Chattering from a quiet weekend which was necessary after a busy week

Lets see about news at this end. Well last Monday was going to be one of those busy days that was not too hectic. I was helping someone from Linguistics about logistic regression and giving them general advice, in the end I suggested they gave a different statistic completely as that would make sense to the reader while the complex mathematical ones that used analogies from other statistical methodologies were most likely to confuse. Linguists are rather specialised in their approach to statistics, they tend to work with counts and the statistic they use are therefore specialised. This is not a problem for someone like me who has dealt with them on and off for over a decade, but it is a problem for those who are used to techniques that use other measurement techniques. There are not many subjects where it is more important to learn logistic regression and modelling of count data before you learn normal regression. On the afternoon I had Simon but only Simon so I could cope. I did not have writers group on the evening as it was half term but that was good as I had a supervision on the Tuesday.

However when I got home at lunch time and checked my personal email, there was an email from the Department of Theology and Religion at Birmingham telling of the postgraduate conference held by Society for the Study of Theology(SST). Now to get this in context, my doctorate is officially a in Theology (the Department of Theology and Religion, which is where my supervisor is based, offers a variety of subjects to be studied at doctoral level but not Congregational Studies so I ended up with the generic one). However as my training and my supervisors predilections tend more towards sociology of Religion, I normally follow the organisations associated with this. However I glanced at it as I do all emails from the department and stopped short. STT was holding a postgraduate conference and the title was “THEOLOGIANS AND THE CHURCH “. Well that picks up a major strand of my thought, how do congregations interact with tradition and with being Reformed that has to include theology.  Then I look at the date (5th and 6th December) and the closing date for enrolment and submission of abstracts (31st October) gulp! Do I really have the energy to turn things around in that short time. Anyhow I fire the email off to my supervisor and by the end of lunch time I know that his reading of the situation is exactly the same as mine.

Tuesday dawns and it is supervision day. It is one of those days when I felt like I was running on caffeine. I got to the station and there was a broken down train on the East Coast main line so all the trains from up North to Birmingham were delayed. Indeed the train before mine left in my train’s slot. This makes it easier to get through to Birmingham than going between slots as they just take the signals for the next train but it means from then on they have the wrong trains coming into Birmingham as the Reading alternates with a Plymouth train. Anyway I hung on for my train expecting that the train beforehand would be crowded (late trains nearly always are) and I had a booked seat on my train. Indeed mine was running even later. The Edgebaston campus was positively thronging with students who had started to soak in, so the computers were all busy in the main student common room in the arts Tower. I know somewhere in there there are Postgrad and staff rooms but I have never found them and I normally manage to find a networked computer when I want it. I also know there are other rooms at the ERI building for me to use when I am on campus but it is quite a walk and I have never been there.

By the time I saw my supervisor on the afternoon my brain had got working and decided that I may as well give a go at getting a paper ready, there was the think piece on hymns and theology or I could do something on the congregation’s engagement with theology. In the end I think I managed to have together a rough outline in my head of a possible paper that draws on both to make the argument that actually a lot of the congregations theological experience is channelled through worship and therefore when theology comes up in a congregation within the URC it is often related to worship.  In doing this I think I am able from my placements that the congregations relative silence around theology does not include debate about worship and that the demotic code that is used as a method of negotiating theological ideas without entering into debate draws highly upon the congregations worshipping experience. The paper is more complicated than that but that does as a fair summary.

Then on Wednesday it was back to work and I saw Margo and Toni. Toni is working on a content analysis of men’s magazines and it is slowly, slowly coming together. It relies on me being half a step ahead of them. So far I have managed it. On the afternoon I spent some time looking at NVivo on the managed service. Unfortunately it failed at the first hurdle, being able to get a NVivo data set that had been created elsewhere into the database. Oops. Anyway as when I went to the help files they clearly thought you should be able to, I suspect it would be easy to fix although there may need to be some trickery done.

Thursday was another work day, tackling a couple of consultations and other queries as well. Bob the information officer for the department is wanting to write something about what I do so I got a phone call for him and I also needed to tidy up for the week as I was due to go to an ASSESS conference the next day. I am getting more and more ambivalent about ASSESS, it is fairly useful as it gives me some insight into what IBM SPSS are planning but that information has got less and less over the years. When it was at St Williams college in York it was quite an event to go to despite the cold, but the Alcuin Centre in my experience is as cold and not as atmospheric. On the evening I sent off an email booking on the SST conference and packed my bag for the next day.

However middle of Thursday I night I woke and realised I am shivering although I am not cold. I mean shivering as well not shaking, I actually have a mild shake most of the time and when stressed it can become clearly visible, however I have never known my teeth chatter during it.. This was teeth chattering shivering. From past experience this normally means I have been running on slightly raised stress level for too long. The only thing I really know that helps it is slowing down and taking things easy. Ok so the logical thing was not to go to ASSESS. Not really a great loss from my perspective but still not something I liked doing. I needed to spend the day quietly. Well maybe it was fortuitous as there was a crisis over heating at the Breakfast and I got a phone call at 7:30 a.m. from Sarah saying could I come and look. So I did and then came back home, ate something and contacted work to say I would not be in before going back to bed and sleeping to around 1:30 p.m. by which time the shivers had finally departed. So I got up and eventually persuaded myself to do some reading. Oh I also managed to fill in the form for SST and find a B&B in central Edinburgh that had decent reports and was not too expensive.

Saturday I decided also should be a largely in day, I had a Tescos order coming and I needed it for writing up the words I had written in the week; it is on my blog  if you want to know how that went. Anyway the actual difficult task is the entry into the computer. I am often reading ahead rephrasing, checking references and so on while I type it in. It may have taken me only 2.5 hours to write initially but the putting it into the computer can well take over eight and I type faster than I write. Anyway I am 10% of the way through now and also about a week ahead of where I want to be word wise, so I am using next weeks writing time to draft the paper for the conference.

Today I spent most of the time writing an abstract for the conference paper. It is only 250 words long but it took me several hours to write. The problem is that normally I have had more time to think myself clear. There are a couple of things I would like to sort out and I was having to decide which to include in the paper and which to leave to later. I was worried that I would write seriously over the limit but as it was I was so cautious I had difficulty in writing 200 words (the limit was 250). It will be interesting to see if I can produce a 20 minute paper. I am still trying to think of which technology to actually type it in (Word or Powerpoint). I suspect I will go with Word but start thinking of doing the slides right from the start.