waah

First post here from the department's newest ABD (I've supplanted Tim as the baby of this little academic family). I passed my area exam on Nov 19th, and I've spent the last 10 days trying to get the muscles in my neck to relax (without much luck, by the way - apparently several consecutive months of stress will do that to you).

My primary area was about performance issues in Renaissance Drama in general. I used information from the plays to describe what it might have been like to go to the theater, but I'm actually more interested in what it was like to be on the production side - e.g. Shakespeare vs Jonson and their attendant problems (indoor vs outdoor venue, adult vs boy company). My second area was on manners, using various courtesy books / manuals and manners in the plays to talk about ideas of etiquette and virtue (or lack thereof). For me, acting styles (which is one of my greater passions) and social etiquette are intimately linked (not so much for my examiners).

Here's where my head is, currently, on an idea for my diss: at this moment in England, we have for the first time the rise of a profession theater and thus professional actors. At the same time, we have the rise of a strong courtly culture. It seems to me that both of these cultures are based around performance and perhaps that is one of the reasons that so many plays are about the court (and flattery and disguise) - actors and courtiers are essentially the same kind of animal, and actors can speak to the issues of performance at court, perhaps better than courtiers would want to admit. I think that, in fact, actors are offering an alternate system of behavior. So, for example, courtiers want to conceal how hard they are working while actors want to show it. And I think there's an argument to be made that theater professionals were often more successful than courtiers (compare, for example, Shakespeare's end - wealthy, given a coat of arms - to poor John Lyly's - poverty-stricken and begging for any kind of preferment to no avail.)

For me, this all connects to one of the fundamental rifts in performance studies - what does performance actually mean? For courtiers, it's what they do all the time; for actors, it's what they do onstage. (Full disclosure: As a person coming from a theater / performer background, I find the desire to think about what we do in everyday life as "performance" to be a little insane.) I think my biggest theoretical touchstone will be Joseph Roach (he wrote "The Player's Passion").

And I think my biggest dissertation hurdle is going to be getting someone to agree to head up my committee. I spoke to Jenny Spencer the other day (she was on my areas committee) and she basically told me that I'm going to have to write a chapter before anyone will even agree that the argument works. And if I could get it published, that would be even better. Oy.

So that's that for now. I'm enjoying eveyone's posts and am already getting tips to help me rethink my methods. It's greatly appreciated!

Your Turn!

Okay, I've made the last three posts (four, counting this one). Someone else's turn!

Here's my latest fun internet find: the memorial Anne Clifford had installed for Edmund Spenser in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.


“HEARE LYES (EXPECTING THE SECOND COMMINGE OF OUR SAVIOVR CHRIST JESUS) THE BODY OF EDMOND SPENCER THE PRINCE OF POETS IN HIS TYME WHOSE DIVINE SPIRRIT NEEDS NOE OTHIR WITNESSE THEN THE WORKS WHICH HE LEFT BEHINDE HIM. HE WAS BORNE IN LONDON IN THE YEARE 1553 AND DIED IN THE YEARE 1598. Restored by private subscription 1778”.

Weekly Update

Here's my first official weekly update. I didn't quite reach any of my goals, I don't think, though I did make progress in every area. But I'm content to settle for less this week and get ready for good progress next week. My big accomplishment was writing two brief paper topic proposals and sending them with my monthly check-in email to JB.

For next week: continue reading ER collection, secondary sources on motherhood, and start doing some actual notetaking and giving DevonThink a whirl.

Right now, though, I have a stinky diaper to change. It's quite a shift from the academic to daily life.

PC Users?

In light of all the talk of DevonThink, Bookends, etc., do any of you have recommendations for PC users? Another dissertation-writing friend is looking for ways to manage sources on her PC. I said she should just get a Mac . . .

Here, Here/Hear, Hear

Thanks for the prodding, Kevin. It’s good to know that everyone else thinks of quitting, too. In my case, I have a great advisor, but not enough time to study, and not enough interaction with other scholars to even get in the mindset to write anything that sounds remotely like intelligible scholar-speak. Hear, hear for camaraderie. My big motivation right now is that I can’t afford to pay my students loans until after our car is paid off, so I have to stick it out and make some progress for at least the next three years.

I’ll commit to posting a weekly update with goals, accomplishments, and failures. Anyone else up for it? (our SAGgy list)

My last week was awful in terms of studying. I felt like I got nothing done, even in the small amount of time I have dedicated to working. I think I froze up because I have a check-in coming up with JB, and I’m nervous I’ll have little if anything to report. I have been avoiding the main thing I need to read (ER’s collected works) because it seems so important and I want to read it carefully (which is hard to do at 11pm). I’ve decided that I need to treat reading just as I would reading for a class: I need to finish by a deadline, and I can return to it later if I need to. So my goals for the next week: write every day, read at least the second section of the ER collection, finish The Countess of Lincoln’s Nursery, read the Maternity section in Mendelson and Crawford’s Women in Early Modern England, and write a paper proposal on ER to turn in to JB next week.

As far as work-flow goes, I’m considering what to do when I need to handle larger amounts of data than I have now. I managed to do the post-it-note-in-the-book method for my areas, though I did type up summary notes of my primary texts and typed annotations of secondary works. Right now they’re all in MacJournal. Currently, I freewrite in MacJournal, and I’ve been marking up books instead of taking official notes. (I need to read Booth et al in Turabian on note taking.)

My plan is to try out DevonThink, and I’m trying out a version of Sente (a Bookends-like bibliography program for the Mac). I tend to believe anything D. Swain tells me about finishing a dissertation, and anything Kevin says about what technology to use. Since both recommended DevonThink, I haven’t really bothered to look at anything else.

