My nemesis Patrick Tomlin (or he who writes in the column I would really like to occupy) over at Guardian Education, has come up with a "survival guide" for new PhD students. Not to be outdone (and from the superior position of my third year to his second), I have produced my own version of distilled wisdom:


1. Tomlin's number five on the list is my number one: try to treat a PhD as a job. Sure, no one will be looking over your shoulder or conducting a daily word count; yes, if you want to take an afternoon off to go shopping no one will stop you; certainly, that two week holiday in Brittany can be taken without any need to beg for time off.

However, it is precisely because of this that if you act as if you have all the freedom in the world, then you will find it difficult to do anything at all; a kind of intelletual agoraphobia sets in, whereby there seems so many limitless possibilities that it is safest just to do nothing. Instead, do something, rigorously. Turn on the computer at 9.00. Turn off the computer at 6.00 (if you happen to be nocturnal these times can refer to pm as well as am). Repeat for the equivalent of five days a week (take that afternoon off but go to a seminar at the weekend), for forty-five weeks of the year, for three years, and - regardless of how difficult the work seems, or how many bad days you have (see Number Five on this list) - you will get the job done, if not within three years then somewhere close.


2. A crucial ingredient in this recipe for success will be how you differentiate yourself from undergraduates. Sure, there will be many of the distractions of undergraduate life around you: a ready-made social scene, sports clubs, societies, and a flagrant disregard for deadlines. By all means go to the pub, play sports - indeed, make a point of doing these things (again, see Number Five). But remember that the classmates with whom you graduated could not be further from undergraduate life, since as you study they are probably being lashed under the slave-drivers who run graduate recruitment programmes for big corporations. Presumably, you did a PhD partly because you wanted to do something other than make money for other people. But that does not mean that you should feel free to stay in the student rut whilst others (taxpayers) are running out of breath around of you.


3. If all this sounds a bit like a lesson in dullness, however, realise that social life and work need not be mutually exclusive things. In my first year, I was a solipstic scholar reading books and emerging only to see my supervisor once a month. Having attended the UK Grad summer programme and all the team exercises on it, I realised that actually I really like working with other people, communicating with faces rather than staring at wordy pages. I now regularly go to three discussion groups and buzz round conferences, and work on collaborative projects. If to some extent you can combine socialising with an academic twist, then you really can have the best of both worlds, strike that work-life balance.

4. And it gets better (though possibly only for PhD students in the Arts and Humanities)! Rule number four is be omnivorous in order to become omniscient. If a PhD is in part preparation for the academic job market, you must discover and engage in all the activities – the seminars, the research institutes, the journal publications – that develop and produce the research that supports the meniscus of undergraduate teaching. You must become absorbed in your subject: devour the weekend book supplements in the newspapers or read the reviews sections of journals; go to discussion groups and attend seminar series; discover that a few notches down from Radio 1 is Radio 4, with all its first-class intellectual broadcasting.

And write on anything, whether a review of a book in a few paragraphs on a scrap of paper, or a full essay to be handed in, or indeed discover the benefits of blogging. One of the worst aspects of PhD research is that it can sometimes take months between the germination of an idea, the reading around it (which often leads down dead-ends anyway), and its manifestation in a solid, completed chapter. Weeks go by, and you feel that you have done or produced nothing. Writing regularly and engaging in the full range of research activities provides a vent for this frustration. Further, the more broadly you read and write, the more chance that you will hit upon an innovative idea, and take the unusual angles of approach that will distinguish your research from its predecessors, making it - that crucial requirement of a thesis - original.

But.

5. They say that only two things in life are guaranteed: death and taxes. Most PhD students being young, the former probably seems quite a long way off, whilst as students taxes are mystical demons we have heard of but never encountered in their scariest guise. But, lest we lack a grindstone that keeps us keen, a third thing is guaranteed for the PhD student: that there will be times when you will simply feel unable to work, and the guilt sets in.

