Chapter three was supposed to be one of the easy ones.
In my pre-ABD days, I completed a couple of research projects that I had high hopes for converting to dissertation chapters. One of these actually dates back to before I arrived at my current institution. Eventually, I did a little more research, revised it to submit to a journal, and then, when the time came, spent a couple weeks converting it to a chapter draft. That was chapter five.
Chapter three was supposed to go the same way. I knew it would be tougher, since there was a bit more research I needed to do. Through two trips to China since I first wrote this paper – about Jinan’s experiences during two major wars in the 1850’s and 1860’s – I had done more research and collected copies of additional sources that I still needed to read. Cleverly, I spent my quota of copies I could get on documents where the handwriting would take a long time to decipher. That way I could conserve my precious time in the archives and then tackle the really difficult stuff from the comfort of my own home. So this spring and summer…time to pay the piper.
There was also one more published collection of documents I wanted to look out. It was twenty-six volumes long. I identified 406 documents that might be useful to me. I narrowed that down to 95 top-priority documents, based on the likelihood that they would contain useful information about Jinan and help me finish this chapter. (As for the other 311, maybe you’ll hear about them if I ever start a blog for my second project.) Along the way, I realized that some of these documents would overlap with ones I had already read. So, I made a spreadsheet of all the 597 government documents I had read and collected in my initial research, at the archives, and now from this collection. Then I had to actually read the top-priority documents.
A couple years ago, a colleague kindly recommended that I might want to read a diary written by a native of Jinan during this time period. This spring, she happened to give a presentation on this diary at a conference I was attending and where I was presenting my research on this chapter. We swapped papers, and this was the kick I needed to actually go read this source. It took a while because I had to disentangle the travels and social connections of the person who wrote it. Along the way, I found some comments that were very useful to the chapter I was writing and added a level of detail I just didn’t have in the other sources I was reading.
Then I had to go back and revise what I had written before all this new reading and write an entirely new introduction and conclusion that reflect how this research fits into the larger scope of my dissertation.
Clearly, I did not complete all this in the space of a couple weeks. Especially not since I had to spend a considerable amount of time this summer preparing for the class I am currently teaching. And beginning to prepare job market documents. And getting started on the chapter that I thought would occupy most of summer.
The good news is that I submitted a draft of chapter three late last week. And my adviser thinks it’s pretty good. The non-news is that writing a dissertation takes a long time. Sometimes things come together pretty quickly. Other times, writing can drag out, seemingly interminably.
To be fair, “writing” is a really poor way to describe this process. Chapter three didn’t take a long time because I spent endless hours typing on my keyboard, although you can imagine it takes a while to type out 55 pages of academic prose, even if you sit down knowing exactly what you want to say. Really, “dissertation writing” is a catch-all for a mix of tasks -mundane and thrilling, small and huge – that make a project what it is.
Along the way, I’ve tried to think about how I could have handled chapter three differently, whether there was any way to get it done faster, to make it a little more like chapter five. I could have cut some corners; I could have worked faster at some points, I’m sure. But I’m hard-pressed to identify a portion of my research I should have cut out. I’ve learned to move faster, but that’s partly a product of becoming more familiar with my project and sources. That’s a corner that can’t be cut.
The main lesson I’ve learned from chapter three is that using multiple types of sources both slows down research and makes it harder to estimate how long it will take. Doing “advance scouting” of different sources can make time estimates more reliable, but that also takes time. A dissertation with a narrower base of sources and more uniform tasks to complete would both take less time to write and lend itself to a more predictable timeline.
As PhD programs push students to complete dissertations more quickly, this calculation – and its effect on the quality and types of dissertations students produce – will become increasingly pressing.