I skipped a week of blogging, which is a shame. Then I wrote this and didn’t get round to uploading it. It’s not so much that I did no work, but that I did too much. So I’m taking the rest of the year off PhD-logging to try to get my head together.
I made a leap forward with the nework graphing, although it was a frustrating process. I was feeling that I had exhausted the possibilities of Cytoscape, but I wasn’t making much headway with Neo4j. Eventually, it was an application called Graphileon which unblocked me. It lets me create nodes and relationships graphically, as Cytoscape did, but with the added fuctionality that comes with Neo4j. Specifically, it makes it easy for me to add annotations to the nodes (texts) and relationships (connections between texts or between texts and keywords). It isn’t everything I need to do, but it’s operational, so I’m treading water again for now.
I tried to develop a proper reading program and soon discovered my limitations, given the time available. I am quite badly swamped in the MPhil seminar readings, not all of which are terribly useful. I soon decided to adopt a more ruthlessly selective attitude towards them. Even so, I doubt I can manage more than 12 readings a week – a reading being a journal article of book chapter of average length.
It’s also the middle of the holiday season for us, and even though it’s obviously quieter in this year of lockdowns, there’s still a sense in the family bubble that we need to mark these moments. Between the three of us, we combine three national traditions, the same number of cultural/ethnic traditions and everybody’s birthday, in a space of time unfolding between mid-October and late-January, amounting to a special event every week and a half! Since I was feeling stretched, I decided to go all out on the 4-day Thanksgiving weekend and refrain from any PhD work, but it hasn’t actually left me feeling more relaxed. Too many things are pulling at my mental energy: my daughter’s preparations for a university application, work, administration and finance related issues. It really isn’t going to calm down until the end of January. The ideal situation for me is to put all PhD work on the slow cooker until February then do a couple of months full-time work on it. However, that’s not how PhD programmes are set up.