Catching up

0.5 hours writing, 6.5 hours reading and ruminating.
I'm at a point where I've expanded my current outline into full sentences, and that's as far as it'll go. I'm at 40 pages, so that's pretty good, but it's clear what's needed is a change of kind and not degree: I need to include other types of information, not just more of what I already have. So I decided to take a look at examples of dissertations by other students in my program. That led me in two distinct directions for reading today.

One was back into game theory: I worked my way through the formal model in a colleague's dissertation, to get myself used to thinking in that way again - it's been a good three years. It was helpful to see what I would need to be capable of doing if I wanted to incorporate a model. I'm leaning toward not doing it, but again, the process of identifying assumptions and seeing how they hang together logically will be useful no matter what.

The other direction was about methodology. My department is a hub of thinking about the relationships between quantitative and qualitative methodology, so I spent some time catching up on what colleagues have been doing in this area in the three years since I was last a full-time student.

In general, that was today's theme: what's been going on in my department and my discipline while I've been in New York. It's interesting to re-immerse myself in that whole world after three years of having my head in a very different place.

I got some useful ideas from reviewing other dissertations about how to build on my current outline. The main one is about painting more of the historical context of my case study, and situating the politics I study in a richer socioeconomic and global context. Tomorrow I'll begin implementing that.

The farmers' market near our apartment that Cathy and I usually go to on Saturdays is also there on Wednesdays, so I checked it out during my lunch break. It's practically a whole different set of vendors! One is the wonderful Red Jacket Orchards. (Their Fuji Apple Juice is worth the mail order.) This expands our grocery and cooking horizons in some potentially interesting ways....