End of Another Year and I am still doing Thesis

Well I admit that most of this week I have taken off, but I still needed to get some work done so I came back from my parents on Friday and have spent quite a bit of Saturday and today working on the flows chapter.  The result is that chapter is back in supervisor draft, and I now have the challenge of getting through the three data/ethnographic chapters.

I was not needing to alter the argument within the flows chapter, but I was needing to incorporate the thinking of Zygmunt Baumann on liquid nature of modernity and on Pete Ward's take on that. Actually this did the thesis some good as at one point I was wondering whether they were working in the same way as me. There does seem to be a tendency among Social theorists to skim the surface of the metaphors they use. My experience in writing poetry is that a metaphor really starts to work when you begin to understand it. The better you understand it, the better and more illuminating it is as a metaphor. Indeed the care with which I have invested in understanding the metaphor and how I am applying it is paying dividends. I was sitting down with Pete Ward's book when he asserted that if we changed the way church was organised we could still keep the gospel as it was. However, I had already looked at the relationship between ideas and people and realised that these are different takes on the same problem. So if you organise church differently, you reorganize people encounter with the Gospel and therefore the Gospel you proclaim. I suspect it is this realisation that is at the heart of the need to restate the Gospel in Reformed thought. If a society reorders itself then the terms change their meaning so you need to rethink the formulation. It is not that there are not references, but that the magic blanket of language that allows us to do so many things slips quite easily.

Anyway I had to work the whole thing through and am now pretty happy with the chapter. It is making an argument and I think that works.

Now I have to get on with the ethnographic/data chapters. Come Monday morning I will need to sit down and do quite a bit of work on focussing. The idea is to use the chapters not only to describe aspects of the placements but to focus on aspects of the tradition and also aspects of the metaphor. The conclusion of each chapter then becomes crucial as it should pull together these aspects from within the chapter. I however need to spend quite a bit of time thinking this clear. It would be nice to have one to one mappings but I somehow doubt it.

Well a couple of fairly productive weeks

Daffodils at a local park

I am just realising that I did not manage to write anything last week even though I did quite a bit of work. I think some of that was due to the fact that I had a very full weekend and when I finally finished the extended weekend's work on thesis I was immediately going out to elders (I took the photo was taken walking to elders).

Firstly I got feed back on the chapter on belonging, I think my supervisor is now largely happy with it just wanting minor corrections so that gives me tradition, worship and belonging as in second draft. Last weekend I sent off the redraft of flows. It is frustrating in some ways. On one level it works as a chapter but the thread that would make it shine is not there yet.  I want it to shine and I know it is something quite simple but I am not sure what. Anyway I got it off to my supervisor so that is three officially in second draft and a fourth possibly.

I say that with last weekend not just being Easter weekend but also my ministers last weekend with us. She is inducted to a church in Southampton next weekend. I found that Friday and Saturday were not good writing days especially as I was worrying about being table elder on the Sunday and getting things right for the service. I was also off colour not quite sure now what with; at the time I thought I was skirting a migraine but it also sounds very much like a bug that is going around. However my brain cleared on Tuesday and I got things sorted and off to my supervisor.

So this weekend I have been working at getting another chapter up to scratch. The one this time is the one on location and what I am trying is even though this is descriptive chapter to see if I can integrated with the observational data and see what I actually come up with. It takes a bit of doing because the use I have done of the theory is pretty general. That and I need to cut this by a third for the thesis length.  It may work, it may not. The idea at the present is to work from locating, through the use of space to the experience of worship. We shall see.

A Quick Note having got Belonging chapter back in Second Draft

This week has seen better progress than last week. I will not get chance to work on thesis tomorrow as there is a big do at church to say farewell to our minister as she is leaving including lunch. I will find it exhausting and I have other jobs to tackle such as sorting out the duties for communion for the following week. Anyway I have got the chapter on Belonging into a form which I think my supervisor would prefer. That is I have mixed the theory in with the theorizing. This I hope will go a long way towards making clear what I am arguing and that although separate one is always informing the other.

The other thing that I have done is to add a final section. This was perhaps the most fun part of the writing as it was taking what I had observed and relating it to two wider sets of ideas. This is actually the sort of writing I have done quite a bit when preparing supervisory papers during my doctorate and is in my opinion fun. The two sets of ideas I was dealing with were the pairing of believing and belonging by Grace Davie and the work of James Hopewell on Congregations and how their identity functions. It was a neat tidy point but opened up a whole lot more questions that could be explored outside this study.

