Score = (writing) + (analysis) + (reading/2) + (other/2) – (freakouts/2)

I use a little app called Klok (the free lite version – it’s nagware on launch) to track my time and then at the end of the day I just drop that in to my spreadsheet and it makes pretty graphs like this:

Note how I spent about 10 days NOT doing anything productive. At least not dissertation-productive. My current target for the Studious Network’s Academic Writing Accountability group is a score of 120/day. Given how little I am able to work on weekends, though, I might revise that to trying to keep my moving average above 120. Still thinking about that one.

AcBoWriMo Progress, November 2011

On the other hand, I made substantially more progress in terms of pure writing in November than I had in a really long time. For me, the first pass at writing is the hardest. It’s not that I’m a perfectionist, even. It’s just that I have trouble starting.

So far I’m having some pretty good success in keeping up the momentum that I built during November – I’ve been getting a decent amount of work done daily, whether it’s crunching numbers for the chapter that I’m focusing on right now, just spending time reading over my ethnographic data, or actually writing. I’ve got a deadline for a long abstract coming up on Monday (what sort of evil people make there be a research deadline in the middle of December? I could name names, but I won’t. Don’t you know I have a final to write, people‽) that is sharing time with the aforementioned final exam. And then onwards to the full paper to go with that long abstract, due the 6th of January.

I’m really pushing to finish. And I’m doing Ac(ademic) Bo(ok) Wri(ting) Month, which is a spin on NaNoWriMo. It’s good for me because getting started writing is always the hardest thing. I always get frustrated because my first drafts are utter crap (my husband is right at this very minute handing me a pretend phone and saying that the kettle is calling because whenever he laments having to start writing something I tell him to just get the first draft down and fix it in editing…) but once I get the first round of thoughts out I can turn it into things that are actually coherent, not to mention realizing where the holes and things are. The goal I’ve set myself is 30000 words this month, which is four chapters of 7500 words each (I picked 7500 because that’s the word limit on a journal submission that is top priority right now). So far… I’m not doing all that well, actually, because I keep getting distracted by data analysis.

But it’s way more words than I’d written in the previous month, so I’ll take what I can get!

http://failbook.failblog.org/2011/09/07/funny-facebook-fails-hipster-networking/

• First off, my Contemporary Sociology review of Ken Hillis’ Online A Lot of the Time came out last month.
• Second, Reconceptualizing the Public/Private Distinction in the Age of Information Technology, my paper from ASAs last year, is online now and will be in the forthcoming CITASA special issue of Information, Communication & Society.

So, um, that’s that. I of course submitted for IR12, the chapter of the dissertation that I call the “Mother In Law Chapter”. Sometime I’ll have to come up with a better title for it, but for the moment that gets people’s attention pretty well.

ETA: Per David’s request, here’s a PDF version!  (By Invitation Only – Internet Research 11.0)

Every semester, the UMass sociology department sends out a list of graduate students and their contact information. And for my first six years of grad school, there were always names on at list that you looked at and wondered, “Who the heck is that?” They were the students who’d been around a long time, whose funding had run out, who were off somewhere else, who may or may not have actually still been working on their degrees.

They were the ghosts.

And while I was at the ASA meetings last week, it occurred to me: I am a ghost. I have been a ghost for five years now, and half a ghost for a year before that. This first hit me when I got to my hotel room late at night after a moderate flight delay and then waiting nearly an hour for my luggage to come up from the belly of the plane. I was sharing with two other grad students, compliments of putting out a request for roommates on the grad student mailing list. They were names I had seen on e-mails that I deleted almost immediately. I had never met either one of them. They mentioned things like “the revolution” and other departmental events and I had no idea what they were talking about.

Throughout the conference I met several other current “young” UMass graduate students, all of whom were introduced to me by friends who were on campus at the same time that I was. Some of those friends are ghosts now, too, feeling more or less the same disconnection from Amherst that I do.

I guess I really am the itinerant sociologist.

Still outstanding: an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant application and my submission for Internet Research 11.0 about which I expect a decision sometime in May (since I know reviews aren’t due until the 21st of April).

I’m also now blogging about general introductory sociological topics at The Social Lens, which is quite fun.