Writing seems to be going badly, you cannot seem to get your head around a chapter, the tab bar on your web browser becomes cluttered with football stories and Facebook because you simply cannot concentrate on the task in hand. Everyone else seems to be getting on with productive study, and if you happen to live with people in gainful employment, then it seems all the worse that you have swivelled on your chair all day whilst they have been chained industriously to a desk between nine and five and come home relieved at the end of the day whilst you are only plunged deeper into self-pity.

Accept these times as inevitable, and learn to let them go. When they loom, walk in the countryside. Spend the afternoon taking photographs. Or go camping for three days. Or, if you do not share my tastes, choose your own favourite escape. And if you still feel down at the end of the week, go to the pub regardless and treat yourself to a pint. Sure, it tastes best if you know it signals the start of a weekend, a break from hard and productive work in the five days before. But if you don't make any distinction between play time and work time no matter how little you seem to have spent on the latter, you will risk becoming a melancholy loner, the archetype of the sick genius tormented by the great idea that always seems elusive. But writing and serious researching is hard; if it wasn't, there would be no need to do PhDs. It is precisely because it is tough that there will be bad days (or weeks, or months); these are sometimes a signal not that you are weak and inadequate to the task, but that the work you are doing is worthwhile and the end all the more significant.

Labels: phd survival guide, Postgraduate Diary

I've just been skimming through the Royal Society's 1985 report into the Public Understanding of Science. Just over twenty years since it was published, I have not got time to go through the detail with a fine-tooth comb and observe how many of its recommendations have been taken up. A couple of details I did pick up, however: the recommendation that all universities introduce some form of "general studies" to allow students to learn from experts from disciplines other than their main one; and the idea that all science PhDs should be required to produce a brief publicly accessible report into their research (such as a press release) as a requirement of graduating. Neither of these proposals have been taken up directly across Higher Education. However, the key buzzword of academia today is very definitely interdisciplinarity, bringing together ideas and academics from different departments (even different faculties); in relation to the second point, the UK Grad programme includes training on writing press releases and publicising research. Whether these are a result of the Royal Society's influence, I don't know, but I expect the report contributed towards the atmosphere of positive change.

As for the findings of the public understanding of science in relation to the media, the picture is more pessimistic. Take a look at these examples of Bad Science, and you will see that fundamentally things have not changed in two decades.

Labels: Public Understanding of Science, Royal Society, Science and Culture

I commented a couple of months ago about how Darwinian evolutionary theory is now so firmly entrenched in my mind that I cannot conceive of life working in any radically different way. However, that is not to say that my amazement at the natural world is in any way diminished (and, in large part, my photoblog is a celebration of the environment). Reading geneticist Mark Ridley's Mendel's Demon: Gene Justice and the Complexity of Life, I come across the following description of mitosis:

Eukaryotic cells have a distinct method of cellular reproduction. The genes and other cellular components first double up inside the cell. A special machinery of cables forms inside the cell, and they mechanically pull the two sets of genes into the two opposite halves of the parent cell. A membrane then forms between the two halves and division is complete. Such is the normal process of cell division, called mitosis, for instance in a growing plant or animal.

As a literary critic, I am aware that much of my seduction by this passage is triggered by Ridley's investment of agency in the cells, and his use of humanising metaphors: they "first double up"; "a special machinery forms"; "they mechanically pull." In fact, there is no such thing as "they" in a cell, which is simply a biological component, not a conscious or semi-conscious identity. It is only from the human perspective (and especially that of a popular science book) that it appears remarkable that cells pull sets of genes apart in a game of biotic tug-of-war from. From the gene's eye view of the world, though, there is nothing intentional or teleological about the act; it is an entirely mundane process that gets on with its cellular housekeeping while someone is eating, or opening a window, or just walking dully along (apologies to Auden).

Nevertheless, even when you escape from the framings and manipulations of text, there is something close to miraculous about watching this process - which happens billions of times a day, and has done so for billions of years - effortlessly in the action of creating life.

Labels: Mark Ridley, mitosis, Science and Culture

About a year ago, when I first got my Nikon D50, I promised to post a review once I had experienced using it. Well, so busy was I taking photos, that this has got put off until now. Having said that, I have realised there is not much point me posting a review, since others have got there before me and done so in more detail than I could hope to reproduce. Digital Photography Review have prodded, probed and tested the technical quality of the camera in their typically rigorous way, and the camera came out trumps. Nuff said.

