PhD Update

Well, had a meeting with one of my supervisors today.  He's been really busy, so I haven't seen much of him, so the first bit of the meeting was just chatting about life and how we've been.  I then told him about the case study I've been working on now and some of the problems I've encountered.  

We then went on to discuss some of the methodological problems that I've been having that he can directly help with.  I'm not sure how soon it will be resolved, but I feel like I"m getting closer.

The biggest thing that we discussed was how to handle the next background section I need to write.  I need to write about the methodological and theoretical context of my work, which means tackling the entire corpus of theory concerning the social nature of architecture and the archaeology of architecture.  He had some good suggestions on how to structure my work, which gives me the direction I need to get started.  Hopefully it won't take me too long!

Helpful colleagues

Thank goodness for people around me who have experience in the field. The problem I was having with inconsistent publications a couple of days ago has been solved since I found out that Experienced Fellow Grad Student had actually dug at the site in question and had in fact excavated the exact building I was interested in! I could have kissed him!

He couldn't solve my weird publication problems, as they are indeed weird, but he could tell me what exactly was found where and describe things for me in more detail than I was getting.

Hurray!

Inconsistent publications

I am making progress.  I have started on a new case study this week and so have been busy accumulating all the publications on this particular site and trying to get a feel for the layout of the site and the nature of the architecture.  This is always really rewarding and I feel like I am making progress, learning something new.  Unfortunately, working with sites that do not yet have their final publications leaves much to be desired.

The problems aren't always immediately obvious.  I wanted to work with this particular site next because I felt like there was a lot of published information and that it would be easier than the other site under consideration.  I was right in that there is a lot of information, but I was sadly sadly wrong that it would be easy.

See, these publications are not at all clear about the labelling of their buildings.  There are two buildings that I am particularly interested in, but I'm having trouble telling them apart.  Publication X has the buildings labelled 1 and 2 in the text but A and B in the photos.  Publication Y has the buildings labelled A and B in the text and photos, but the photo of A in Pub Y is the same as B in Pub X.

Confused yet?  Me too.

So I tentatively assigned the following labels:

1 (from Y) = B (from X)

2 (from Y) = A (from X)

But more problematically, the photos of the details of each building (benches, etc) aren't labelled at all, so I have to guess which building they are from and where they were located in the building.  Oh, and the photo of the same building in two different publications has been flipped left-right, so I don't know which way was East and which was West.

*tears out hair*

I would be tempted to go and dig the site back up myself, but it was flooded 10 years ago by the building of a dam in Turkey.  So no luck.

These are the days that I wonder whether anyone ever reads back over their publications to see if they made sense or if they just throw stuff together without thinking.

Is this where the promise that I will never be *that* kind of academic goes?  Best laid plans. . . 

Book Review

Well, I've finished another book that I got over Christmas, Naomi Novik's Throne of Jade - Temeraire Book 2.  I read the first Temeraire book over the summer, and really enjoyed it.  The second book lived up to all the promise of the first, with an imaginatively written world.  Novik's China was particularly creative, with the integration of dragons into their society showing that she thought about the realities of daily life in detail.  This made for very satisfying reading.

I was very pleased with the development of the relationship between Temeraire and Laurence.  In the first book, Temeraire is treated as a young child and over the course of this book he clearly matures and forces Laurence to see him as a fully independent individual.  This made Temeraire a more interesting character rather than simply a curiousity.  

The plot rockets along, engaging and very exciting.  I found it hard to put the book down and really enjoyed the political intrigue.  The writing was clear and colourful and lots of fun to read.  All in all, I really enjoyed this book. 

Book Review

I finished reading Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron last night.  I read Bear's Dust last summer based on some Amazon browsing I did to try to find some new stuff.  I was initially attracted to Bear's fantasy, but decided to buy Dust as it was not part of a series (though this was not true).  I enjoyed Dust but it wasn't exactly my passion.  

A couple of month's later, I found the author's blog and it re-ignited my interest in her writing.  I am very glad I gave her another chance, because Blood and Iron is exactly to my tastes.  The writing is snappy dense but doesn't overwhelm the plot.  That plot is complex, nuanced, and doesn't coddle the reader.  In fact, in some places, I had trouble sorting out exactly what was happening.  This is mostly due to the fact that the book was chok-full of literary and mythological references, particularly when it came to explaining motivations and emotions.  In some cases, the references were obscure enough that I, an Arthurian buff, didn't manage to make the connections, but surprisingly, instead of turning me off the book it drove me through the book and has piqued my interest in exploring more mythology.  

I am a fantasy enthusiast, through and through, and this hit almost all of my personal quirks.  The only aspect that might have put me off, is the melding of Faerie and the Modern world.  Too often, stories based on this type of world-building turn into a kid-in-king-Arthur's-court story, which puts me off.  I'm very glad I gave this a chance despite my misgivings because the relationships between humanity and Faerie were much more intricate and thought-out than I expected.

On the downside, while I initially loved the character of Carel, I found her transition into the Merlin and her choice to support Faerie to be too opaque for me to follow.  A second reading after more exploration of mythology might elucidate her character, but it right now I don't see it.  

I will be searching out more of Bear's Promethean Age books to follow this storyline further as I really enjoyed this book and it has piqued my interest in subsidiary topics!