| doing lines of dust and sweat off last night's stage |
 doing lines of dust and sweat off last night's stage
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Mar. 15th, 2009 @ 01:52 pm 
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At the beginning stage of working on an essay, I'm kind of a data magpie. I gather everything that might be relevant, then refine it and go over it until I'm ready to start working on writing the essay. In past times, this involved a lot of book-borrowing and photocopying; now that so much is available online in PDF form, it involves a lot of book-borrowing, PDF-downloading, and scanning microforms or photographing ancient books.
Accordingly, my "History" folder now contains 1.43GB of data in 131 files and 8 folders. (I just sorted it.) I have 66 articles from the Scottish Historical Review saved - and I'm not even done with that. Not all of them will turn out to be that useful, but seriously, the reading! (I also have about six library books for my essay currently.)
And the thing is, I'm really not ready to start really working on the information I have in earnest. The essay's not due for over two months, which means I can't get myself out of the mindset of looking for useful sources for quite some time yet. (And I need more primary sources, I do, but I'm still learning how to find them.)
Quite possibly, the most annoying part of this essay will be putting together the bibliography. Not least because it just feels like there's a certain number of sources past which you look like you're lying...
Idly, reading archaic texts - 17th-century especially (it's before the period of history I'm really looking at, for the most part, but some stuff still comes relevant) is having weird effects on my reading comprehension. And is threatening to affect my spelling. Possibly the oddest effect is I have trouble reading gender-neutral pronouns; people use "hir" to aim for gender-neutrality, but I'm currently reading a lot of documents where that's the common spelling of "her". So instead of just finding it slightly jarring generically, but parsing it as "gender-neutral pronoun", I'm finding it really jarring generally, because it triggers my brain to try and shift into 17th-century parsing.
Harder still is reading "shoe" as "she". There's one case where I really can see why the /o/ was dropped. (There are some words that have made an interesting journey via Americanism; take "oestrogen", which Americans spell "estrogen", a spelling which is spreading - and changing common pronunciation from "e" as in "week" to "e" as in "edward".) Judging by spelling, pronunciation was a lot more complicated a few hundred years ago. (Unsurprising. Languages tend towards simplification where meaning is unaffected.)
Now I want to look up when the Great Vowel Shift happened, and I can't, because I'm currently at New House and there is no internet yet...
... ooh, thanks for the reminder now I'm at the library, self!Current Location: my bedroom then Reid Library Current Music: Fall Out Boy - 20 Dollar Nose Bleed
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