So rather than a review, an unreview. Let's start with the premise that I, like most other people, love this camera. For my uses, it is nearly faultless. But not quite. In my unreview, then, here are the five things I dislike about the D50:

1. There is no LCD backlight. Although the eyepiece information gives shutter speed and aperture, it does not display ISO, metering pattern, or white balance setting. For complex night time shots (such as this one), a backlight on the top LCD display would be of great benefit.
2. Probably my most common error when using the camera is that I forget to change the ISO with each new shoot. If I go from shooting at night at 1600 to shooting during the day (which might require 200), I end up with noisy pictures in the latter. Of course, this is not so much a fault with the camera as with my bad practices: I need to get into the habit of resetting all my manual options every time I finish a shoot. Nevertheless, for an entry-level DSLR a warning in the viewfinder when the ISO is set too high would be a help. Additionally - though not necessarily a function you would expect from a camera in this price bracket - an ISO priority mode would not go amiss.
3. As far as the quality of the photographs goes, when shooting in RAW at low ISOs it's difficult to see how the quality might be improved (given that megapixels matter little when publishing photos primarily to the web, as I do). However, one consistent problem (and one that is by no means unique to the D50 or to Nikon's in general but is common across many cameras) is that the white balance can be off when under tricky lighting conditions, such as incandescent bulbs or scenes with a large bias to one colour. If shooting in RAW, this can usually be rectified; these shots of the cathedral, for example, were way off in the original and required post-processing to match the true colour of the stone. However, the photos I shot at my sister's graduation were more problematic. Here, the people were standing in the sunlight against a shaded green backdrop of shrubs and trees. Because of the green bias in the scene, the skin tones came out wrong and, skin being notoriously difficult to colour in any circumstances, trying to process these to match the tones on the portraits with the colour of the background proved very difficult. Of course I could/should have manually set the white balance for the skin tones beforehand, or used white balance bracketing. Nevertheless, for a casual user, such advanced features might be difficult to use, and you would rely instead on the automatic functions of the camera, which are not quite perfect and foolproof.
4. Another technical issue is not with the camera body, but with the standard kit lens, the 18-55mm DX. For my relatively undiscerning eyes, it is quite difficult to tell how the quality of the image with this lens might be improved: it is sharp at either end of the focal range, provides good colour rendition, and is relatively fast with its 3.5 aperture. The autofocus is relatively responsive. However, the manual focus is very slack. For macro work, if you need to focus manually and are pointing the camera down the focus ring will slide around. It lacks the solid feel of an older, heavier, manual lens, such as the Vivitar 210mm I have borrowed before.
5. Finally, as is the problem with all technological toys, I want more. An ISO that runs from 100 to 3200. Ten or more megapixels. A burst mode that runs to more than 4 shots when in RAW mode.
   

But is this lust enough to prompt me to upgrade? At some point in the future, and if I continue to enjoy my photography, then I would. As second-hand Nikon D80s or D1xs appear on Ebay, the temptation would probably be too great to resist. But I have no idea how much these cost at the moment, because I have not bothered to look. When I was deciding which camera to buy, I spent hours browsing the second-hand market and reading reviews. Apart from questing for a longer lens, I have not visited Ebay since I got the D50. This has to be a good sign.

So how, then, has my photography changed through the use of this camera? Oddly, in spite of all the high-tech wizardry, the feature that has made the greatest difference to my photography is also the most mundane component: the battery. With a battery life that runs to several thousand images, as opposed to less than 100 for my Coolpix 2100, I am able to pick up my camera bag and go without any preparation. I go to town, I take my bag. From my computer desk I see the evening light start to change, I grab the camera and run. Because I do not need to worry about whether the camera is ready or not (and when the battery does start to go the indicator gives you about 100 shots of leeway to get to a power point), I can shoot on impulse. Spontaneous images such as this sunset, or this frost, would not have been possible without having the camera always by my side.

