Three for three

2 hours compiling data, 1 hour planning, page count = 203

Whew! What a day. My interview went well this morning, I feel like I prepared well and answered the questions completely and with some style. Then I worked with a colleague to submit a panel proposal for the 2009 Latin American Studies Association conference. (They make you submit these things so early....) It's a great-looking panel about army, police, and security reforms in Latin America. We have a mix of established scholars and grad students covering a wide range of topics. It came together very well in a short amount of time, my colleague and I were pleasantly surprised at how smoothly it went. This will be a good way to continue scholarly engagement with my topic after I'm done with the dissertation.

I worked on compiling the force data to complement the budget data, and get a more nuanced sense of how different countries balanced their police and armed forces. I had a bit of a hiccup while working on Paraguay: the police levels for 1915 looked way too low, representing a huge drop from my other datapoint, 1907. It didn't make sense, so I went through temporally nearby records for 1911, 1913, and 1919 before realizing: D'oh! I had just missed a section in the 1915 documents. Once I included that, it all made sense again. Whew! It really does feel like detective work sometimes, you need to look at the figures with an investigative eye, ask if everything makes sense in a common-sense way. Anyway, that took longer than it needed to, but I'll continue tomorrow.

The VPF spring kickoff event was a big success. We had a great turnout on a rainy night, lots of new people came, we kept our remarks short and sweet, there was a good energy in the room. I hope we'll see a number of new people joining soon; the follow-up strategy will be very important.

All in all, a fun, successful, and exhausting day!