kareina

This week I did my 20 hours of LTU work Monday-Thursday, with only a tiny bit of Durham reading in the evenings. Therefore I opted to work from home on Thursday, during which I managed to do 8 hours of thesis work and 2.5 hours of snow shoveling. I also took three breaks for 30 to 60 minute long phone calls hanging out with David who had to work in Storuman (a four hour drive inland) today.

While I feel guilty that I haven't been working on the geochemistry questions that need addressing, I am having ever so much fun playing with Swedish Historical Museum's database . I have now made a good start on this section of my thesis introduction. First I introduced the database and mentioned that I would be summarizing the steatite finds from it, organized from North to South, and from West to East, grouped by Swedish Provinces, and below them by either the location number (if the exact location is known), or the name of the parish (if the exact location isn't known). So far I have finished the province of Norrbotten (from which there is only one steatite object), and am mostly done with Lappland (from which there were four locations with steatite finds). So far most of the objects that have been typed up are Bronze age cast moulds for axes or spear-points. However, two of them were medieval vessels. Now that I have the trick of searching by shape (föremål), and specifying "täljsten" for the Material, and the name of the province under "Landskap" it should go fairly quickly to work my way down the country.

It will go even faster for those locations with precisely known locations, since they come with a .klm file to export into GoogleEarth. Most of today's work was for finds that had been purchased in the 1950's and only had descriptions of the location plus the name of the parish, so a good chunk ot today's effort was carefully reading those descriptions and trying to decide where in GoogleEarth to put the star on the map for each location. For the ones in the Vilhelmina Parish I have also emailed a lady at the museum in that town asking if she can help find some of the locations (thanks to a suggestion made by a friend of a friend when I asked on FB).

However, now it is 03:15 and I really should do my yoga and get some sleep!

I was just reminded (reading ariadne3's latest journal entry) that things like wordles exist. Therefore I present to you The Cambrian Metamorphic History of Tasmania reduced to just the most frequently used words of the 47,498 words which appear in the main body of the thesis (not counting the list of references, the abstract, the list of figures, the table of contents or the appendices).

I just added up the figures, for the first time ever:

Chapter 1 (Introduction): 3 figures
Chapter 2 (Collingwood River): 72 figures
Chapter 3 (Southwest Coast): 30 figures
Chapter 4 (Other Locations): 20 figures
Chapter 5 (Timing of Metamorphism): 123 figures
Chapter 6 (Discussion & Conclusions): 13 figures

Total: 261 figures, all of which are referenced in the text at least once, many of which get mentioned on more than one occasion. Gee, why would that word be so common?

Ok, oh great LJ hive mind, I need to do a summary of all of my thesis results for the final chapter before going on to say what they all mean. I can think of ever so many ways to organize this information. I’ve got six different regions for which data has been acquired, two with lots of data, and information in every category, four with only a little data, and only covering some categories of information (and not necessarily the same categories). The categories include:

( categories )

The thesis itself is organized with three regional chapters (one each for the two main regions, and one for all of the other regions for which there is less data) covering all of the P/T results and one chapter talking about all of the timing/monazite/zircon results.

For the final Discussion and Conclusion chapter, am I better off echoing that layout:

( echoed layout )

Or, would it be better to keep it by region, but include the timing information in each region rather than keeping it separate from the temperature and pressure? Or, would it be better to discuss each topic (garnet core formation conditions, peak metamorphic conditions, other information) on its own, and address each region under those headings? Or is there an even better organizational system of which I’ve not yet thought?

Thanks for any suggestions you may have, my clock is ticking, the end of the month, by which the thesis needs to be complete, printed, bound, and submitted, is drawing nigh…