A big timer (think Countdown clock) has just pinged; and my suspension period is up. That was a fast three months! (Too quick for Loughborough admin to actually send me any confirmation of the suspension). I’ve got a call scheduled with my supervisors on Tuesday to discuss how to get started again. I haven’t quite managed everything on my To Do list; but I haven’t neglected things all together.

And in the meantime I have sorted other bits of life out. One of the things I’ve done is re-establish contact with another part-time student at Lboro, and begun talking to Dr Gill Ragsdale, director of the Research Degree Programmes about the ways that the university can help us part-timers.

It just so happens that this week is a going to be a busy one; but just the same I have a few items on the list already. I’m going to start by reviewing the headings for the year 2 report, reminding myself what I need to write. I’ve possibly found a way to outsource some of the routine research work, which will save me hours of time, so I will be talking about this and establishing payment terms. Finally I need to re-read some of the philosophy of science work. That should keep me busy.

My registration begins again on 1 November, and I rather a lot left to do on my Things to Do list!

In the last few weeks I have been doing some PhD admin tasks. I discovered on Saturday that I had a corrupted USB memory stick. Almost all my recent work was on it, along with an awful lot of PDFs of articles collected over the last two years. So I had something of a panic about it, as one could imagine.

I have indeed lost all the Word documents, but some jpegs and many PDFs have been recovered thanks to a lovely friend, Dave Talks. I have salvaged the words from some of the Word docs so I have been able to recreate them.

But, crikey, what an object lesson in making sure stuff is backed up – at Lboro, at my Virgin Media filestore, on CD, on Google documents – there are plenty of places I can have copies of things, so I have absolutely no excuse for this kind of mistake!

When not getting stuck in London because of trees on the line (NXEA not satisfied with the usual Autumnal leaves, oh no, they’re going for the whole tree), I have been attending to some of the admin tasks.

I’ve just discovered -eek- that a USB memory stick with a fair number of PDFs of articles may be corrupt, so I am hoping that the backup I made to CD is still OK. I am far as ‘H’ in terms of organising my personal library, making sure that I have a record of my printed articles on Refworks, uploading attachments and generally attempting to add some librarian-like method to the mess I had created.

Don’t know why I didn’t think of it last year, but I am also reading some examples of second year reports, so I know more about what I need to have ready shortly after Christmas. Last year was a nightmare; I would complete one aspect only to be told about another hurdle to jump. I did wonder at what point I had missed the memo that set out what I was trying to achieve. I am not suggesting that I needed to be told *what* to write, but I had no guidance at all about the format the report should take and it was incredibly frustrating to have successive drafts rejected for not meeting this unspecified standard.

Oh, and I renewed my library books just before they were due back. A minor triumph!

The PhD project has proceeded only slightly faster than this blog has been updated…

I am currently in a period of suspension, due to resume on 1 November. There are all sorts of reasons why this has been a good idea, too numerous and dull to record here. In the time between now and November, I will be working on a number of admin and housekeeping things, as well as keeping the research and my motivation ticking over. On my to-do list is:

- write up my attendance at the SLA conference for the PGR requirement and other activities

- Overhaul my refworks collection, publication alerts and other current awareness sources – I seem to have duplicates and a proliferation of ‘useful’ Web 2.0 tools like Delicious and Cite-U-Like

- develop further the headings and what I want to say under each for the 2nd year report but not actually do any of the writing – I will note where I am in the reading, what I will probably need to read again in November – just to make enough notes so I don’t lose the trains of thought completely.

- determine how the content analysis sample will be taken – where will I get the lists of churches from which I want to take my sample?

- plan a timeline for November to Feb

So, where were we? Oh yes. .. PhD in progress. It is, at least, still in progress. I passed my first year viva in November last year, and am currently working on two aspects of the research. My first year report is here.

1. Longitudinal sample

The very nice man at findachurch.co.uk gave me a method by which I can use the database to assemble a random sample. I am collecting 100 each of Anglican, Catholic, Methodist and Baptist churches across England. I will track these churches at regular intervals over the next couple of years to see if the presence or absence of websites changes.