I also have updated the style sheet for my proof readers. What I was intrigued was to find there was a rule for whether you capitalise or not the Sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The answer is yes if you are talking of the generic form as there but not if you are talking of a specific event. So if I wanted to say I went to my goddaughter's baptism then the b is in lower case! You learn something new every day.

I have started redrafting the chapter on flows. Intriguingly this time I found I could only start structuring it once I had written the introduction. I do not normally write the introduction until the end. However I will need to go back to the introduction to finesse it and put in an idea of what is covered in this chapter. That means next weekend I am writing four mini articles (about 1,500 essays) on the relationship of four different aspects of fluid dynamics.

Oh and the doll, well she has gone through a fair bit of the thesis with me. Firstly timing interviews so they did not go too far over the hour, secondly timing writing time in a morning and now timing  Pomodoro slots which I concentrate for.

Last Supervision Poetry, this Month Hiking

Union Election Placards outside the University Library

Another month gone and supervision tackled. The weather was contrasts again, this morning in Sheffield I had sweatshirt, gilet and coat and while walking through the fog to the station I was wondering if I would need to get a scarf while I was out as it was that chilly. I got to Birmingham and it is sunny, warm, very definitely spring and I am peeling layers. I had sent three chapters to my supervisor, hoping to get two into draft and a reworking of the third with ideas for the fourth in outline. Well the two are in draft (Ruth and James expect them soon) although the worship one is still needing reworking. The tradition one has gone through on a single draft. Things are moving on.

However belonging if anything has gone backwards, or rather with other chapters coming into focus, this as lost its focus. The result is that I need to do something pretty strong on restructuring and working through. This is where the walking comes in. The first stage is to get myself into the literature on believing and belonging (Grace Davies). Not that I am talking much about the same thing which is why Grace has not appeared much but she is arguing that people have real problems in belonging. There is therefore space to discuss the way congregations create belonging. There is definitely something going on but at the moment things are separate and the only way to get further is to immerse then create space. I did this a while back by drawing a labyrinth, for a previous one. It was semi effective, this time I think I am going to have to get myself out for a walk. I think given space and time it will be to the Dam Cafe and back, which is the only walk that really starts from my front door. So I am at present holding thumbs that Saturday is a fine day.

The rest of the month, I need to tackle flows, although that was the good news this time. The structure I wrote for the chapter on flows is far better than the structure of the chapter on Belonging. Then I need to do a lot of work on the chapter on Community. The last is really only there because I am not seeing my supervisor until 16th April so definitely have six weeks to work on this. That is not to say the weeks are not busy, there is also St Andrew’s AGM, Sarah’s departure and Easter to fit in. So busy but I think manageable.

A None Writing, Thesis Week

No picture this week, Sorry but I forgot to take them earlier and I have new glasses and am getting used to them at present. The actual progress on writing has been slow this week. Indeed I have probably spent about four hours in total working on it and the word count is zilch. That is because the actual work I have done is on reviewing the chapter on Flows rather than writing anything. It is a much clearer chapter than the one on Belonging was which has the advantage I can see a lot of the junk. The big challenge is to chop down the initial bits which are decent but long winded and get to the core of the chapter quicker.

That said I have not been doing quite a bit of thesis related work. This week the URC held a conference (that was their word for it, a consultation may have been better) on worship called Opening the Gates to Heaven. It was a very typical URC event with worship leaders of all colours there, including trainers, ministers, and lay preachers. Then there was me! The only one who would probably claim that her interest in worship was from the perspective of someone in the pew and not that of an organiser. This contrasts very starkly with the Society for the Study of Liturgy  where the dominant group were the critics of liturgy. Yes the normal Reformed bias also showed. If we get our theology right then our worship will follow. The problem I have is that I suspect that our more ceremonial traditions have it right in that it is "Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi"or that as we pray, so we believe and so live (which is a rough translation). The other thing is that I see not the words per se as determining the belief but the way the person sees themselves through the words. In other words unlike many who use that phrase that think it is enough to get the words right, I actually think it is important to understand how people understand the words. Well that took up two days this week. The conference was very packed full with sessions. I think we got through seven papers and two group sessions plus about five or six worship sessions and two story sessions. That was all fitted in with sleeping and eating into less than thirty hours with sleep and meals but it was two and half hours drive both ways to Northampton.

I was already a day down this weekend, I had taken it earlier in the week but then spent it getting specs. Well I need to be out of the flat and that meant that I could not really work and I needed to do some preparation for the meeting. Not that I did what I should have done, the effort of last weekend left me ill focused. Then I also needed to prepare for my supervision this Tuesday. That actually gave a focus as I needed to review the flows chapter for the supervision. Not that there will be any lack of stuff to talk about. I have sent three chapters this month!

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 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.