Lit Review Update 16

Plugging away. The mark-up took about five hours, four of which was work and one of which was getting up to make coffee for me and Craig, going to the bathroom and other breaktime. The piece was 28 pages long. So in actual work, I'm marking up at a rate of seven pages an hour. In elapsed time, I'm getting about five and a half. So let's be conservative and estimate five pages an hour. That means 34 hours for Fialkoff, 7 hours for Naimark, 43 hours for Chirot. I'm not sure how to gauge Bulutgil, as she is in double-spaced, twelve-point text (it's her unpublished dissertation). Sweet Lord, I hope my pace picks up! I have 84 hours of mark-up to do and that hasn't calculated in time for typing in the blurbs and outlining.

Those two processes require more thought that you might imagine, even though they are faster. Typing up the margin blurbs usually requires more elaboration on the comments to make certain that they are quickly and easily comprehensible later on. The goal of this exercise is to avoid the need for recontextualization time at all costs! Imposing the outline structure also requires some analytical ability, but it's only here that I often arrive at a clear picture of what the writer was trying to argue, especially when the writer has poor organizational skills. Years ago, Susan Whiting told me, "You have to give each book a fair reading as well as a fair trashing. But the fair reading has to come first." I do hope she will be proud of me. These writers have my undivided attention and pure focus.

I feel that I have some small hope of picking up speed, however. Mann was definitely the most dense of the writers so far. In all fairness, he was also the most rewarding read of the bunch, so far. I'm not looking forward to Bell-Failkoff at all. He seemed to read fairly densely, but I have to say I was underwhelmed by what I read.

I wonder if I can devise a framework for judging textual density and then gauging mark-up time that way? I should keep more data. Neil asked me to make a realistic assessment of my ability to do this job, given my constraints. He didn't say it in a nasty way at all and I seriously appreciate him saying it. I don't know if I'm too slow to make it. But I'm pretty sure that most of my attempts to sample lightly here and there have been partly responsible for why I've been stalled for so long. I can't do the distillation in my head anymore. It all has to show up on paper. That's slow. But what I can do is keep good notes on the process and go back to Steve and Ellis for advice. The more they see, the more realistic their advice can be.

I definitely feel that after this lit review, I'll be able to run a seminar of ethnic cleansing with ease. In a way, that's what keeps me going. This sounds totally geeky, but I want to run a seminar. Most of my comparative seminars were not able to integrate theory and cases. I want to design seminars that do.