(no subject)
Yesterday I posted about my various doings of late, most of them necessary but non-academic, so today, it's time to talk about work. I've actually been doing some this week, and I venture to say that today I was actually pretty productive. I did enough spreadsheet-compiling and reading that when it came to reading hockey blogs this evening, I couldn't face the articles about advanced statistics. Not even the ones on specifically Canucks blogs! But the time for the hockey fandom post I've been promising for ages isn't now.
So, work. I've mostly pulled out of my weekend-and-Monday research-related slump, despite the lingering question mark about what aspect of the eleventh-century Bretons and their monastic charters my dissertation is actually going to address. I'm still waiting to hear about the archives, so in the meantime, I've been working on stuff for my Haskins paper and, in the past few days, doing some reading. Today I spent a couple of hours in the morning (and another one this evening) working on a spreadsheet of the charters for my Haskins paper, as I attempt to work out the chronology of the various transactions in question. They are manifestly not in chronological order in the cartulary! In any case, this is my William of Dol project, and there are interesting things going on with the interplay of the donations William and his brothers made to the monastery of Saint-Florent at the time he became a monk there, and William's brother John's later foundation of a daughter house of Saint-Florent at Dol. And that's just working with the properties and their relative chronology and their placement in the cartulary. I hope they'll become even more interesting once I put the donors and witnesses in.
I went to the library this afternoon and got myself set up for borrowing books (a sticker on my student card) and then read two articles on priories and one, by prof FM, about the so-called "territorialization of lordship" in post-Carolingian western France. It was excellent. News flash: if you use comparable Carolingian and eleventh-century evidence (as opposed to sources coming from different levels of the aristocracy as historians have tended to do without recognizing it), lordly domains look pretty much the same across the period - bits of property scattered across a swath of territory, size of territory roughly commensurate with importance of lordly family. According to FM, the real change was the emergence of properties with castles as the capitals of these domain-networks, and that is an awesome idea.
I also signed out Dominique Barthélemy on Vendôme for its exhaustive chapter on Marmoutier's charters, and hauled it home. I plan to educate myself in the ways of Marmoutier's charters in preparation for hopefully getting to see some soon.
All this said, I've also been thinking about my past year of research fellowship, and the one that's now in progress, and wondering if maybe it might have been better for me to teach last year - as in, maybe I'd have actually gotten more work done with more structure. I don't know, because of the general outside shittiness that would still have been a problem, but I've definitely noticed that lack of structure can be a problem for me. Along those lines, I was reading in Female Science Professor's blog about her mental classification of grad students - those that are productive no matter what and get everything done no matter how much there is (former roommate J definitely fell into this category!), and those that are generally less productive, some in the subgroup that can only be productive if they can focus on one thing, and some in the subgroup that get overwhelmed by endless time and do better with some structure. I think I need to be counted in that second subgroup! Alas, it's a subgroup that, by consensus in the comments, is populated by immature grad students. So, now that I have it, I need to use this knowledge, my own idle opinion now backed up by FSP, to some sort of productive effect...
~
Anyway, on other topics, S, one of the other tenants of my landlady, has invited me to go out for coffee with her tomorrow evening, which, yay! I haven't been out anywhere restaurant-ish (save for MacDonalds and some takeout-sandwich places) since I've been here because I don't have anyone to go with. I'm looking forward to having someone to talk to for a while (maybe in French, maybe in English - I understand she speaks many languages). I'll also have to buckle down so I get things done before then, so maybe that will work as some structure to my day tomorrow. I'm also planning to go to one of the other libraries on campus, which I'll have to do earlier in the day than my library trips today and yesterday were.
Finally, tonight in Vancouver the Canucks play the first game of the 2011-2012 regular season against the Pittsburgh Penguins. Hockey is back! Or at least, hockey will be back at 4:00 am my time. Obviously, I'll be finding out the score when I wake up. But I'll be watching in spirit as much as I can be from (hopefully) a deep sleep! GO CANUCKS!
So, work. I've mostly pulled out of my weekend-and-Monday research-related slump, despite the lingering question mark about what aspect of the eleventh-century Bretons and their monastic charters my dissertation is actually going to address. I'm still waiting to hear about the archives, so in the meantime, I've been working on stuff for my Haskins paper and, in the past few days, doing some reading. Today I spent a couple of hours in the morning (and another one this evening) working on a spreadsheet of the charters for my Haskins paper, as I attempt to work out the chronology of the various transactions in question. They are manifestly not in chronological order in the cartulary! In any case, this is my William of Dol project, and there are interesting things going on with the interplay of the donations William and his brothers made to the monastery of Saint-Florent at the time he became a monk there, and William's brother John's later foundation of a daughter house of Saint-Florent at Dol. And that's just working with the properties and their relative chronology and their placement in the cartulary. I hope they'll become even more interesting once I put the donors and witnesses in.
I went to the library this afternoon and got myself set up for borrowing books (a sticker on my student card) and then read two articles on priories and one, by prof FM, about the so-called "territorialization of lordship" in post-Carolingian western France. It was excellent. News flash: if you use comparable Carolingian and eleventh-century evidence (as opposed to sources coming from different levels of the aristocracy as historians have tended to do without recognizing it), lordly domains look pretty much the same across the period - bits of property scattered across a swath of territory, size of territory roughly commensurate with importance of lordly family. According to FM, the real change was the emergence of properties with castles as the capitals of these domain-networks, and that is an awesome idea.
I also signed out Dominique Barthélemy on Vendôme for its exhaustive chapter on Marmoutier's charters, and hauled it home. I plan to educate myself in the ways of Marmoutier's charters in preparation for hopefully getting to see some soon.
All this said, I've also been thinking about my past year of research fellowship, and the one that's now in progress, and wondering if maybe it might have been better for me to teach last year - as in, maybe I'd have actually gotten more work done with more structure. I don't know, because of the general outside shittiness that would still have been a problem, but I've definitely noticed that lack of structure can be a problem for me. Along those lines, I was reading in Female Science Professor's blog about her mental classification of grad students - those that are productive no matter what and get everything done no matter how much there is (former roommate J definitely fell into this category!), and those that are generally less productive, some in the subgroup that can only be productive if they can focus on one thing, and some in the subgroup that get overwhelmed by endless time and do better with some structure. I think I need to be counted in that second subgroup! Alas, it's a subgroup that, by consensus in the comments, is populated by immature grad students. So, now that I have it, I need to use this knowledge, my own idle opinion now backed up by FSP, to some sort of productive effect...
~
Anyway, on other topics, S, one of the other tenants of my landlady, has invited me to go out for coffee with her tomorrow evening, which, yay! I haven't been out anywhere restaurant-ish (save for MacDonalds and some takeout-sandwich places) since I've been here because I don't have anyone to go with. I'm looking forward to having someone to talk to for a while (maybe in French, maybe in English - I understand she speaks many languages). I'll also have to buckle down so I get things done before then, so maybe that will work as some structure to my day tomorrow. I'm also planning to go to one of the other libraries on campus, which I'll have to do earlier in the day than my library trips today and yesterday were.
Finally, tonight in Vancouver the Canucks play the first game of the 2011-2012 regular season against the Pittsburgh Penguins. Hockey is back! Or at least, hockey will be back at 4:00 am my time. Obviously, I'll be finding out the score when I wake up. But I'll be watching in spirit as much as I can be from (hopefully) a deep sleep! GO CANUCKS!