Jubal's Thesis Devlog

[Jubal]

Well, I have them for other projects, so why not the thesis...

THE BASICS

My thesis title is "Byzantium and the Black Sea 1150-1215" though in fact 1130-1230 would be more accurate. What I've ended up mostly writing about is the interactions between politics, governance, ethnicity, and to a lesser extent economics in the Black Sea region in this time period. I'm going to write updates with the various musings I have on different days. The thesis has to be 20,000 words when done, which is Many Words. You're very welcome to ask me questions (please do!) and I'll try and answer them - explaining things to other people is often pretty helpful with this sort of work.

UPDATE 1

Currently at 4807/20000 (24%) word count. I'm expecting the last 3000 or so to be quite easy to write as that'll be the intro and conclusion, "top and tailing" the research work. Hoping to get another couple of hundred words written today, by which point I'll be where I was hoping to be by the end of term a couple of weeks ago (but was held up from by flu mainly).

[Jubal]

UPDATE 2

Last few days have seen some reasonable writing progress, I'm now up to 6200 or so words, approaching the 1/3 mark. Much of that has been building up my chapter on Georgia and Trebizond, which is now 2200 words in itself and not far off draft length (2500-3000 for each of the core research chapters). Other chapters are doing less well, the final research chapter is only a paragraph long!

[Jubal]

U3

Hit the 1/3 mark.

Mostly spent today reading, and cursing the brilliant Alexander Kazhdan for the frustrating fact that he often didn't reference fairly important things, probably because his knowledge of Byzantine source material was so absurdly encyclopaedic that he tended to forget that there'd be things other people hadn't actually read. Got through two of his papers, one which will be synthesised into about one sentence (were there important marriage links between Byzantium and the Rus in the 12th century, no there were not), and another which is much more of a mine of information, a lot of which I'll need to plough through (probably including hunting down the original Greek texts) at some point.

[Pentagathus]

Word goals.

[Jubal]

Yeah, pretty much. So much to do, all feels quite overwhelming and I just don't know if I know enough a lot of the time at the moment

[comrade_general]

I just don't know if I know enough a lot of the time at the moment

Wut.

[Pentagathus]

He fears that his knowledge may be inadequate for being a master of knowing things.
I've never had a written assignment of anything near that length, but I usually enjoy such things because it's something you can just get on with and you get a sense of progression as you do it. Can't really give any advice apart from arbeiten!
But yeah just keep doing it until it's done I guess. I'm sure you can do it and do it well if you can maintain the motivation.

[Jubal]

I think the "I don't know enough" thing is a pretty constant problem among academics, as far as I can tell most of the PhD student have it just as bad.

Anyhow, I've gotten over the 8000 word mark now, going to switch to starting Greek revision soon. Hard to say how it's going, as usual.

[comrade_general]

It was mostly the last part which sounded weird.

[Jubal]

Two days, one talk to prepare. Aaaaaaaaaah D:

[Pentagathus]

Better than two talks to prepare, one day.

[Jubal]

Conference done! And it went vaguely OK, I think, got a couple of bits of good feedback. I'm still not sure how intellectually tight I think it was, but I managed to at least deliver it coherently.

[Jubal]

I'm now over 11,000 words, still waddling on with it. It's frustratingly slow work a lot of the time at the moment - settling back into a good work routine after a house move isn't easy.

[Jubal]

The last sprint continues - 20746 words is the current count, so I need to cut it down a bit. But also add some bits. Which may be hard.

[Glaurung]

It should probably be recorded that the thesis was completed on time and within the word limit, and submitted. The result is currently awaited, I believe.