2. Content analysis

The major meat of the project is the content analysis of websites. What are churches saying about themselves and their faith? And are they doing it nicely? So I have been pulling together the kinds of elements considered by other research, and a few ideas of my own, to create my content analysis tool.

I’m also carrying a couple of articles and a text book on research methodology around with me, with the intention to start the justification for why I think CA is the best tool for the project. But sadly I keep falling asleep on the train home and not reading them.

I seem to only be posting here either just after or just prior to a supervision meeting. I wonder if this suggests what my motivations are…

My next trip to Loughborough is on 30 September and I need to be sending a first draft of my first year report in a week ahead of that. So that would be in roughly two weeks’ time. It’s not that I can’t write 5,000 words in two weeks, I have no fear of that. I just can’t necessarily write 5,000 good or coherent or useful words in that time. My time off in July bombed, for various reasons, some better than others. I’ve not really read very much lately; and not really with a good excuse other than tiredness.

So I’ve spent a wet weekend catching up on what I needed to read; and variously moving papers between themed piles in order to generate the review headings I probably ought to have finalised in June. Actually it’s been better than I had hoped, once I convinced myself out of a slight panic yesterday when feeling I had to write it all by COB Saturday 6th!

This, in effect, is as much as I had to say to my supervisors in a telephone conference last Wednesday. I was jolly glad I didn’t travel all the way to Loughborough for a 25 min meeting where I was gently chastised and told to get on with it.

The daft thing is that I had done, and blogged, some of the thinking needed (see the previous post to this one); but in the busyness of Everything Else that’s happening, I had totally forgotten I’d posted this stuff.

If that’s not a salutory lesson, I don’t know what is.

It seems today that my mental machinery is working fairly well and I have for the first time come up with a good and clear statement of aims for the project which I have recorded under the ‘Project aims – July 2008′ page.

It’s a rainy holiday Monday and therefore a perfect day to be at home reading through the articles I have located.

My work in the last few weeks has focused on some of the administrative tasks I need to perform. I’d be interested in understanding how a full time student’s time might be broken down into admin/ teaching/ research over the course of their three years.

I had 48 hours as a student in Loughborough a couple of weeks ago. I attended a training course on ‘What is a literature review?’ which when I booked it, in February, I thought would be a box-ticking exercise as I’d have written most of the review by then. That turned out to be a wildly optimistic thought and so the course was a very helpful way of thinking about the approach I could take. I also went to a compulsory induction day; again, I thought this would be mostly irrelevant but it did help to clarify some of the administrative hoops I have to jump through.

Since then I have been reading; thinking about my research questions and trying to formulate them clearly; also drafting a second and better set of headings for the literature review. Here’s where I am at so far:

Review headings

How do Churches make use of internet technology to inform and for communication?
Enthusiasm – collection of quotes saying how marvellous the internet is.

1. Religion online
a) Definitions and discussions

b) Feasibility

c) Christianity and other religions

2. Replicating church online

a) Major projects

b) Rituals online

3. Churches using the internet

a) What are they using it for?

b) How and why?

b) Christianity and other religions

Research questions, aims and objectives

Research questions

1. To what extent do churches see themselves in a role as online information providers? What kind of information is being published and why?
2. To what extent are churches engaging with the internet and new media channels of communication?
3. To what extent are UK-based internet users connecting online for religious purposes? Are existing communities being enhanced, new ones established or is there a mixture of both?
4. To what extent is the internet, with its perceived lack of boundaries and unregulated content seen as an appropriate medium of communication by the established Church?

Aims and objectives

• Evaluate the content, currency, and prevalence of UK church websites:

Investigate and assess existing methodologies for evaluation
Assess and develop content analysis framework

• Assess the Church’s attitude towards the internet; its facilitation or otherwise of Web 2.0 initiatives and authority views on these initiatives.

Investigate online community participation in the UK, establish baselines for the level of interaction and compare and contrast this with faith-based communities.

This morning at 11am (after having catalogued church library books for 90min) I started a simple job.

1. Add some notes to selected references in refworks
2. Export the file
3. Use the data for a mail merge to make a sheet for extracting data to.

30min tops. 40min if I faff with the mail merge.

FOUR HOURS LATER… I am just finished.