Shades

1 hour writing, 1 hour reading, 2 hours processing data, 0.5 hours emailing, page count = 166

In terms of writing, I incorporated some of the feedback from this week's meetings, adding another vignette to the introduction to introduce the period of institutional design, along with the period of conflict. I also decided to put a piece on Antioquia in the research design section of the methodology chapter - not so much to justify the choice of that particular state, but to explain what's distinctive about the state.

My reading focused on a similar theme, looking at some local histories of Antioquia, both political and economic. I'm going to pursue this vein for a little while, I think, as a way of starting to write up the empirical materials.

Speaking of which, Ana María got me the first of her three products, a completed database of Antioquia police records from the police museum. We took a sample of 106 (2 from each of the 53 folders) from the total universe of about 6000 records. I've started processing this data, developing coding schemes for the different variables and doing the actual coding. One of the more interesting details is that some, but not all, of the service records have a place to identify the color of the agent. There's a complicated set of labels for skin color in Colombia, including the very strange trigueño, or "wheat-colored." Don't ask me. I first observed these in the national beauty pageant, which is an obsession to a degree that we just can't understand in the U.S. (The pageant, which takes place this coming weekend in Cartagena, still uses those labels.) Anyway, most of the agents in our sample are either trigueño or moreno - much like our soldiers in Iraq, it's the dark-skinned boys who get to be cannon fodder. I'll continue to process this data over the next day or two, and begin incorporating it into the manuscript.