Settling Back down

Last weekend should have been my parents golden wedding celebration (my Mum got the whole do cancelled as she cracked her pelvis the morning before) so it is time I settled down to sorting out my thesis post exams.  There are bits that annoy me about the report such as me admitting that on one reference I could not find the original and thinking therefore there were lots. There are exactly two pieces I could not trace and the second is not actually referenced in my thesis. I have now found that reference and found that the reference to it was wrong. The other remains a mystery and if a historian wants an intriguing puzzle I am willing to set out what the problem is. There are other things I will struggle with such as doing a literature review without a topic. My thesis draws on a wide range of literature and doing a review over the thesis would be as long as the thesis.

Anyway today was the day to settle down and get something done. Actually some weeks back I made up a table of the interviews I did and I will send that to my supervisor. I have also found a paper by Voas and will trace others. However, today I sat down and began to go through the audio recordings. I am actually transcribing them. This was something I was thinking I was going to have to twist and only transcribe in parts. Then a couple of weeks back I went to a session by QSR and they talked of three levels of transcribing:

1.  The highly detailed favoured by conversational analyst, which often uses the Jefferson Transcription System. This is what I started out using.
2. The medium one tries to capture words but turns it into good enough English. I tried this and most of the interviews I had transcribed in this was done using a system suggested by Catherine Kohler Riessman book Narrative Analysis 
3. They third is the notes one and just tries to capture the gist of what was being said in the interview.

It is the third form that I am now using. I am leaving out most of what I said and just trying to capture the essence of what was said back to me, although that often means working in the interviewees own words. It will give me enough to code to for the analysis and I will be able to select bits that I want to include into the thesis and then transcribe them up to the second level. My analysis does not justify taking them up to the first level. The difference is remarkable I have transcribed two interviews this weekend and I would have got a third done but for software.

I am transcribing in QSR NVivo and need to because that gives me the ability to select the precise bits I need to code and the ability to link these to the tape recording to later produce the precise transcripts of the relevant pieces. However, the software has crashed most times I have tried to close an recording with a transcript I have been working on. I have checked the software is up to date. I have removed the first recording this happened with and brought it in again. I have waited up to an hour for the software to do its bit. It will fortunately save the transcript just as long as I do not close it! The result is yesterday I transcribed about half an hour of interview three or more times and I have had losses today as well. Now as I finish a section of the transcription I save the project. 

Anyway I hope to get this sorted this week and I have ordered a foot pedal so I do not need to use my hands to control the audio player on the computer. I have also found another book that needs to go into the thesis as it deals with an area close allied to my thesis although not overlapping. I think it was published after I reviewed congregational studies in the Reformed churches and found two studies. This makes a third.

Viva Prep at Birmingham

Today I went to see my supervisor at Birmingham for a Viva Preparation session. He offered me one when I submitted my thesis and I took him up on it. However the only date that we both could make was today. Today's session was more relaxed than a normal one

In the weeks since the last blog I have been working through my thesis. The process has focused on annotating the text with post-it notes and pencil. There are three different sorts of annotations. Simple textual correction are corrected in pencil. l will produce a list of these corrections for the examiners, but they can then be put to one side. Then there are the explanations and more in depth corrections that cover actual substantive errors. These are put on yellow post it notes. When I really need to make sure these are mentioned I have also put a yellow tab mark at the top. Finally, there are the key points of the thesis. These are on pink post it notes. However, these are divided into major and minor with pink tabs for the major ones. There are far more pink tabs than yellow, but I suspect about an equal number of post it notes in each colour. I am also doing mindmaps of each chapter. I will also do a diagrammatic picture of the thesis and produce an index for my own use.

Anyway the reason for me writing this is that today I went to see my supervisor to do viva prep.l needed two things from him. First was local information on how vivas work at Birmingham. I know the general stuff, but each university has its own idiosyncracies and thus I needed to know what these were for Birmingham. There is nothing off the wall, but the detail was important. Indeed we got at one stage into a discussion over the affiliated colleges to Sheffield University. The second was to get me talking around my thesis. It actually seems to come quite easily in that I can put things into words. My main difficulty, as Martin spotted, is referencing my thesis. I am going to have to do some thinking. Up today l have assumed that page number was the sensible way to do this but I am realising that there maybe a more natural way. I suspect that the full thesis diagram might produce this and therefore becomes more important than the indexes.

The day was as sunny as it usually is when I go to Birmingham. Many students were out on the grass and few were in the computer rooms. I suspect that it is a pre-exam week although some exams were in progress. It is now less than a fortnight to my viva and as l walked back to the train station it just might be my last time as a student. Birmingham New Street is still a mess and I am not sure whether I should be glad that I will not have to deal with it regularly over the next few months or sorry that after putting up with it in this state I will not automatically see the new look when finished.

