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.