Home again, home again

I'm home. And I'm exhausted. Our trip went relatively smoothly, we saw everything we wanted to see and had a lot of fun. There were some interesting events while travelling though - including a huge sandstorm on the Desert Highway which led to a massive accident that we drove past minutes after it occurred, followed by one of our fellow passengers having a heart attack! One of our flights home was also delayed waiting for a connecting flight, which had almost the entire passenger list on it - consisting of people who proceeded to provide the loudest flight I have ever been on. This was particularly frustrating since we had gotten up at 1am to make our first flight.

So, interesting and exciting.

I'm now busy processing all the information and experiences I had while out there. I was surprised by some of the sites I visited, and thoroughly enjoyed that.

Didn't give up. . . might still live

Well, pursuant to my last post, I have indeed been running around getting things organized. Top of the list was visas, second was flights. Flights were particularly exorbitant because we were traveling over Easter weekend, though we seem to have mitigated that by flying out on the Saturday. Next on the list is a hotel to stay at when we arrive at 1:30 am. Once again, because it is Easter weekend, I am finding that any place reasonably priced is totally booked up, making this difficult. NOrmally, we'd just sort it out once we arrived, but since this is such a short trip and because I have a number of research goals I need to accomplish, I can't afford to have a slow or tired start. So I'm still looking to find some place that I"m happy with.

In other news, I had a meeting with one of my supervisors this morning, and we spent a good deal of time brainstorming over the various things we could do to measure smell ourselves. I think we may have gone a bit overboard, but I foresee some sniffing in my future!

Transition

I am currently in the downtime between submitting a draft chapter to my supervisors and meeting with them to discuss their opinions. This time, the gap between submission and meeting is going to be almost two weeks, and I'm finding it hard to get moving on something new. And there are many things to be doing. I could be working on getting my theory chapter written, I could be combing the literature for all the published sources of the next site I'll be focussing on as a case study, I could be preparing the 4 lectures I'll be giving over the next two weeks, or I could be preparing my poster that has to be given at a mandatory university poster day for research students.

Instead, I'm floating around reading articles aimlessly, generating new ideas for things I could do to my poor abused sites, and generally feeling overwhelmed by all the things I *could* be doing. Of course, once I've met with my supervisors, that list of things to do will increase as they give me edits to do and advice on the next things to focus on.

Bah

Alright, time for a plan. This weekend I will prep the lectures. Today and next week I will start organizing my theory chapter and get writing. Everything else can wait for a while.

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!

Working from home

I am at home waiting for a repairman to come this morning and am once again caught up in the eternal quandry of how to work at home.  I brought home work I can very easily do here - writing up some of the research I did late last week, and I am determined.  There are just so many more distractions here at home.

It's not like the office is any better.  There, there's always someone dropping by to say hi and to pass on the latest gossip.  I love that, love seeing my friends, hearing the latest goings-on and chitchatting.  

How can you really get stuck into work though?  

Then again, I work well when I'm flitting back and forth, but I always feel more accomplished if I've put in a solid couple of hours in of reading and writing.  Unfortunately, the only place that has recently allowed me to work steadily has been the coffee shop down the road, which gets expensive in tea.  Maybe I'll drop by later, but I sure hope I can get settled into working somewhere else.

How do you guys get settled into a working headspace?  What do you do to get yourself in the mood?  Do you force it if you're not feeling it?

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!

Experiencing the divine and pilgrimage

I listen to a really good podcast The Dark Side of Fey. The most recent episode was a thought-provoking one on Experiencing Deity. The discussion itself was fascinating, and an issue that I have struggled with myself, it triggered some thoughts on recent issues concerning experience and archaeological sites.

My field work is located very close to the famous site of Catalhoyuk. This site is now the pilgrimage location of many different goddess groups due to some scholarship from the 60's that suggested that the Neolithic community living at Catalhoyuk were goddess-worshippers. While this interpretation is no longer accepted in the archaeological community (many of the images are now believed to be bears rather than women), the pilgrims continue to come and are an integral part of the experience of visiting Catalhoyuk.

To these women, and indeed any pilgrim of any religion, the act of travelling to some particular location brings them closer to the divine and allows them a truer experience. I find this difficult to reconcile. On the one hand, I am a pantheist and believe that all things are divine, therefore no one location will provide a "better" or "truer" experience than another. On the other hand, I truly believe that you gain a better understanding for having visited a site, and have submitted many grant applications for a research trip through the Middle East based on this very belief.

Does location matter?

It seems as if I'm a hypocrite, because I would say that it didn't matter for spiritual reasons, but for academic reasons it does. But, my spiritual beliefs center around the understanding that divinity is everything and that there should be no separation. How does that work??!

Having this contradiction handed to me means that I need to reevaluate my assumptions, and I think it is very true that different experiences are available in different locations. You see/feel/smell/taste/etc different and therefore travelling is very valuable (thank goodness!), but I can't justify prioritising one experience, or one person's experience over another. All are perfectly valid and valuable, and should contribute a person's understanding of the world.

This means that the women who travel to Catalhoyuk to experience the lives of the "goddess-worshippers" will gain something from their trip, but also means that they should not think that it is the only place they can connect.

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. . . 

Drowning in Articles

I am a year and a half into my PhD and am coming to the end of writing my background chapter.  For an archaeologist, this means writing about the historical context of my research and the current state of knowledge about the time period.  I have been tackling this in thematic chunks and my material has been organized in these sections.  Now I'm starting to integrate these sections by writing the more specific contextual sections and I'm finding that my filing system is starting to break down.  I'm spending too much time trying to find a particular article as stuff is spread across the themes.

I think I need to reorganize my articles and take a close inventory of what I have and where it is.  I use EndNote and am very diligent about entering reference information.  I would like to try keeping better track of where each article is in my system and whether I have printed it off or if I've moved it into a thematic collection for some purpose. 

I think the best system for me to adopt will be an alphabetical system by the first author's last name.  I have avoided this in the past since often sets of authors write together multiple times about similar things but alternate who the first author is.  This can make it difficult to keep track of all resources on a particular topic, but clearly keeping things by topic is no longer working.  I guess I'll have to give it a try and give myself permission to redo it if it isn't better.

Now, I have a filing cabinet in my office in the department that I can use, but I intend to work from home when I move in June.  At that point, I will need to devise a filing system to use there, but in the mean time, I can use the hanging files in my office.

I guess I will be spreading my paper out on the floor sometime soon and alphabetizing and cross-referencing it in EndNote.  I'll be sure to take some pictures of the before, during, and after and keep you updated on the progress.

How do other people keep track of articles and resources?

Conference Presenting and Recovery

Well, this weekend I had the opportunity to present my first academic paper at an archaeological conference.  It was not the first conference I had attended, but attending as a PhD student presenting a paper was a very different experience.  People actually seemed interested in speaking to me and after my paper I had a number of individuals come up to me to discuss my research.  This was very flattering and I just can't believe how exciting it is to have people taking an interest in me.

Of course, I then came home and collapsed in a heap.  I was totally worn out from all the networking and socializing that had been going on.

Yesterday, I did almost nothing but buy groceries and watch tv.  I bought a whole bunch of veggies to experiment with this week and explore some of the recipes in Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian.  Tonight, I think I'll be making stirfried pork with kale, mushrooms, and peppers with chilies and garlic - not exactly out of the book, but inspired by!