Another week, and happy to report good progress. Paper 3, based on my MPhil dissertation, was submitted a few days ago to the eminent journal. This journal uses a fancy online submission system, which is quite a novel experience for me as a humanities researcher. Online submission is commonplace among science journals, but rare in humanities, where we’re more likely to email papers as attachments, or even in some cases print them out and post them. I found I had to write an abstract before submission, again quite unusual in humanities, but once that was done it was off, and simple. The submission website took my input Word (.doc) file, and converted that, seemingly trouble-free, to a PDF. I’ve since heard from the journal editor, and the paper will be going out to review soon. It could take four months or more to hear the outcome, but it’s in process.
Paper 1 is also making good progress. I finished editing it on the computer last night, and now have printed it out to work on it in a coffee shop for a final read through. I should be submitting it in the next week. Normally I like to work in a paperless office type of way, reading and annotating PDFs on my iPad. But in this case I might want to scribble like mad, so went for the printed option. In terms of length the paper is ideal, not too short, not too long, and I think it’s improved over an earlier version. Nearly there anyway.
In more fun things my text adventure coding has also moved on. I’ve built a coding framework for the main part of the game which seems to work well and will make it easy to implement in Inform 7. The next task is to write the dialogue and text – quite a big task, but I think manageable. I found mind mapping useful here too, filling in detail about individual characters and how they will respond to the player. Then I could take my mind map, transfer it from iPad to laptop, and do the coding and writing.
One thing I haven’t done yet is to mind map for future academic research plans, but I think that should be a priority now that I’m getting so many papers finished and submitted this month. So I will make doing that a priority in the next week.
And as a morale boost I received a big box containing 25 (!) offprints of my Scottish Historical Review paper. I’m drawing up a list of places to send them to, including the archives in Edinburgh who helped me access digital images of the required historical records, and the archive centre in Dumfries, since the paper looked at Dumfriesshire book owners.
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