Right now, I’m needing to get my marked up texts into the computer somehow, and I feel like I have so little time to work that typing it out now would take too much time. I know it will pay off later, so I’m planning to have do some typing of notes at least once a week to see how that goes. I find that it helps me to have a little bit of time between when I read a text and when I type up notes--much of what I marked in the text seems less relevant after a few days.

Questions:
Do any of you have advice on how to decide what to include in your notes? Do you err on the “too much” side? How do you gauge the right amount?

Kevin, any other tips on how to approach DevonThink? I’d rather just get started importing info into it before I go through all the tutorials. Are there things you wish you’d known before you started?

Also, I need to hunt down a reference and thought your sharp memories might help. I think the story is in something classical or in The Book of the City of Ladies. It’s where a warrior runs away from the battle, and his mother meets him, pulls up her dress, and shouts that she wishes he could just climb back into her womb, his cowardly actions are so shaming. Any ideas?

Lastly, because I’m looking at many non-literary texts, I’m struggling (yet again) with how to ask literary questions of those texts. In examining the concepts of motherhood (at least for now), it seems easy to get sucked in to just figuring out what motherhood meant in the Renaissance, or how it was presented, or how it really worked (as much as we can tell). Any tricks to keeping a literary focus?

a new tool

Check out this funny but helpful web application "Write or Die."

You can enter in the target number of words you'd like to write and the amount of time you want to spend, and then start typing away. If you spent too much time staring without moving those keys, dreaded consequences follow. You can set the program to how wicked you'd like those consequences to be (on evil mode it begins erasing what you've written), but I found the program to be in good fun. And when I tried it on a whim, I ended up typing over 250 words in just six minutes. Sure most of that was garbage, but if I did that several times a day, six days a week...

As a simple creature, I need all the tricks I can find.

Come on now

It has been too long since any of us have written, so I'm here to cattle-prod us away from apathy. In all honesty, I'm only one step away from leaving the program - a horrible advisor, an impossible teaching schedule, no real place to work - and I need all the camaraderie I can get. And I'd like to see everyone avoid the many pitfalls I've encountered. That means a little every day. That means small, achievable goals with a larger plan. Part of the reason I didn't finish last year was that I was without a plan. I hadn't made the decision to finish by date X, and breakdown all of the many tasks on the calendar. So let's rally.

Furthermore, it took me a while to develop (and actually still am developing in my new habitat) my workflow. So I offer you the "sweet suite" of programs that have been helping me manage the large amounts of information I've accumulated and put it to good use. I'd love to hear what you think and how you work.

My Way:

First off, you need some way to capture, organize, and search out the research you encounter. After years of marking margins and even writing quotes and reflections in notebooks, which were often lost or piled in a forgotten corner of the closet, I decided to commit to electronic form. I purchased the mac program DevonThink. It essentially is a database program that can easily massive amounts of information. You can dump into it word or text files, pdf's, image files, pictures, graphs, sounds, etc. Most importantly, it has a sophisticated search engine (they call it Artificial Intelligence) that automatically finds similar documents and can group them together for you (see their tutorials). So after you begin dumping info into it, you can pull up a JSTOR pdf or some of your own notes, hit find similar items, and suddenly the program pulls up notes on books you forgot you read or quotes that have long since been buried. I have mine organized by authors, and I also replicate these files to go into corresponding chapter headings and subheadings. Steven Berlin has a useful post on how to use the program and why small chunks of text work better than dumping entire articles into the program.

Whenever I read something I take notes in the program. That way I can easily find it later and the program links it to other related notes or material. For each reference I also try to make sure I also put it into my bibliographic manager Bookends. I prefer this program over Endnotes, and it has the advantage of keeping all of my references together; it also attaches electronic versions to the reference if it's available. So, if you find an article on JSTOR you can download the bibliographic info and attach the actual document to the citation. This helps me quickly cite in chapters and easily generate a works cited page. It also organizes all the electronic research on my computer.

Next I have been experimenting with the drafting program Scrivener. Booth, Colomb, Williams' revision of Turabain's Manual for Dissertation Writers emphasizes the helpfulness of the storyboard when you are organizing a large, complex argument. Scrivener is of that mind and allows you to set up a virtual outline/storyboard and to see the argument visually (something I need). I usually set up a chapter's broad parameters, its major sections, and then begin to cull info from my DevonThink database and paste it into the growing outline. After I fill it out a bit, I then print out a draft of all the basic subheadings, my comments on their purposes, and any quotes/notes that correspond. It's just a step in refining my information and clarifying how I think it goes together. See their tutorial for more on how to use this drafting program.

The time spent up front in marrying a word processing program to a bibliographic manager will save you in the end. Word is the most popular program, but I've been using the alternative Mellel. I've found that Mellel and Bookends work very well together and I save time not having to worry about typing in the citations as I'm writing. The programs do it for you, and since the grad school requires a Works Cited page, it makes compiling that list automatic. Mellel is a bit strange and requires learning an unfamiliar platform; but the control you have over the program outweighs the initial discomfort.

It may sound a bit convoluted or having the effect of making more steps than required, and I'd be interested to hear from everyone on how you go about gathering and composing, but the habit of each step helps me refine and clarify what the point of the material is and how it's useful. I'm finding I'm much more of a process guy than I ever knew - I need those many steps to get at anything interesting or intelligent - and having these programs keeps me from going crazy with piles of folders. I still like having paper in front of me when I actually writing paragraphs, yet it is the programs that have helped me at first compile and organize notes into a rough, rough draft (what Bolker calls the "zero draft").

What works for you?

Greenblatt on Colbert Report

Did you guys see Greenblatt on the Colbert Report? I just found the video here at a blog that posts info on happenings in the Renaissance Literature world (of today).