Week 43
Intro
I spent the full week in Rome this week, working from the beautiful Bibliotheca Hertziana. Mostly I was writing—rethinking my dissertation, preparing talks for the coming weeks, and getting job materials in order—but I managed a little further hacking by way of this writing, too. If you get the opportunity to spend some time at the Hertziana, I highly recommend it! The coffee is… below average (after a few days I caved and brought in my own beans, grinder, and Aeropress), but the buildings are magnificent, and the administration smooth and impressively functional (it’s in Italy, but “Max Planck” means it’s a German institution). Minus the catastrophic coffee, the conference catering is also quite good, especially the plates of dolce that tend to be provided after the main course. La dolce vita.
Dissertation
I fully reworked my dissertation introduction as a proxy to renovating the fundamental structure of my dissertation, which I wrote about last week. Though I had written various parts of this introduction already, now that they’ve been recombined they come in at a healthy 8465 words, which feels a good length for the bare bones of an introduction.11 A typical dissertation chapter in my field falls somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 words. The draft of one of my chapters, for example, is currently 20,066 words. Though I am sympathetic to the idea that one should write the introduction to a book/dissertation last and not first, I have found that I can’t really get any of the middle content off the ground unless I have a solid handle on at least the projected structure of the whole; which in practice means that I am constantly rewriting my dissertation’s introduction as the blueprint for the chapters that will follow. I am presenting an overview of my dissertation this week in an hour slot in the MVC weekly seminar, so I doubled back towards the end of the week and stripped it down into a twenty minute presentation (with slides furnished and inserted in the source as a rookery slipshow), an exercise that will lead to a little further rewriting this coming week, I think.
Alongside this dissertation drafting, I also wrote a full research statement and cover letter draft for an upcoming job application. Against my better judgment, I did some of this drafting at 3.30AM in the morning, as I woke up at that time with the ideas running amok, flooding over from my dreams into waking life. I also started drafting a talk on Marx’s mathematical manuscripts for an upcoming panel with Amira Moedling and Felicia Jing titled “The Critique of Computer Science” at the London Historical Materialism conference.
Footnotes
- ^ A typical dissertation chapter in my field falls somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 words. The draft of one of my chapters, for example, is currently 20,066 words.
Rookery
In the course of preparing presentations and my dissertation, I made some improvements to how slipshows and pinboards interact in rookery. Each chapter of my dissertation now has an entrypoint page showing a pinboard of the sections contained within it, the total word count across all sections, as well as block links to the slides and script version:
Clicking through to the slides shows a dark mode slipshow of the ideas interspersed as #slips in the writing. Following the pattern I first set up in the Rheo slides package, the PDF script that is produced then has markers indicating where to hit next slide.11 I want to move more towards memorizing talks, but it is hard for me to give up the precision of the sentences that I spend so much time refining: and at the same time, I am not yet sure enough of the sentences that it makes sense to fully memorize them. Here are the opening slips of my introduction’s presentation:
Footnotes
- ^ I want to move more towards memorizing talks, but it is hard for me to give up the precision of the sentences that I spend so much time refining: and at the same time, I am not yet sure enough of the sentences that it makes sense to fully memorize them.
Rheo
I coded some further optimizations to ligaments, so that reloads of my mainline rookery (which is now >2200 pages) are slightly snappier (as short as 2-3 seconds for some changes). But I still need to sit down and really think through the incremental reload story, as recompiling large rookeries is likely to be my most common use of Rheo going forward. This could be a place where Rheo really outshines native Typst, for example, as the latter is not optimized for recompilation of fragments littered across a repository which are synthesized into a single Typst compilation context as they are being incrementally developed.
et alia.
I am happy to say that I have found a decent local in San Lorenzo in Artisan beer bar. Up until this point I have really only had Ma che siete venuti a fà in Trastevere on my radar, which is about an hour’s walk from San Lorenzo, and so not really practicable for a relaxed drink after work. Artisan seems to stock mostly local craft beers, though unfortunately no imperial stouts on tap that I’ve seen yet, so it’s a good way to get a taste of the town.