Alexandra Guerson

Writing the thesis…

Apr 17, 2007 writing 4 Comments

Since I’m finishing my main stint at the archives, the writing stage looms and I’ve started thinking how to go about organizing myself and getting onto a writing schedule. I really want to be done within 2 years and I would much prefer to graduate in the spring.

I came across some good advice by Dave at academhack today:

• Get on a ScheduleThis was the most important advise I got. A faculty member told me how she wrote her dissertation in a summer. She said that she spent everyday of the summer in the library from noon till six working. While I am not sure this intense of a schedule is the way to go for everyone, I think getting on a schedule is key. For me I know I work better later, so I gave myself the mornings off to run errands, watch a movie, blog, or do whatever I wanted, but after lunch was work time. I tried to work five to six hours a day. Whatever works for you though. Develop a plan and stick to it, even if it is “eight hours a week.” This will help you to not feel guillty all the time that you are not working, and also get you in a routine. I know that many are in academia to avoid treating life like a job, but treating my dissertation like a job helped me tremendously. I eventually settled on a schedule of working at least five hours two days in a row, taking the third as a break. Sometimes I worked more then this, but this was my minimum.
• Write, Even if you have nothing to say: Early on I spent time trying to write a whole chapter cleanly, start to finish. I thought I had to write the introduction, then the first section then the second . . .and do this by writing the first chapter then the second. Forget it. Just write. Later in the process I learned that what helped was just to start to write anywhere. I didn’t write the chapters in order (I wrote #3, #1, #4, #2, intro, #5), and the later chapters I didn’t even write within the chapter in order. That is, in a particular chapter I didn’t know exactly what I was going to say but I knew I was going to talk about a particular moment in Lolita or Patchwork Girl, so I just started writing. Sometimes you just have to write to figure out what you want to say. This means that you will probably scrap a lot of your work, or rework it, and you will have to organize it, but this is better than trying to write 50 pages in order from the start. (I know someone who writes everything three times-complete rewrite each time.) Rachel even mentioned that she had a long chapter which she eneded up cutting into scraps and organizing onto a poster board. Me, I like the giant whiteboard, with colored markers, but whatever works. I wrote about this before, when I discovered Scrivener. On a related note, I think blogging helped as it gave me writing to do that was less demanding, a sort of warm-up exercise for the day.
• Read Other Dissertations: Shealeen mentioned this, and I wish I had though of this sooner in my process. Go to your Graduate Library (or where ever the dissertations are kept) and read some. Particularly read ones that were supervised by your committee, this will give you a sense of the expectations and the genre. Many schools and committees have specific expectations that if you discover early will help you.
• Read a Book: When I was struggling with what I wanted to write, I read, even if what I read was only tangential to what I was writing. I found that this helped to get me thinking, and often I found inspiration in the strangest of texts.
• Talk to Your Committee: Set up deadlines, let them know what chapters are arriving when. This will not only help you work to a timeline, but also insure that you are giving them time to work on the material. Giving them a chapter in the middle of grading, or when they have just been given three other chapters by other students, will probably slow down your feedback
• Editing and Writing are Different: I know a lot of people disagree, but for me this was true. I wrote, global edited, and configured as one step, let the chapter sit for a while, and then returned to it to edit much later.
• Do Something:If you are tired/exhausted and feel you cannot do any more work for the day, but still have hours left, do something simple: Spell check (surprising how long this process can be for a 40 page document-especially if you are me), run down a reference, format your bibliography. There are many mind numbing steps to the process that you can do even if you feel like never seeing another word about Thoreau (assuming you are writing about Thoreau).
• Write What You Teach: Under the category of two birds one stone. This goes along with the bit about writing out of order. I was teaching a class, several weeks in fact, on House of Leaves. In my dissertation I have a whole chapter about this book, but it is late in the dissertation. Still when I was teaching it during the week it was easier to write about. I didn’t finish the chapter in those weeks of class, but when I did go back to that chapter over the summer I had some substantial work done, some of it as a result of class discussions. Bonus: Also made me more prepared to teach class.
• Get Office Space, or go the Library: There is only so much writing one can do in one space. Sometimes shifting venues helps. I was surprised out how just the act of going to the library would help me to get work done.
• Get Good Tools: Seriously some days you are going to spend six hours or more at a computer screen. It’s worth it to invest in a good/large monitor so you don’t get headaches and eye strain. Writing for that long can be exhausting. Along with this consider different word processing programs, honestly it helped me.
• Back Up Your Writing: You never know when your computer will decide it doesn’t like you dissertation and delete it (especially if you are running Windows). Back-Up. I kept everything on my home computer, a copy on a flash drive, and a copy on a remote server (you can email yourself a copy of what you are working on occasionally).
• Get a Life: Do something that has nothing to do with academia. Hang out with people who have no idea what MLA or APA or Chicago Style means. Do something that requires no books, no libraries. For me this was running, but whatever it is, do it.

What do you guys think? Any recent phds have anything to add?

How do you keep track of your ideas?

Mar 24, 2007 productivity, tools 2 Comments

This is pretty much the system I use:

Replace the Hipster PDA for a small moleskine or moleskine weekly agenda and the rest is pretty much the same… Particularly the Moleskine Notebook part (I have a lined one instead of gridded) and the switching back and forth between scribbling on a paper and typing on a computer.

