be good to have an extra reading day in the middle of next week, as I should be making in roads into my first theoretical section. Where I stand with respect to the research methodology I am working in.

The tradition is Ethnography, my stuff is really straight down the middle. I have done research in other traditions but the way this worked it just made sense to stick with a single methodology. It is a qualitative tradition and no I have not run away from the quantitative methodology because I can't handle numbers, nobody reading my thesis would think that and anyway I am a Statistician. Rather what I wanted to study was conceptually more amenable to an ethnographic approach. That is not what I am going to argue, rather it is to explain what makes ethnography, ethnography as opposed to any other qualitative technique. Then I have to take a more social constructivist approach rather than a realist but then add into the complexity that I believe that academic tradition actually partially shapes what you find. So I talk about culture because I am doing ethnography.

The other thing I have started doing is creating pen portraits, scenes and so on for the two congregations. These aren't for the thesis directly they are ways of me thinking myself into the congregations.

Oh well it should take me a couple of weeks to do then that is the methodology put to bed until I come to the final review.