Updates & New Devlog

[Jubal]

Well, I failed at keeping this as a devlog. Project continuing nonetheless: hit the 45,000 word mark on the thesis today (I'm expecting the end result to reach ca 80,000 words, so still a very long way to go, but progress is progress).

I'm struggling to work out how to balance writing and data entry at this point - I'm feeling more panicked about writing, but maybe I'd find writing easier if I did more analyses and for that I need more data. :/ Truth be told I think I'm probably not doing anything quite fast enough.

[Jubal]

I'm now in the thesis editing stages: the whole thing is 88,361 words at the time of writing this, including bibliography but excluding another 2000 or so words of footnotes. It's the bibliography and footnotes I'm now working on: I had around seventy or eighty "empty" footnotes at the point at which I finished the first draft of the text, I'm now down to a bit under thirty, and I'm most of the way through compiling the bibliography, but it's slow progress, especially on areas where the literature is rather patchy (engaging with ethnicity/race as topics in a Caucasus medieval context hasn't been done a huge amount).

Today's work included sorting out bibliography stuff relating to the eristaviates (complex only really because I'm referring to more Georgian-language stuff there and knowing if I've read it right is tricky), and also included doing the bibliographies for my sections on race and ethnicity which are quite complex, even just in terms of defining my terms as race and ethnicity are both contested, complex words and I'm far from a specialist on the very wide ranging, multi-field literature that covers them.

I'm also trying to "spin off" a paper from the thesis because I got asked to write something for a Georgian journal and it seemed a good fit, but that's got to be sorted in the next two weeks as well, so things are getting rather hectic.

[Jubal]

So, since the last update things stalled a lot on account of I was ill - my supervisor took until about September to get the thesis read through, and then I had Covid and a new job from October onwards, so it's been rather tricky. I'm finally getting back to editing in earnest though. The biggest job will be adding in even more citations as my supervisor thinks I need to... I'm not sure what literature I have to engage with in some areas, but it's also nerve wracking simply declaring that nobody has written about a particular topic because that's not usually right either.

The paper I mentioned in the previous post will be released in the next few weeks: I've also done some talks since then, at the International Medieval Congress in early July, as a speaker at Paul Moffett's "It's Gonna Be Epic" symposium where I talked about Georgian epics in late July, and at the Future and Reality of Games conference in November where I talked about using the medieval Caucasus as an alternative model for game representations of "medieval" societies. And showed off a working version of the database at the Medieval Academy of America's postgrad digital humanities showcase in December, plus my post about my work on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry which was that month. 2022 was actually a pretty busy year! Though I'm wondering if I should try and spend more time on publications and less on talks in future, as the former hang around rather better.

[Jubal]

Besides my paper in Chronos now being out, today I hit the milestone of 500 footnotes in my thesis. I think I must be close to done now? Ish? Maybe?

[Jubal]

Well, I got a PhD out of all this. So, what next?

This certainly isn't the end, it turns out - at most the end of the beginning.

• I've got another publication hopefully coming out next year, focused on the Zakarid and Orbeli dynasties - more on that as it comes.
• I still have to publish the database. This is still a big job away from being done, I should cross-check a lot of my current rather ropey data and ensure I'm up to date with the set of sources I've used. But one of my PhD supervisor's programmers has done a lot of work on dockerising my database syste this year, so that hopefully puts the database in good stead to be available in 2024 sometime.
• The thesis will want to be turned into publications, probably plural - my expectation is that I'll want to hack the methods section into a series of papers, with the body of the analysis turning into a monograph with a newly written attached narrative history.

This is all a disconcertingly big job, but at least I won't get bored any time soon