Getting there, or editing is now over

Paper Ready for Printing

Well I went wild on Friday and bought two reams of paper for printing out my doctorate. That was my way of encouraging myself to actually finish the proof review of my thesis.
Friday I spent quite a bit of time getting the chapters on Community and Worship up to standard. Then Saturday I spent the whole day trying to remove words from the chapters on Location, Community and Worship. In the end I gave up and removed a section. However, I shortly afterwards spotted that my chapter on Belonging length included the Bibliography at the end. This gave me enough space to put it back in and I am about 500 words under my word limit of 80,000. Actually I might be quite a bit lower than that as I am at present counting labels to charts and graphs but I would say less than 0.5% off the total is not bad.

Oh one little detail, I describe at one point someone going out for a "fag-break". Now I know that technically that should be "cigarette-break" but I have never heard that used by anyone. The break is always a "fag -break" whether it is people going for one or people talking about someone going for one. So my decision was to leave it in that form in my thesis.

Today I have been working through the chapter on Belonging and the Conclusion. These were far more finalised than the rest although it looked as if my English was more unconventional in the Belonging chapter. So the text for submission is now finalised, now all I need to do is the mechanics of laying it out, getting all the papers in the right order and printing. Oh I do have one more piece to write and that is simply the piece that is for acknowledgements. So one of my jobs this week is to look through other people's acknowledgements and to record them.  Apart from that I will be doing my best not to become hyper over referencing styles and layouts. One job next weekend is to check every single reference in the thesis and make sure the references look right. I have well over two hundred references.

This feels very strange and I suspect the feeling will continue to build as I go through the next ten days that are before submission.

Back to the Draft:

A Piece of Wild plant Garden all tidied up 

for Autumn outside a local School

The first thing is to tackle how I have got on with the settling back into re-writing and re-drafting mode.

The first thing to say is I said I could not let my supervisor know until next weekend. This was because I knew I was busy this weekend. Indeed I was working for about half of Friday and had some other bits a pieces to deal with. However,this does not mean I have been inactive.


I have fought off using Scrivener for a while. Some of this caution is due to the difficulty of using Scrivener with references from Mendeley. However I was faced with a challenge I really did not want to tackle in Word and that was trying to reorganize an entire thesis. the other thing is that Scrivener has story boarding facilities.Now of course ideally you would do that at the start of your thesis but mine, like Topsy, just grew. Actually that is not fair, I had a plan but it has been changed so many times since I started writing that really I have lost control.

Thus I took the plunge and got hold of Scrivener and started to use it to Reverse Outline so as to get some idea of what is where in the thesis. The fact that Scrivener has a story board facility means I can reverse outline with the text right alongside.  Actually that is not quite right as I am also working through the pages as I go and trying to reorganise things so they are in the right place.

Having now sat down, I must admit that the thesis last Wednesday was not at a level I would have liked to defend. The process of reverse outlining is taking me back into the thesis and seeing where it is weak. I am also aware that the reordering and a couple of insertions as suggested by my supervisor starts to make the thesis tell a story.

The aim at present is to have got through the reverse outlining by next weekend, which will basically give me a set of edits to make to my thesis. Then to write to my supervisor and tell he what the process is and how I want to organise it.

Perhaps what I am most happy with about this incident is that it showed my research instincts were right. What I was producing was not good enough. Now having been through this I have things slotting in much better and I think I am starting to know the story I am telling. The storyboarding should allow me by next weekend to actually be a lot clearer on where I am going and to stick to it rather than get diverted by new interesting ideas. My instinct is a lot happier at present and is beginning to run with the situation.

However due to Scriveners weaknesses I am expecting to have to do quite a bit of work at the end of the thesis to tidy it up in Word and to sort out the references.

Week 21: Only slight increase as redrafting starts

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far:38,629
Words typed this week: 2088
Words lost this week: 1545
Total increase: 543
Days I managed to write this week: 4

Well the progress is still slow, but I feel a lot more positive about it than I did last week. My supervisor was able to put into words some of my vague wanderings and get me to relate them to my thesis. That was a major achievement. Now I need to re-write the location chapter to reflect this.

The stuff that is wrong with chapter on location is structural i.e. actual organisation of the writing so that I can link it effectively with the theory. My initial solution was to completely muddle up but that would mean ruining the theory part that was close on finished.  What my supervisor suggested was removing a large clunky bit of description and putting it into an appendix. That I have done. I will have another two appendices dealing with two other chain of events that could take over the thesis.

