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Thing learned: even when busy, explicitly devote the last half hour of the day to cleaning up and posting about what I did, because otherwise it’s not going to happen. It’s been a rough few weeks, sorry.
- Worked on various parts of the dissertation. I moved all methodology and lit review parts to the Introduction in order to simplify the whole thing’s structure - now I have chapter 1 on how dojinshi exchange works, chapter 2 on how it’s a hybrid economy, and chapter 3 on how we can interpret them as open source goods. Bam. Enough.
- Did a lot of reading for methodology section on modular design of research (both process and output) and making the data reusable. It’s reaffirmed my determination to keep the main text of the dissertation short, but do everything possible to make the text and underlying data easy to share and reuse. That’ll help both me and others a lot more than if I just locked myself up for the next four months and wrote six hundred pages.
- Did a fuckton of administration and application-writing because I have to prepare documents for a job application with deadline at the end of this month. It’s honestly exhausting and I’m a bit alarmed by how much dissertation writing time it’s been eating up, but on the other hand, it’s forcing me to think very hard about what kind of researcher and teacher I want to become. That’s good.
- Preparations for the job application include yet more updating of my publications in the university’s research repository. This is the administration thing that never ends, which is very annoying, but it’s also kind of fun that I keep discovering things I did that I can add in there. For instance, it turns out that I’m allowed to add not just my translations of academic articles, but also translations of fiction, meaning that I can add in manga translations. Of which I did about sixty, meaning that my publications list is going to triple over the course of this weekend. *mad cackle*
- In all seriousness, though, I have no idea why it never occurred to me before that I should add this stuff to the list of things I’ve accomplished in life that would make me qualified for a uni job. It’s like these translations are not serious things that matter in my head. But they are - I worked hard on every single one of them, they are all 200-page books with ISBN numbers and everything, they prove my Japanese ability, etc etc and so on. Of course they’re relevant when I’m applying for a job that involves Japanese and knowing about Japanese popular culture. Perhaps it’s that I made them as a freelancer, not in my capacity as an academic? A bit surprised at how alive that distinction is in my head, given the amount of time I spend going on about how connected academic activity is/should be with the world outside of it.
- Attended a three-day digital humanities workshop where I heard a lot of interesting stuff and learned how to work with TEI. I’m not convinced that I can use TEI myself since close document analysis is not immediately my thing, but it’s important to know this stuff so I can pass it on to students (and hopefully colleagues lolsob).
- Learned how to make posters because I’m doing my first poster presentation next week. Still not done. Aaaaaaaagh.
- More stuff that I forgot. Will do more regular posts again.
