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.

Almost stopping for Christmas

Parcels for posting and Christmas reading

Well I did not write last night but then I finally got my tradition chapter of my thesis sent off to my supervisor close on midnight. Now I am not expecting him to read it until probably late January at the earliest, maybe February. However, I wanted to get it out of my in tray so that when I get back from Christmas I can have a good go at getting the flows chapter into final form.

Even with finishing so late it took a lot of effort to get there. I started using Pomodoro technique on Saturday to increase my production rate as Christmas and remains of cold had hit it the previous weekend. I also wanted to go to a party on Saturday night. A friend M holds a fantastic Christmas party every year. It includes elements of young person's birthday party as her son's birthday is around then, get together of families to share a meal (chilli made in huge quantities and served with rice) and Bohemian drinks party. Finishing with an intimate group of friends who sit around the table and chat sociably until the small hours of the morning. It is very inclusive and very relaxed. The late night sociability with friends is something I have rarely done since I came to Sheffield twenty years ago and felt good.

So I started, and I got to the stage where there was just one section that needed working on. So I went to the party, stayed later than intended. My decision was to sleep out and then get on as best I could. So I was rather surprised to get up after five hours sleep and find myself ready to work on my thesis.

However, yesterday was a long haul. It took me to lunch time to finish the section, and then I had to check the Grammar and do the bibliography. I have not found a good way to move references between Scrivener and Word. So what I do is to put in Scrivener enough detail (normally authors surname and date plus page) to hopefully find reference in  Mendeley and then when I switch to Word I go through and check it all through very thoroughly and put in the references.

This was hard going for the chapter on tradition as there are at least twice as many references as their are for any other chapter. This is because the autoethnography has been done by me interacting with the texts from and on the tradition. Actually this chapter is still very clearly work in progress. If I get to getting it published it will definitely be one chapter that needs a lot of work. Actually it will need to break into at least two chapters just to deal with the stuff that is in their. Did you know Calvinist/Puritans/Reformed used to view science as a spiritual discipline and an act of devotion to God? Just one of the odd facts I pulled up yesterday while reading up on Dissenting Academies. They taught science because that is how they understood it, not because of commercial applications. If you wanted a commercial education there were plenty of other schools offering that, and they were cheaper too.

Oh I also have cheated, I tend to use Wikipedia not as a source of information but as a place to say "this is not just me".  That is things I know, but I can not document where I know them from. My father was employed there, and while he was there I picked up in general conversation this fact, really is not reference. My supervisor does not like Wikipedia in academic work, so he suggested I took a reference from Wikipedia. Well yesterday I found myself with no other alternative to Wikipedia but to take it reference, fortunately to a source which I a pretty sure does actually give the information given.

I have a big question, why has the Reformed tradition lost confidence in its spirituality. The more I read both historical books in the tradition and also accounts of the tradition it seems that we had what many would say was a well developed spiritual industry about a century and a half ago. Since then we have been persuaded that we do not have one! It is rubbish, when people put the Reformed tradition down for being "anti" then I nearly always can be sure that far from being anti, we have been particularly pro.

Anyway largely stopping for the next few days as Christmas is upon me. I have parcels to post, family to visit and other things to be doing. I will be back writing next weekend so I am taking a couple of books hoping that if I read some of them this week then I will save time afterwards.

Fighting Reference Management Software

This weekend was making slow but sure progress until I had to put in a new citation for Halbwachs. This is a book published in 1929, but as he was French I am not reading the original but a translation. So I decided to follow up another little quirk that I have to deal with for my thesis. That is what to do with works that have at least two dates from publications; that is an original date and the date of the version I am quoting. I am using Mendeley, and the one thing Mendeley does not deal well with is this case. Basically, there is a field in Mendeley called "Original publication" and I can fill that field in, in Mendeley. There is also a field called "Original-date" in CSL, which is how you are supposed to tell Mendeley to format your references. You would think they were one and the same. They are not and I cannot find any way to get CSL to reference the original publication field.This is annoying as 50% of my citations have a different original publication to the copy I am using. One case is where I am using the paperback edition, and there has been a prior hardback edition. However, I have a fair few translated texts and several historical texts.

I asked my supervisor early on, and he was clear I needed to publication date of the copy I was using on the incline citation and original publication only in the Bibliography. Fine, so what I was planning on doing was finishing putting my thesis together, then take the Bibliography that was produced and edit it to put in each and every date! Time consuming but not half as much as hacking Mendeley this past summer was going to be.

He has changed his mind, a supervisors prerogative. I now need to have the original publication in the inline citation. That would mean hand editing every single citation and the Bibliograph. So I decided to try and hack Mendeley. At first there appeared to be no improvement. So I decided to go backwards and see if I could hack Endnote, but for this to be a viable option I needed to be able to import into Endnote. That took quite a while to work out and when I had worked it out I realised it was also not working correctly. Not all the "books" were labelled as "books". Given that I have about 500 references in Mendeley, going through and changing them all, plus putting all the information that was lost was going to be time consuming.

So back to Mendeley and then I found another post that told me a work around. Basically, I had to find a field that existed in both Mendeley and CSL had that I was not using. It took some finding but eventually I discovered that the field "genre" met the requirements. Then I can create my own citation style for my thesis. When I have that I can then play with it and get it so it looks right. I have got it to the proof of concept, but it will take several more hours to get it actually into a form that I want.

So I still have to finish the Tradition chapter. I am hoping to scrounge an extra day later in the week but hope to spend some evenings on it as well so I can justify having Christmas week off.

