" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

I don’t have much time, so here’s what I’ve been up to:

1. I had an incred­i­ble 90-minute meet­ing with one my com­mit­tee mem­bers about my recent chap­ter sub­mis­sion and I feel like a real, honest-to-god scholar. His feed­back was sup­port­ive, spe­cific, and crit­i­cal — I left his office invigorated.

2. I’m fin­ished with Chap­ter 2 for now. I’ve done all I can is put it on the back-burner and let it sim­mer while I prep for my next chapter.

3. I just fin­ished Caleb McDaniel’s excel­lent post, “The Dig­i­tal Early Repub­lic” on the research data­base meth­ods for find­ing trends in pri­mary sources.

4. Cleaned out my diss drawer in my desk and found a ton of arti­cles I planned to read, but never got to. I have a cold today so I’m going to track them down elec­tron­i­cally so I can read them on my iPad (see above).

5. I really need to stick to my diss map, or at least, keep it in front of me as a reminder of what the hell I’m doing.

The hol­i­day break was fan­tas­tic, but it’s time to hit the books. I had a meet­ing with my dis­ser­ta­tion advi­sor yes­ter­day and it was AWESOME. She chewed up my chap­ter and spit it out and I’m psy­ched. It’s been a cou­ple weeks since I really looked at my chap­ter so before I review her edits, I’m going to review with my own edits. That way, I can have a con­ver­sa­tion with her edits rather than just fol­low­ing her instructions.

I’m a bit writ­ing rusty from the break so I’m just going to end this here. Let’s hope that is not a har­bin­ger of 2012.