Check the full description at Getting Things Done in Academia

Keeping up with your field

Mar 24, 2007 digital media Leave a comment

I found a neat article at Digital History Hack about how to easily and quickly be up-to-date with the current literature in your field. Check it out here. I set a site to keep track on Jewish history and it’s pretty neat although there aren’t as many online resources (particularly on the form of RSS feeds) for medieval Jewish history or medieval Spanish history as I would like…

Procrastination

Mar 24, 2007 productivity 3 Comments

From the Latin pro meaning for and cras meaning tomorrow… Ah, my days as an undergrad! I used to be SO organized… I set myself earlier deadlines for all my papers and assignment and always had them finished about a week before they were due. I wrote my honours thesis in about 2 months working only on fridays and during the week of spring break. I handed it in on March 23rd and my supervised joked that she probably shouldn’t accept it since nobody had ever submitted it so early before.

But then came grad school. I thought I could keep this up, that I would have more time to devote to each course, to the thesis, etc. How naive I was… Now I seem to be the queen of procrastination. I keep checking my email, writing blog entries, etc when I should be maximizing my research time. The truth is, my eyes are getting more and more tired of staring at the dark screen of a microfilm reader… Only 6 more weeks left!

For what it’s worth, here’s some tips on how to avoid procrastination.  I’ll probably need to put these into practice when I get to TO.

Using a blog as a course website, pt 2

Mar 19, 2007 General interest, digital media 1 Comment

Hmmm, seems I’m not the only one to think it could be useful. Check this out.

DEVONthink

Mar 3, 2007 digital media, ditigital documents, research, tools 3 Comments

Scribe is turning out to be very buggy for importing info from my Bookends bibliography database. I came across DEVONthink, a really powerful information manager that seems VERY flexible and can index, search, organize, create wiki-style links, cross-reference, all kinds of files. It’s not free but it might be a good investment…

Take a look on the video here. Hmm, another toy to play with…

Scribe 3.2

Feb 25, 2007 digital media, tools 3 Comments

I’ve been playing with scribe 3.2 recently and I have to say, it has a LOT of potential. I tried to old version back when I was an undergrad but found it very slow and had to use. I couldn’t automatic input my sources – no importo available – the printing didn’t really work for me. It felt heavy and cumbersome. I ended up simply using Word to organize my notes for my undergrad research. I’m now working on my dissertation and need something a little more sophisticated. I have Bookends to handle my secondary bibliography and I created a simple database on FileMaker Pro to input my documents from the archives. Now I need something to bridge the two, something where I can organize all my subject notes – be it from primary or secondary sources. Scribe seems to be the tool I need.

My friend Jen P. has said many good things about it. The new version is much speedier and easy to use. Plus, having FileMaker Pro – which is what was used to design Scribe 3.2 – already means I have more flexibility with Scribe since I can edit some of its features to suit my needs as well as create as many databases with it as I want. I could even design a filter to easily import from my research database into scribe.

Yesterday I discovered two features that can prove very useful. One is the list of keywords. I knew you could add keywords to every source or notecard created and I figured it was just to make it easier to search.  And in a way that’s what it does but in a much easier way – it works more like an index. You go to Lists->Keywords and a window with a list of all the keywords you’ve created shows up. You then click on a particular keyword and you end up with a list of all the notes/sources with that keyword. I think this could make the writing process much easier… Here’s some screenshots (don’t pay attention of the keywords I have, I was just testing the software):

Very nifty indeed… Of course, a lot of the fields are more appropriate to modern historians than to those of us pre-modernists but many of them can be adapted nonetheless. Need to play with it more and see…

Update on need-a-break

Feb 25, 2007 break, research, working at the archives Leave a comment

I didn’t go to the archives this past week. I feel really bad but I did have a reasonable excuse – we are moving today and I needed the time off to organize things, clean the place, pack everything, ship some stuff to Canada… It’s a good excuse, right?

I did show up briefly at the archives on wednesday to pay my bill (I run a tab of my photocopies) and pick up some photocopies they had done for me. The security guy downstairs  waved his finger at me when I got in saying “you missed two days!! I’m putting “falta” (absent) down for you every day!” I then explained I wouldn’t be coming all week as well. He rolled his eye in what’s-this-world-coming-to kind of way. Hehehe, I have a really good relationship with the whole staff, particularly the security staff and the people working the desk. After a year working there every day, they consider me part of the staff. There was a new security guard starting a couple of weeks ago and the senior guard was taking her around to introduce to the staff. I was reading something and he brought her over to me to introduce me as well. I really felt part of the place that day

Using a blog as a course website

Feb 17, 2007 Teaching 7 Comments

I don’t know why, but while I do research my thoughts are filled with teaching ideas. The lastest has been the possibility of using a blog interface as a course website. It’s a very handy platform, easy to master and preloaded with a host of interesting tools. The calendar on the side can guide students to particular lectures, which can be added as posts (long or short) in which students might dowload whatever material the instructor wants to distribute (lecture notes, powerpoint presentations, videos, images, etc) as well as ask questions. There could be posts with instructions on assignments or any other issue that arise in class. All posts can be categorized and searched. The whole site can also be easily password-protected. Course materials (syllabi & handouts) can be placed on a permanent page that would be always visible on the side bar.

What do you think? Can the more experienced instructors out there think of the drawbacks of such a system?

I need some time off

Feb 16, 2007 break, research 4 Comments

I´m on a slump. I don´t know what´s wrong but this past week or so have been really painful. Maybe the repetitive nature of my sources is getting to me. Maybe I´m just tired. Whatever the reason, I haven´t been able to concentrate much during this past week and a half. I sometimes spend over half an hour just staring at the microfilm reader´s screen and I´ve been stuck on the same register for the past three days! Alan thinks I should just take a week off. I´m not so sure, there´s stil too much to be done. But maybe he´s right. Besides, I could use the time to browse through some libraries, do a little research on secondary literature, read Elka Klein´s book on the Jews of Barcelona… I´ll think about it over the weekend.