kareina

One of my apprentices just told me that they will be starting a Master's program, and, in addition to much enthusiasm and joy on my part, I also lectured a bit about one of the many advantages of using Scrivener for one's research, saying (in part)

"Especially for research, because I also have literature topic cards, with links to every paper/book I have on a given topic (and, of course, links on every paper's card to all of its relevant topics), which is golden now, as I am going through my topic cards one by one and making certain I have either cited everything listed therein in the right thesis section, or there is a reason that it isn't worth citing."

To which they replied "Yeah, all of that sounds way more reasonable than I'll ever be"

At which point I couldn't help but say "If you are going to do a thesis, I STRONGLY recommend that you do this for everything AS you download them, it will make your future self love your now self for making their work easier... basically this is the equivalent of doing the prep work for an art project--sanding the wood before you paint, drawing the linen thread to reveal the straight line before you cut, carding and putting the wool onto a distaff before you spin, etc.) more time is needed for the early stages of the project, but less time elapses from start to finish, and less effort/struggle is required."


I was so happy with that analogy, that I couldn't help pause from my own thesis writing to put this here (slightly edited, for clarity) where others can see it.

Other than a nice longish walk with clovis_t this afternoon, I've spent most of the day doing useful uni stuff. As a result I've written 1,192 words and done three new figures. *much* better than I've been doing the past few days (well, ever since I took that day off to turn in that application for an extension). Today's progress helps, but I sure hope I can keep this sort of rate up--I need to--that application form said that I'd been averaging 4000 words a week (which I had been), but this past week that had slipped--today's push only just gets the average back up to that level again.

Fortunately, it is all still interesting. For any of you who haven't yet done your PhD (or even a Master's or Honour's thesis), when you do one of them, don't do what I did--do your writing as you go--every time you do something to collect data, promptly write up what you did and what the results were and make your figures while you remember what you were looking at--while I have looked at all of this data before, because I didn't do more than cryptic notes in my daily "what I did today" log, I'm having to almost re-do some of my work to figure out what I need to say about it. Of course, I'm also discovering some things I *didn't* notice the first time through--sometimes I looked at the pictures of the garnets and the garnet graphs, but didn't import them into the same program so that I could line the one up against the other. One of today's samples has a really, really obvious visual change between the core and the rim, and it has a really obvious change in composition between core and rim, but unlike all of the other samples which also have a obvious (but very different looking) visual difference between core and rim, this one the compositional change does *not* line up with the visual change!

Hey, I'm at a reasonable breaking point and it isn't midnight yet. I wonder if baronsnorri is available for an evening walk?

My sister, bethchm sent me this link to a speech given by J.K. Rowling at Harvard commencement. I found it worthy of sharing here.

Next time you are going to amass large quantities of data accumulated over several years in different sessions on the Microprobe and it might someday be a good idea to compare the data from various sessions, it would really be a brilliant idea to set up each and every spreadsheet with the same order for the column headings.

(Yes, I know, using a database instead of a spreadsheet would also have been a good solution, but somehow it seemed easier at the time to use the technology I already know how to use...)