the invisible blogger dissertates.
While, it might seem, being a female weblogger may be a frustrating, futile affair, I’m not discouraged from posting. What I am discouraged by, at the moment, is the weight of the Thesis. It is seeping into my bones, massive and menacing, as expected around this time. I am yet a year and a half away from graduation (best-case scenario), but there’s a lot to do, and it is monumentally difficult to take a project of this magnitude one step at a time.
Last year, I took a look at Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis. Of course, she isn’t proposing that the “you”-subject of the book only work for fifteen minutes each day. She is, however, proposing that I make myself do fifteen minutes of good, solid work, and then see where that leads me. There’s more, of course – a book’s worth of decent advice, actually – but this is the gist. If things just aren’t productive on a given day, that’s okay. Squeeze out the fifteen minutes and go on with life, doing things that you feel can be accomplished at this moment when your brain just isn’t in the right frame of mind to dissertate.
It takes me a while to get into a good working groove on Roland. [Once|If] I do, several more good hours are likely to follow; but the getting into it part is difficult. So I’m adopting Bolker’s advice, with modifications. A two-and-a-half-hour stretch set aside, in which I can only work on thesis. If thesis isn’t going, I’ll participate in activities that require no external input (thinking, meditation, yoga) and produce no external output (no blogging or cooking or cleaning, for example).
Part of me wonders whether this will affect my personality, as it is expressed in relating to other people. Will I become less likely to seek others’ company? More likely to go for long walks? More or less articulate about the subject of my thesis, let alone other important topics? Hm.
On a different note entirely, there are no official provisions for collaborating with others on the subject of one’s dissertation, in the humanities. Or are there? Am I just not seeing guidelines where some actually exist? Perhaps I will contact the Graduate Council again, and formally arrange with them for technical collaboration with a colleague. So that there aren’t Issues later.
Of course, if said colleague releases some code as open-source (or a Creative Commons-type license), then even a formal permission shouldn’t be necessary.
January 19th, 2004 at 6:53 pm
Even if it were released under an open-source license, and you were willing to elide the actual collaboration part, it would probably still involve some resources like a server. But, if it makes it easier, I can be invisible <snif>.
January 19th, 2004 at 7:12 pm
Mrm, no, I am not willing to elide the collaboration part. But, as I understand it, I’ll be helping you to develop something that’s useful more widely than with just Roland. So releasing it open-source will need to happen at some point, and if it’s open source and made available as a generalized tool, the legitimacy of my dissertation research should not come into question at all.
January 20th, 2004 at 1:55 am
“activities that require no external input (thinking, meditation, yoga) and produce no external output (no blogging or cooking or cleaning, for example).”
…hmm… “sleep” fits those categories :) :) :)
January 22nd, 2004 at 9:23 am
Re year and a half away: The Cee-and-me little sister Heather is in her second quarter of grad school, and declares without hesitation that it’ll be The Hard One. Actually accomplishing the work is not as difficult as preparing for it.
Re dissertate: Now, my little pocket dictionary doesn’t make a claim one way or the other, but it seems that ‘dissertate’ (or its singular, ‘dissertates’) isn’t a valid reverse-engineering of ‘dissertation.’ Shouldn’t it be … ahem … just ‘disserts’? =)