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?
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4 comments:
amstr,
as far as how much to type, I've found that as I started the project I typed more than I ever could use. As my project became more clear (ha!) I would note down only what I knew what would be of use to me. The advantage to having DevonThink is that it will easily search out those helpful bits later. So my guess would be to type in whatever seems helpful for now. That's why I use the Scrivener tool as well, b/c later I then cull out what's of use as I'm setting up a tentative outline.
As for DevonThink, it's actually really easy to use, so import away. The only thing I'd recommend at first is to think of an organizational structure that will help you place items. Sometimes the process of deciding where to file something will actually inspire new ways to think about the project and new questions to pursue. Robert Boice's book _Advice for new faculty_ quotes a sociologist who makes this point.
So what I've done is at first I made a folder for each author I was handling. Within that folder I usually made a sub-folder for criticism notes and another for primary texts. (I've since been moving all my texts, both primary and secondary to Bookends where they are linked to their bibliographic record. I've found that the DevonThink AI is much better with short bits of text than a whole essay or the 1590 Faerie Queene). In addition to author folders, I also have one for "history" and "genre" and even one for the DNB (I've been downloading the new DNB refs for my authors - they're great for quick facts and have a decent narrative about who these folks were and who has written about them).
Then as I starter rethinking the structure of the diss, I decided to organize the chapters by genre. So you can replicate each of your files and put them into new folders. Thus any changes I make apply to all copies.
The tutorials are okay; most are not relevant to our work. But I'd worry more about getting your info in there first and getting comfortable with its appearance and way of working.
As for your last question (sorry, no recollection on mothers re-offering their wombs) I have the same concerns as I'm dealing with tons of historical texts. What I've been doing is ripping off how the experts do it. Susanah Monta's book on Martyrdom may be a good one to look at. Its writing is refreshingly clear and she argues that all the competing martyology texts influenced how literary texts handled constructions of martyrs. And what about Julie Crawford's book on Monstrous Births? She reads motherhood into the literary texts I believe. Her first chapter's footnotes might be ripe for your picking!
Since AK doesn't offer advice I've been turning to book after book. But JB has been extremely helpful in terms of articulating strategy and offering suggestions. I know what you mean by avoiding him (he seems so hard to please) but I'd shoot him a quick email with that exact question. This is where he shines, and I'm willing to bet he'd have a lot to say on how to keep the literary (especially b/c his diss was also on the non-literary).
Good luck.
One more thing (sorry for the outpouring; I just got out of the Folger and I'm buzzing).
In regard to time limits, I can't imagine how hard it is for you with the two kids - though I will soon; Meg is pregnant and we're expecting early May!! - but teaching at two places and having to travel for each really cuts into my working time.
I mentioned Boice's book before, but it's worth looking at for help with finding short bits of time to write. After his suggestions, I've been carrying around a clipboard with blank sheets of paper for each "thing" I'm working on. And as I'm on the 1.5 hour Metro ride 3x a week or 45 min. ride to Georgetown, I jot down ideas or experimental outlines. Currently I have pages for the chapter I'm working on, for each of my classes, for job letters, for the conference paper I'm giving next week, etc.
Even if I just take ten minutes to jot down ideas for any one of these things, I find useful material to cultivate later. And I tend to repeat the ten minute scribble a few times a day. Then on the next day I rewrite the outline I made or revisit an idea I had for class. Each time I do it, it gets clearer and more useful.
The hesitation I had to get over at first was the sense that a quick ten minutes would be useless in relation to such big tasks. Boice is great at reminding us to be patient, create habits, and feel okay with a little bit each day.
I'm not always great at doing this, but when I do I feel exponentially happier and smarter, and sleep better at night. Maybe this will help? In the least, it deflates those guilty pangs.
Kevin,
Thanks for all the great advice! I've been fine with short bits of writing so far, and I need to be okay with short bits of reading, too. (They all add up, right?)
Thanks for the book recs, too. I feel woefully out of the loop on texts of interest to Ren folks. Any advice on how to keep up with interesting new work?
My shortcut to finding out what I haven't read is to look at _The Year's Work in English Studies_. It's available online through the library, and each year they compose this masterful summary of what was written, what it was about, and why it was good or bad. They divide the periods up nicely so you can easily jump to see what's going on in Spenser studies, or dramatic excluding Shakespeare.
My other trick it to read through the _Studies in English Language_ review that comes out once a year. They usually grab a big-whig and ask him/her to read through a massive stack of books and write a substantial essay about them all. It's really helpful and points to what the major developments and similarities are in the field. Mary Ellen Lamb was putting hers together a few years ago while she was at the Center. Patrick Cheney also did a nice one not too long ago. I can't remember which one of the four volumes it comes out in, but if you look online you'll quickly find it.
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