Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Outcomes vs. episodes

1 hour meeting, 3 hours processing data, 4 hours writing, page count = 179

I got a signature! One of my committee members has signed off, and I have three to go. Very exciting. We had a good meeting, and she had a lot of great comments and sources to help flesh out the historical and comparative chapters.

I worked on reframing the critical-juncture chapter in terms of outcomes rather than episodes. Another committee member gave me good advice yesterday about structuring historical materials for political-science purposes: start with the conclusion or the outcome, and then trace the process by which that conclusion was arrived at. So I'm doing that with the critical-juncture chapter. Part of that involves making more of a reform to empower governors to form their own police forces. I had been thinking about the critical juncture in terms of two episodes: the 1890s when the National Police were created, and the following decade (the 1900s?) when the army was professionalized. But part of the military reforms in the latter part involved the empowerment of governors to create their own police forces. Because I had been structuring the discussion in terms of temporal episodes, I hadn't connected these two decisions about the National Police and the state police, even though they're linked thematically, because they're separated temporally. The way I'm rewriting it is better.

To flesh out the piece about the state-police reform, which I had only mentioned in passing before, I went back to my historical data about the regional allocation of police forces, and put together a table tracking its evolution, which involved a good bit of data processing.

This week's and next week's blogs are brought to you by the letters M, L, and S, for Matt and Laura Sumner, who in their infinite patience and kindness are hosting me once again in the East Bay. Congratulations to Laura on turning in several chapters of her master's thesis today, and to Matt on finishing his penultimate semester studying interior design!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Chris, structure is so crucial, innit? For academic writing, I always preferred inductive, rather than deductive writing; my least favorite film theorists would write long, deductive essays that read like an undergrad paper A-B-C=D (including some of my favorite professors!)
I think it's amazing, considering how much data you have to make sense of and organize, that you're far enough along to be putting that info into a structure that better links outcomes into patterns. I've received the rights to a novel which I'm adapting into a script for my thesis film, and having similar issues of picking which parts to include; no second can be wasted in a 20 minute short, so I have to sift and sort, to find thematic cohesion...