It’s time to really buckle down and get this dissertation going. I read “The Clockwork Muse” by Eviatar Zerubavel to give me some ideas on how to accomplish the monumental task of writing a dissertation. In a nutshell, the trick is small pieces, planned times, and deadlines. In more detail, here are some notes that [...]
With my recent trip to Germany and the Bundesarchiv in Freiburg, I learned a few important things. One, my original proposed study of the Jägerstab and all of the tunnel projects that organization created is too large. Dr. Herbert suggest that would make a nice life-time study, rather than a dissertation topic. Instead, I should [...]
Part of my dissertation methodology is to try to use collaboration to provide an increase in usable sources. To accomplish this, I have set up the Omeka archive with the wonderful Scripto tool. This tool marries an Omeka install with a MediaWiki install to provide a nice way to be able to view images in [...]
Part of my dissertation is to create an online archive of the documents I find. Thanks to the Hist 698 Digital History Techne class I had with Fred Gibbs this semester, the technical work of this part of the dissertation is now done. I used Omeka with the Scripto plugin (which is really a bridge [...]
Not quite the same feeling and fun as a road trip, but fun enough. Yeah, archive work! Yeah, Germany! Yeah, yeah archive work in Germany! Thanks to a grant from George Mason University’s Provost Office, I just spent the last two weeks in Germany (by myself, not so yeah) doing some archival research for the [...]
Sorting It All Out I have a lot of images from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum already. It’s about time I start looking through them to see what information I can get. The first issue I ran into, besides the shear number of them, is how to tell which images to look at first. [...]
(This post is cross-posted at my personal blog) Scrivener is awesome software for writing, that I’ve mentioned before, but I had yet to really test out the integration with Zotero (my citation manager of choice). So now that I have finally started on my dissertation writing in earnest (and not grant writing), I needed to [...]
Like a block of stone I recently finished writing and rewriting and writing again the essays for several scholarship applications. It is probably a good thing, but that was the most time and effort I have ever spent writing three pages of text. I went through several revisions of each essay, had the wonderful Fulbright [...]
Pun intended, of course. I found a really cool piece of software that will, I believe, be very helpful in writing the dissertation. It’s a Mac application called Scrivener. I found it while reading up on an influential digital historian’s blog, William Turkel. I like it because it organizes the writing process in the way [...]
I spent the day researching grants and reading about how to properly put together a proposal. I also spent a bit of time plotting out my todo list for this semester, creating a checklist of tasks and when they are due. I made the list in my Google Calendar, so it’s not available to be [...]