Summer research break

Oohh, just realized I have not blogged for a while! But I have good reasons (or excuses?) for it.

Spent all August writing a 10.000 words doc to sum up the outcomes of my 1st year research. It was really interesting to go back and revise all the material collected. Did not realize I had SO much references! At that point, I was so grateful to all those people (Steve in particular, big thank you) who recommended to use a reference manager at the beginning of my PhD (and thank you to Cristiano for setting it up). Although writing that paper was an unbelievably painful process, pulling material/thoughts together was extremely useful to recap where I was and figure out which direction I wanted my project to take.

I also made use of August to start learning some paleography basics. As I am soon going to do some Vespucci document hunting in archives, I thought it was about time to engage with fifteenth century documents and get use to the language and the writing stlyle. As soon as I started I felt the need of crying! Things are slowly getting better now although I am still far from reading an entire document by myself. My supervisor Jill Burke gave me tips and support and it was really helpful (and less depressing) to get through that material with someone who knows her stuff.  After all that hard work I treated myself to two weeks holiday in lovely Malta, so good to escape Edinburgh rain & wind (and insane festival tourists!).

Here I am now, ready to give a 30mins presentation on Wed 21st at uni for my 1st year PhD Review. I will go back to my research after that and start from where I left. Lots of exciting news and trips coming up in Autumn/Winter time, will soon blog about them all.

If you can, keep your fingers crossed on Wed :)