The tedious part of research.

Now that I'm back from my recent travels and am content to stay in Toronto for the next while I am getting to the business of dealing with the material I've been collecting. While at the archives I've been either noting pages for later photocopying or else taking digital pictures. I have done very little entering of data into my notetaking program. So I have tens of thousands of images, and a few thousand pages of photocopied material, to go through. For the most part I haven't even read what I've collected. First up I am turning individual images into .pdf files. After that I will take notes on the contents.

I think it's important to take stock---even if only very quickly---of what I've got before I can really lay out my chapters. At the moment I have only a vague sense of what topics might make good chapters. So for the next little while I will be doing very tedious work, but necessary work. It's not boring, exactly, since I like learning new things about my research, but it will take a long while. After I've organized the images I think what I'll do is pick out the topics I want to take notes on and go through everything topically that way. Maybe I will be good and write, if not whole chapters, then at least sections of potential future chapters once I'm done the research on discrete topics. Hmm. We'll see. But that seems very far away. Remember: tens of thousands of images.

Anyways, back to chronicling my life. Yesterday I went off to Massey for dinner and a lecture given by Michael Marrus, a well-known holocaust historian. Dinner was good, as was chatting briefly with a small handful of Masseyites, and the lecture was interesting. LG showed me his enormous 22'' monitor. I need to get an extra monitor myself, but I think 22 inches is a smidge too big. Also, I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on one.