Pre Christmas Supervision

A Welcome Mug of Tea at New Street

Its been a long time since my last supervision, the one in October which was suppose to be the last before submission, only it wasn’t. I have been doing a lot of work since then but also had a holiday. The combined effect of having to restructure my thesis and a holiday have led to me being far more creative than I have been for the last year. Creativity is not a process at present of creating out of nothing but far more akin to putting together a collage and changing it from being something that is just a collection of used bits into something that feels a cohesive whole. This is harder than you would imagine not least because I seem to insist on collecting the most disparate of things.

Since last supervision I have reversed outlined my entire PhD using Scrivener, tackled two of the dutiful chapters (introduction and methodology) and also worked on the chapters on flows and traditions. All these had been sent to my supervisor even though at least the traditions chapter was anything but finished.

Well I have been back to see my supervisor today in Birmingham. The place was swarming with the Winter Graduation candidates. I am pleased to note that the University of Birmingham seems to require people to dress semi-formal which for women means either black/grey dress or black/grey skirt and white blouse. For someone whose first degree had the formality of St Andrews this is copable with, and there is little chance of clashes. Actually there was a real beauty about the red brick campus against the frost cold of a bright December day.

However I was not graduating, I am just reorganising my thesis prior to submitting. My supervisors assessment of where I am at and where I thought I was at agreed. He does feel that this time things are fitting together in a way that was just not the case in the previous version and this shows in what I am doing. Two chapters are now in final form (well bar one small change in the one part that can’t be finalised until I have finished in the introduction i.e. the description of the chapters to come).  So that is Introduction and Methodology put to one side until final edit. The other two  under review today require quite a bit of work. One of these was not a surprise, it really was not ready for review but because it showed how my thought was developing I thought it well sending it to my supervisor. The other perhaps is, but it felt a bit skinny as if the bones were there but not the sinews. This is in part because the sinews I had on before had to be removed as they no longer worked, but I need to create new stuff.

The programme now is to get the tradition chapter back to him before Christmas and then to go back to flows after Christmas. The aim being to get the majority of remaining six chapters to my supervisor by 29th February. I may need extra time, but I think it is doable.

Well as ready as I will be for next supervision

Well this has not been a week of good progress. Good progress would mean that I basically had my chapter on tradition back in draft. It did not sound much to do, just an extra section that gives the references to people who have also written about the tradition and something on Bourdieu. The shock was to realise that the language he was using reflected very accurately a specific theorem. The remains the Bourdieu was quite a skilled user of statistic, but many of his followers have a simplistic understanding of what he was doing. He was choosing statistical techniques because they fitted with what he was researching. That does not make those statistical techniques somehow better than others but it does make his use of techniques better. Well David Cornick returned the compliment and started using "habitus" without referencing Bourdieu.  Now I have the idea I have to go away and think what the implications are. For a start things do not behave as nicely with human culture as you do with probabilistic models.

Progress on the whole has been slow, I did have an extra day on Tuesday as the UCU was on strike again only I seem to have a rare ability to throw migraines on strike days with the result that my brain only started functioning late on in the day. Then on Thursday I was feeling off colour but went into work anyway. The result was that for the first time in a couple of years I have had a head cold. I have had a couple of days when the effect of the cold left me decided feverish. The result is that I have not made the progress that I hoped on the chapter of tradition.

However I have sent the tradition chapter in its very much draft form to my supervisor as I am aware that things are dropping into place in a way that they did not in the final stages in the spring. I want to check with him that these ideas are at last coming on with something that is worthwhile. This chapter is growing and I suspect that it could grow further.

I am beginning to wonder if there is not a book that looks at the way that the Reformed tradition is embodied in the local congregation. This would expand this chapter to fill the space and mean I needed to spend more time reading the tradition. I am getting more confident with handling it and my hand waving is getting less arbitrary. For instance I have replaced a section on falling out in general with a synopsis of the big falling out for the Reformed tradition which is the debate between Predestinarianism and Armininianism which happened at the second Synod of Dort. What it actually did was provide a template for future fallings out within the Reformed tradition! I am at the point of wanting to check how Scotland dealt with Congregational discipline for another part and slowly but slowly I building a much more Empirical model.

Starting Advent and Starting to see the Form Emerge

Seasonal Lights in City Centre

Well I have sent the chapter on flows to my supervisor yesterday. That means he has three chapters to discuss with me next week. Actually I am very tempted to try and get a fourth one to him even if it is not quite up to the readiness the other chapters are. That is because as part of my rewrite of it I will start to be putting in the new focusses to that chapter, and that should change the feel of it substantially. The flows chapter was in the end a matter of cutting a lot so relatively easy to get into the right form. This next chapter needs more fresh writing. Indeed I sat down today with a pen, paper and timer and wrote against the clock. Actually what I produced in the time will mainly go in the bin, but at the end of it I carried on writing, and I actually started to write something worthwhile which can form the basis of the extra bit I need to write.

Now I am struggling with how to edit the rest of this chapter, there are detailed edits to be done but there is also structural work. Do I correct the detailed edits and then do the structural work knowing that I might not need to make all the edits or do I do structural work and then sit down and work through the detailed edits which now might be in a totally different place. Decisions, decisions.

I also would be further on if there had not been two power cuts this weekend. This has delayed writing although both were at night. Once I know the power is off, and I nearly always am woken by it going off, I only sleep lightly until it comes back on. So I have needed to catch up on sleep once it was on. Todays was worse as it was still off at breakfast time so I went out to get a coffee to warm up and only returned once it was on. Still not used my emergency camping stove but was glad I had it and was wondering whether I should invite the neighbours around for soup.

This evening went to the cathedral having forgotten it was advent 1. So ended up with triple the usual congregations or more in the same space. Sheffield Cathedral has building works so it was in St George's chapel. That said it was not over full and I managed to find a corner where I was almost tucked behind a pillar. Unsurprisingly the whole message was "Be prepared" but I am getting that rather a lot these days.