I am Submitting: or the final stages

This will be brief, there will be a much longer post on Tuesday but I have been off work since Thursday and been finishing off my PhD. There were bits and pieces to do. The first couple of days was spent on the bibliography. I had to do three things.

1. Make sure every time I had referenced a text that was linked to the Bibliographic database. At various stages in the editing some referenced links had been lost. I therefore had to make sure all were active.
2. Make sure I had to make sure that every reference that I referenced was correctly and fully entered in the database. Unfortunately about three websites had disappeared. Two do not matter as they were esoteric denominational stuff. The third site was a very nice introduction to a theme. I did find it, but it is behind a paywall and it is an old version. 
3. I  had to make sure that the way the citations were happening was fine. This was a problem as the information my supervisor wanted me to put in was not standard and he was quite precise over several details. I needed to include original issue date, I needed to have page numbers just as numbers and I needed with book sections to bold the book and italicise the chapter title. I also for my own good practice standard needed to include the date when I accessed any webpage (see previous point). This involved me using CSL editor to create my own style.

After that it was layout.  It has taken me the best part of two days to meet the University requirements. The biggest pain of the whole lot is the requirements for figures. They want the figure number above and the caption below! You'd be surprised how many ways Word can mess this up and decide it is not going to behave. Anyway that will have to be sorted tomorrow in work where I am printing before I do anything else about printing. I also will need to redo the contents and the figures listing at the front of the text.

The other last minute thing was writing the acknowledgements. I have written them but just realised I should get them sent around people so that they had a chance to object. So I am hoping that they are happy as I really cannot do much editing.

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.

Collating and Back to the Introduction

Books relating to Foucault

This weekend I have traced and proofed all my appendices.  I ended up with six appendices including a Bibliography. I have drafted and abstract which is 100 words too long (50%), so I am going to have to cut that down quite drastically and the big challenge is not to say succinctly what the study was but to say succinctly what the findings are. Then I have pulled the whole thesis together! This took up most of Friday.

So yesterday(Saturday) I pulled the whole thing together and did a lot of the formatting work. I now have a table of contents and also list of illustrations. I have called them illustrations but basically anything that is not pure text. So there is a table, several diagrams, a couple of photos and at least one drawing. I could find eleven in total.  What this means, is that I can finally do an exact count of the number of words in the text; 76,863 to be precise. This means that I have approximately 3,000 words to play with, maybe slightly more. The question is what are my priorities for these words. There are two, the first is to extend the section on Foucault in my introduction, not hugely but so that it actually makes an argument rather than just states the case. This has set me back to reading Foucault today. The second is to develop my conclusion.

There are however several other tidying-ups that need to  be done. One is highly related with the first, and that is to check through all the references to Foucault in my thesis and make sure they are consistently referencing the appropriate texts. The second is to find all the references to "I" and check they are appropriate and if not to remove them. I have removed some of them as I have been proof editing, but I am quite sure that some have got in. It is fine to write "I did X"; it is not fine to write "I think the second option". The first is a statement of what I did, the second is a hedging of bets. Then there is the Bibliography that needs to be sorted through and making sure it is coherent and correct. Plus putting in all the originally published information. Fortunately I have a six day weekend made up from annual leave next weekend.