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Jul. 14th, 2012 12:34 pmI am back in dissertation land until dinnertime. I am, in fact, reading aloud every single word, just to check continuity and sense and that I haven't too many egregious idiocies at this point. So far, my biggest problem appears to be that I have mentioned Appendix One but do not yet have an Appendix One.
At one stage I was going to have vast appendices that dwarfed the dissertation, but Van reminded me that I am not an historian in this case and asked me how many of them I needed. The answer was one and that one is maybe 27 lines. I'm not going to have more than 100 footnotes, either. This is sad, for I do like my footnotes.
There are differences between disciplines. I had so many tables containing Medieval manuscripts and their distribution and their dialects and their dates and their context for my first PhD. I knew which dialects were likely to produce scribes for Chretien de Troyes' works and which were likely to produce new stories following his lines. I knew the dialectal and date range for all the prose Arthur and Tristan manuscripts and for an awful lot of chansons de gestes (not the Crusade ones) and how they all made patterns over time and space. I learned so very much about how stories can be extended in various ways by different authors and through combining and recombining in different manuscripts. It was amazing fun and a bucket-load of work at the tail end.
I guess I don't miss the appendices. I still had the fun of research on the way through, and I don't have the bucketload of work at the tail end, trying to make them all make sense to outsiders and checking the cross-referencing fifty times. Same goes for the footnotes. I have them, and most of them are now in correct format (I hope - that's what this reading is for, to polish things up a little before my supervisor tears it all to pieces and I rend my garments and go wailing in the streets), but without all that cross-referencing with all those tables and with the bibliography (for my required style has more redundancy, so all I have to do is check the once at this stage) there is so much less work.
When people tell you that Creative Arts doctorates are easier, it's not because they're intellectually less demanding, but because of the saving in time and energy at this end. Also, as I said two years ago, I needed nine languages* plus palaeography and codicology for that first doctorate and for this I only need four languages**, all of which I already had.
* English, Old French, Old Occitan, Middle English, Latin, French, Franco-Italian (to read one work, basically), Spanish, Italian plus bits of German and Hebrew and others. I don't count the bits!
**English, Old French, French and Latin, for the curious. I'm not counting Old and Middle French as different languages, for that seems to be a bit of a cheat. My English is, in fact, almost tolerable.
At one stage I was going to have vast appendices that dwarfed the dissertation, but Van reminded me that I am not an historian in this case and asked me how many of them I needed. The answer was one and that one is maybe 27 lines. I'm not going to have more than 100 footnotes, either. This is sad, for I do like my footnotes.
There are differences between disciplines. I had so many tables containing Medieval manuscripts and their distribution and their dialects and their dates and their context for my first PhD. I knew which dialects were likely to produce scribes for Chretien de Troyes' works and which were likely to produce new stories following his lines. I knew the dialectal and date range for all the prose Arthur and Tristan manuscripts and for an awful lot of chansons de gestes (not the Crusade ones) and how they all made patterns over time and space. I learned so very much about how stories can be extended in various ways by different authors and through combining and recombining in different manuscripts. It was amazing fun and a bucket-load of work at the tail end.
I guess I don't miss the appendices. I still had the fun of research on the way through, and I don't have the bucketload of work at the tail end, trying to make them all make sense to outsiders and checking the cross-referencing fifty times. Same goes for the footnotes. I have them, and most of them are now in correct format (I hope - that's what this reading is for, to polish things up a little before my supervisor tears it all to pieces and I rend my garments and go wailing in the streets), but without all that cross-referencing with all those tables and with the bibliography (for my required style has more redundancy, so all I have to do is check the once at this stage) there is so much less work.
When people tell you that Creative Arts doctorates are easier, it's not because they're intellectually less demanding, but because of the saving in time and energy at this end. Also, as I said two years ago, I needed nine languages* plus palaeography and codicology for that first doctorate and for this I only need four languages**, all of which I already had.
* English, Old French, Old Occitan, Middle English, Latin, French, Franco-Italian (to read one work, basically), Spanish, Italian plus bits of German and Hebrew and others. I don't count the bits!
**English, Old French, French and Latin, for the curious. I'm not counting Old and Middle French as different languages, for that seems to be a bit of a cheat. My English is, in fact, almost tolerable.