Right the week after I wrote was quite exhausting, not only was I only semi-fit, no cold symptoms but I tired easily, but there was a Data Curation Roadshow I was attending for two days with work. Having two full days when I was dealing with people (largely strangers) continually for four to five hours was exhausting. The topic was interesting and I am fully aware of the gap between what does happen and what ideally should happen. At the moment if you are fortunate then if you want the data behind a paper, the researcher has it on a disk which they can unearth. If you are unlucky then they have long ago chucked out the scrap of paper which the original data was on after all they had gained the publication. This is true except for a few high profile disciplines and some very large studies where the data is fully documented and stored on secure maintained fileservers. What we need to do is move to a method of automatic archiving of data with regular reviews but that will cost a huge amount and nobody has yet found a funding model by which it raises money. Also once the research is complete a researcher often looses interest in the data set, also many researchers don’t feel they have data, they just have video recording and pictures and such.
In the middle of attending this course I also had an interview for my PhD. It was with a couple about my age and their son aged about my nephews age. This is the second time a child of that age has been interviewed but both times parents were present. Often when I am dealing with people who are younger members they are less what my supervisor calls insiders than older members, now this couple were as much insiders as me. The boy Luke lasted all of twenty minutes and then went back to playing with his Xbox. At the end of the time they asked whether I had anything to input about the mission of the church. This was because they had an elders retreat day this weekend that was looking at the mission of the congregation particularly with respect to the children’s work. The problem is not shortage of children, they have around 100 children on the books at present, but shortage of leaders. Well I stalled, not because I had nothing but I have a huge amount and it is still at a fairly unprocessed state. Anyway of the following two nights I wrote up both the interview and but a short paper together and emailed it to both them and the minister. It was pretty much thrown together, however it had the core of what I wanted to say to the church. I suspected that the minister would want to get back, but although I made it clear I was ready to talk, she didn’t. We will see how it develops.
Over the weekend I was writing, it was interesting to do, the time I had and the word space meant that I could not do justice to my sources. The piece therefore I feel is sketchy, I have more to do and this is only my first real attempt to write something about Reformed tradition as central to my PhD rather than as something that runs alongside it. It is surprisingly different how I can think when addressing this issue. It is as if the sociologist becomes dominant rather than the person who does organisational studies, I suspect that actually by looking at it, I distance myself from some of the Reformed character in me, who actually feels rather at home in organisational studies, this is the stuff we handle rather well. Sometimes I suspect we are too good at organisation and could do with a bit more chaos. I also conducted a second interview on the Sunday this time with someone who was very new to church (yes all church) having only been attending Herringthorpe for three years and before that churches were places for hatching, matching and dispatching but she had married into a Christian family and when her husband had wanted to return to church she had ended up going with him to Herringthorpe. I am however rather relieved to find Philip Benedict has written “Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social history of Calvinism” which covers upto about 1700, it means a different perspective at least on the early stuff and the last section is titled “New Calvinist Men and Women” and I suspect it will be useful.
This week was quieter in work which in someways was good. I managed to get the papers off to my supervisor although I am now seeing him on Wednesday next week instead of Thursday. I suspect that he did not realise Thursday was St Patricks day as his excuse is that he had to be in Liverpool on it. That would fit with his current research topic, he did Chinese New Year in London last year, I did a quick google for a related paper but can’t find any. It may be a totally different situation. I also found the week slightly confusing as I took Tuesday as my day off to finish my essay as I had so much on, on Monday.
On Friday evening I went to James and Jean Dickson for the evening. They seem to be keeping up pretty well given that James is 80. I had spotted that the building that has my office in has a map of the area before St Andrews was built with lots and lots of wells marked, as these wells do not seem to be attached to particular property I suspect they mark the site of springs coming to the surface. I mentioned this to James and he wants to take a photograph of this map. We shall see if this is possible on Tuesday.
This weekend I have been over to my parents, on Saturday we had lunch with Ruth she seemed to be in good form. She cooked a meal that suited us all very well including fruit salad. Although some restraint was practised over the delicious first course none was practised with the fruit salad. The only snag was my parents had decided that as I was over it was chance to eat lots of nice food, so they had salmon for supper as well. I spent quite a bit of time making sure Dad’s computer was virus free, except I suspect it was never infected but his mechanices account had been compromised and someone was spoofing emails using my fathers email address which they had got from his account. Today I ended up entertaining my parents by reading postings Crappy Choruses and Horrible Hymns thread on Ship of Fools which had them giggling. Some of the pieces really demonstrate what can go wrong while composing pleasant dittys to the Lord. I went back
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