darragh murray

Technically, this entry could be called thesis week two and three, but I’ll just say two, as week three hasn’t finished yet. Well, I’ll be brief - I wasn’t as productive as week one. The reasons why, well, I’m grasping to comprehend the reasons, and simply, there just aren’t any. I suppose laziness is a good excuse, but I’ll go with mental and physical exhaustion. I read and read and read. The microfilm machines began to transform into something akin to a black hole. As I approached the event horizon I had to step back, to prevent myself from being physically sucked into the 19th century periodical texts and lost forever.

I continued my concentration on Buchanan’s Journal of Man, finding plenty of useful phrenological information amongst a mammoth selection of primary source material. Like a study-zombie, I notated the salient ideas of the various texts, and later attempted to make some kind of sense of the direction they were taking, and ended up rather confused. I’m wondering if I’m making the right approach.

I was getting tired with sitting at microfilm machines, so I decided to do a bit of secondary source reading, attempting to identify the historical gap, if it indeed did exist, in the secondary material. I sat up late some nights ploughing through John Davies’s Phrenology – Fad or Science, a 1950s publication on American phrenology.

I also discovered the HRPC postgraduate common room, the perfect place to do some work after the library closes, and before boxing training on a Tuesday and Thursday evening. It is also close by the History Honours Thesis library, which contents I had the pleasure of perusing to garner ideas for structure and the general quality of publication.

I met with my supervisor just yesterday after I submitted a very rough abstract. I admit when I was drafting the rough abstract I had little idea of what I was doing was right, so I just decided to dump the contents of my brain on the paper. Seems that this was the incorrect way of doing it! My supervisor gave me a bit of a proverbial kick in the pants.

“Stay away from the secondary literature, Darragh!! Concentrate solely on the primary materials and make your own opinions about them!”

I have been taking the wrong approach it seems. For the next one-to-two months I must only work on primary material. This means more microfilm machine love.

Well, that’s about it for the time being, I’ll report back in the next week or two, hopefully with news that these 19th century American medical periodicals have successfully impregnated my brain with a clue about what I’m suppose to be doing.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 11:50 am and is filed under Thesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.