There are interesting things coming out. I am I would have thought fairly typical of many members and suspicious of how much lip service is given to church meeting so finding that when I actually look at people's behaviour it shows that people tend to "get it" even without lots of front and also tend to value it, even if they don't attend. This is even amongst people who might have reason for not getting it. Now I am not suggesting that church meeting were usually exciting well attended events. On the whole they weren't. However the evidence suggests despite being the same old poorly attended business meetings they do speak to people of a church that is governed by the whole people of God.

Next week I am going to try and write the next appendix so as to give myself chance over the weekend to work through the previous chapter and start seriously reorganising. Oh the other thing is I have found a reference to a text that I have sought for a long time. The only challenge now is to find a library that has a copy of the text. It was printed in 1851 according to the reference. As it is a transcript of a text given in 1620 you begin to see the problem. However it is one text that quite a few URC members are able to paraphrase. It is interesting to put it in context and try and understand what it is actually saying.

March's Supervision (another sunny day in Brum)

Today I was down again at Birmingham for my supervision. I am still struggling with the size change from writing papers of 6,000 word size to writing chapters of 12-18,000 words that make up a thesis of 80,000 words. The big thing I am struggling with is writing the theory into the analysis. There is a still a definite gap and I am not making the connections. My supervisor was kind enough to say that my description was theory driven but I was not making the connection clear to others. So it is back to the drawing board, although James and Ruth will be glad to here that the detailed description about car parking has been put into an appendix as a case study. There looks as if there will be three case studies, one from St Andrew's Edgerton and two from Ulverstane. Anyway another major redraft of this chapter but it should be shorter at the end. If it works then that is actually a structure for my other two ethnographic data chapters.

I think I am deciding which piety I am going to present in the final data chapter. It has to be something like the piety of Reformed Dissent in England. It is Reformed, in that like all Protestant churches in the British Isles they tend to draw on the strand that comes under the Reformed label rather than Lutheran or Anabaptist. We also do embrace the more thorough implementers of the Reformed tradition, but we are also shaped by the stance taken by the CofE. That that was a stance of middle of the road Reforms, and therefore balance, have led dissent to adopt the alternative approach of tolerance, I claim my freedom ot practice my faith according to the lights the Lord has given me, in return I allow you to practice yours according to your lights. We don't just accept this, we make a positive virtue of it.

My supervisor asked how I felt about writing now. I got as far as I enjoy writing and then got distracted. Writing is something I enjoy, but there are bits I find really difficult, changing chapters and getting my head around another area, pulling back from the very, very detailed information I have both in my head and my notes so as to write more theoretically. The whole complex internal structure that I have to do. I am pretty sure that by the autumn I will just want to get rid of it, but at present it is too much of a challenge and I need to keep writing, I really suspect if I stop the effort to continue will outface me.

The photos attached are part of the end result of a study by Chris Shannahan of the relationship of social exclusion,  urban youth and spiritualities. He did his doctorate with Martin and Martin has acted as an advisor on this project. I ended up at one stage presenting my experience as an ethnographer to a class that included him. 

So this month I need to do the redrafting while doing the initial draft of bits of the next chapter. So no prizes for guess what I expect to be doing during any extra time off in Holy Week.

Oh by the way I have found a couple of things this month. The reference from Barth I was searching for I managed to cross reference, secondly I have found where to find a full transcription of John Robinson's address to the Pilgrim Fathers. In his published works, but that was published last in 1851. I think I might be hunting through old libraries!

Week 8 : While on strike and preparing for conference

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far: 17,929
Words typed this week: 2,243
Words lost this week: 257
Total increase: 1986
Days I managed to write this week: 4

Progress still steady, missed the two thousand words this week by fourteen! There is actually good reason for that, there were also eighteen different items referenced in those words and each reference has to be chased down and checked. Basically I had at least another fourteen words I could have added but I was running out of time. Fewer words lost this week but I still ended up removing some as they did not fit where they were.

I was running out of time as tomorrow I go to the Society for the Study of Theology Postgraduate conference in Edinburgh and I am giving a talk on that. No the talk is written and I did the slides yesterday but there are other things like tidying the flat, doing a bit of shopping (so I have something to eat when I get in) and packing that need doing and can not be put off until tomorrow as i am travelling.

The conference should be interesting, there are enough papers close enough for me to find stuff that interests me. Unfortunately one seminar I would on has a head on clash with me presenting a paper. I would have been struggling to choose if which to go to if it hadn't.

The strike was interesting, it compacted my working week into three days and thereby gave me officially an extra day for thesis. In actual fact it did not work like that and I ended up tired out on the day and slept about half of it but at least I got some reading done.

I am also beginning to struggle with how bitty the thesis writing is and loose track of all my drafts and I have not started the really serious part of actually writing the data chapters! I am still on the methodology but should soon finish that.