Heads down, time to get this thing finished

I have been to supervision today, sorry no pretty picture as I did not see anything I felt like photographing. I have managed to redraft the three data chapters, and it was time to review progress with my supervisor not least because my supervisor has a new job that he will start in May. I needed to check my broad assumption that because I was so close to him leaving I did not have to do anything. Universities are not exactly quick on the uptake when it comes to working out how research students are affected by staff changes. The result is they probably will not have noticed that he legally should not be supervising me without special permission. There is no way they will have worked out whether to give him special permission (preferred option) or what alternative contingency arrangement should happen. Also, my notice to submit will have gone in before he leaves;  we did the signing part today.

Anyway I caught a nasty bug last week, I am describing it as a cold officially, but it seems to have been more of a sinus infection with earache and headaches the dominant two features. It was particularly bad yesterday, and I was expecting today to be surviving on decongestants and pain killers. Fortunately, I hit crisis about midnight last night. I still required pain killers to control the throat/ear pain but no headaches!!!! These were not migraine headaches; I could still speak coherently, but they were painful.

Anyway over the last four to six weeks I have revised the methodology and the introduction chapters and make the changes to the data chapters. These were relatively straightforward changes. I was supposed to:

• upgrade the usage of the literature slightly (the main upgrade being in the introduction and the belonging chapter), 
• include stuff from the flows chapter that they wanted cutting, 
• put in quotes from the interviews. 

These tasks are relatively mechanical as writing goes. I was surprised at the way quotes worked. The request was for quotes from interviews to be included. I have problems with quoting out of context. I have heard too many diatribes against doing that with the Bible to happily do it with another source. So I had to find a way around.  It is not entirely satisfactory. However, as my supervisor pointed out having found a way around I need to explain why I am doing that in my Ph.D.

My supervisor also wants me to reference the place in the interview that will be intriguing. There are two options. Firstly to allocate quote numbers to the segment. If done this way it allows you to put them in order, but gives no idea of spacing. The second is to put in line numbers within interviews. The line numbers gives more detail of position but would mean exporting all the transcripts, putting them into work and then getting it to number the lines.

I have finally sorted how at present to deal with food. The last few times I have been buying food and then not wanting to eat it. Sometimes I would eat it and other times I would throw it out. Today instead I decided to buy when I wanted food. The result was that at about noon I had a soya latte and some trail mix and I had yoghurt and green tea about tea time. Neither was really a meal but neither was totally unhealthy and I had a meal waiting at home to be eaten.

The other nice thing was that with the cold when I bought my latte I left my credit card in the reader and the Costa Barrista on finding it called me and returned it to me! That was enough to persuade me to use a Costa later in the day. Needless to say the sun was shinning and it was a pleasant day while I was in Birmingham.

So with all that out of the way, I need to get my head down and write the Belonging chapter and the Epilogue.  I have started on the Belonging chapter and have spelt out in minute detail the difference between faith membership, institutional membership and community membership.  It feels a bit like giving the primary school guide to congregational structure but as my examiners do not get this when I made more oblique reference I am having to spell it out in detail. The Epilogue is where I need to assert originality which basically means that I am going to have to relate the argument of the thesis back to the literature in the Introduction plus maybe one or two other items.

Well it feels like progress

When I got my to do list it felt like a huge mountain to climb and I was already exhausted. There were only ten of them but some were huge and with some I was not sure how much underneath would need changing once I started. My supervisors kept telling me that the corrections were not that huge. I did not believe him.

Well I am prepared at the moment to accept a bit of humble pie. Since Christmas I have done a second edit on the the two chapters with major corrections that I saw him about before Christmas and I have also sent him two other chapters. One chapter does not need any changes although I may just do some for the heck of it well actually I have some nice quotes from interviews that might just go in.

The work since Christmas has persuaded me that I did base my findings on my observations. I have put in quotes all through two chapters and they provide strong evidence for what I have concluded on many points. They also do something very interesting as I have not worked them into the text (many are too long for that and others are tangential). The quotes interact both with the text I have written and with each other. The result is far closer to the thesis my supervisor originally wanted with multiple voices working through the text. I have enjoyed creating questions and patterns that placing the quotes next to the text creates. I know many ethnographers suggest this as a method but when I have read texts set out like this the interaction seems minimal. The texts remain largely separate and linear. With my thesis this has not happened. For instance I assert one thing in the text and there are three snippets around it. One is a senior member saying what I have said about another, the next is a junior member who addresses the senior member and final one is a story told by the person the other two are talking about. It shows without doubt the inter-textual nature of the interviews. I could not read one separate from the others.

However I am also very glad that I have used narrative fact-ion within the thesis. These set the context for the happenings within the thesis and for the exploration. They also bring to prominence the anthropological element of the thesis rather than the interviews.

However I suspect my examiners were wanting a linear thesis and what they have now got is a tightly woven one instead. I am however enjoying creating the weave although I expect I will not find rewriting the chapter on Belonging nearly as much fun though I know where I am going with that.

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.