Once again, the focus of this week was to keep finding, bookmarking, and plugging relevant dissertations into the Zotero program that Dr. Shermer and myself share the password to. As I said last week, this process keeps getting easier and easier with one exception. There is one university that I continuously have trouble finding solid dissertations about; Michigan State University. I feel like that university in particular requires the most time and attention. There are significantly more articles from the University of Michigan that have subject matters which are more relevant to the purposes of this internship- which is sort of frustrating.
Another thing that arose (which isn't necessarily a problem) is that certain universities seem to have dissertations about one particular topic more than any other topic. For example, I have discovered more dissertations about racial desegregation/ racial integration from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill than any other institution. To name another example- dissertations about infrastructure and administration are abundant with respect to The State University of New York. However, I should note that I have found dissertations under other categories (rather than one category simply dominating the dissertations from one particular university). I'm not sure if this is a "problem" because I think it's only natural that racism is the topic of a university that institutionalized racism for decades prior to the civil rights act (North Carolina at Chapel Hill) or if infrastructure/administration dissertations seem to be prominent about the first university to set up a network such as S.U.N.Y. However it would be nice to have a more well-rounded library and list of categories for each institution.
Another issue that came up during Dr. Shermer and I's meeting during this week was one of time management. She stole the words out of my mouth when expressed her disliking to the majority of my work being completed the day that we are scheduled to meet. I agreed with her on the spot and promised to fix that habit. I have made it a point to get some amount of work done on a daily basis- rather than "binging" with the work (despite the fact that I certainly am getting my hours in) on that particular due date. A part of me also contends that- though I do agree with what Dr. Shermer said for the most part- her statement may be a bit misleading. She grounded that statement on the records from our Zotero program which documents the time and day that each entry is submitted or altered. Just because Zotero shows that I plugged all of the information in to the program on the day that she and I were to meet does not mean that I found the articles and did the research on the day we met. Most of the time I'll look for articles, bookmark them, and then plug them in all at once so that I can sort of stay on a roll while finding things in the Proquest database.
Regardless- I do tend to save the majority of the work for a time that is indeed to close to the day we meet. In this respect she and I have indeed reached a concurrence and I absolutely will change that.
Another thing that was a bit irritating was that my Zotero account had been acting up at the end of last week. I plugged some sources into it and for some reason it wasn't syncing with the internet to upload them. Furthermore- they seemed to either not sync or sync erratically. I spoke to a friend who is a software engineer and he had heard of Zotero- he recommended that I uninstall the program and then reinstall it. This seemed to fix the problem.
Other than the few things that I had mentioned- things are going great! Its becoming clear that dissertations are becoming harder and harder to find- so for the time being I think I'm going to start hunting for books and journal articles (which should be fun).
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