And because of the fact that I now use the camera several times a week, familiarity has bred an understanding of shutter speeds, apertures, sensitivities, focal lengths and so on, understanding that I could not have gained with pleasure from a textbook, or without a great expense of film through a conventional SLR.

Of course, knowledge is worthless without its application, and the camera is the tool that gets done the job of what starts with the artistic, seeing eye. Are there images that I would not have shot before, because I had neither the experience gained from using a digital camera, nor the functions of an SLR as opposed to my previous compacts? Looking at the last 100 images that I have posted to The Pequod, the answer is a qualified "yes". Of these, about a quarter would have been impossible without advanced equipment, reliant as they are on my ability to control aperture or shutter speed. A further 25 or so were quite experimental shots, which I would probably not have expended film on. This leaves about half the photographs reliant not at all on the quality of the camera but the intrinsic quality of the original scene. But as I admitted in a post very early in my photographic career, great cameras play a minute, technical part in great photographs. Great photographers, on the other hand, always make great images. It's just that when the two work together, the results can be spectacular, and I have more confidence that one day I (though not a great photographer) will produce the idealised, unrealisable perfect shot with this camera, than with any other.

Labels: Nikon D50, Photography and Art

In Italo Calvino's famous meditation on the relationship between novelists and readers, If On a Winter's Night A Traveller, comes a warning about the fundamental trap of a literary research thesis:

A girl came to see me who is writing a thesis on my novels for a very important university seminar in literary studies. I see that my work serves her perfectly to demonstrate her theories, and this is certainly a positive fact - for the novels or for the theories, I do not know which. From her very detailed talk, I got the idea of a piece of work being seriously pursued, but my books seen through her eyes seem unrecognisable to me. I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them conscientiously, but I believe she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.

In science, you carefully choose the dataset on which you will run a test for a hypothesis, selecting a target which will provide results most efficiently and with the minimum of uncontrolled variables. But, ultimately, the dataset chosen by the scientist should be entirely irrelevant: the data must be independent of the conclusion if the scientific theory is valid. In the apocryphal story, Newton may have been standing under an apple tree when he reasoned the theory of gravity, but that theory applies equally whether the observational data is falling apples or dropped bombs. Were the theory to stop being applicable in a comparable situation - under a plum tree, for example - then the theory would have been falsified, such that we would need to recognise either that the theory must be fundamentally wrong, or that it requires modification in order that it apply (or appreciates why it cannot apply) equally for different varieties of fruit (or, more realistically, in the extreme conditions of entities such as black holes).

In literary study, however, the division between theory and data is less clear cut, as the Calvino passage makes clear in its parody. Currently researching some of Umberto Eco's semiotic theories, I notice that although deconstruction claims itself as a method applicable across all texts and language - since it places language as the very centre of our way of being in and knowing the world - most often the texts to which it is applied are always already open to deconstructive readings: works that are self-referential, embrace paradox rather than conclusiveness, are conscious of their being as texts. Thus Barthes examines some stories by Edgar Allan Poe, but not the editorial correspondence from the New England Magazine in which many of them were published.

And literary writers such as Italo Calvino (or A.S. Byatt, Umberto Eco, John Fowles), conscious of the ways in which the academy will appraise their texts, deliberately pre-empt and parody those modes of criticism. Thus texts such as If On a Winter's Night adopt what I call the critically sarcastic attitude. A Lotaria, or other academic reader, comes to the work from a pre-conceived theoretical angle, finds that the text deconstructs itself (or performs according to the predictions of some other theory), and thus the text can do nothing but applaud that critic ironically: "Well done," it says, "of course such and such a theoretically knowing symbol/structure/tone/philosophy etc. was there. I put it there. I knew you would come looking for it."

I am not a poststructuralist myself, though I am aware that I regularly (often subconsciously) dip into its toolbox in my analysis of texts, just as I do Marxism, psychoanalysis, historicism, or the close readings of new criticism. However, though I do not have a single preconceived critical angle, in my research I still risk falling into the Lotarian trap.

Without giving my game away too much (anonymity matters, as does the intellectual property of my original idea in my thesis), I am examining the use of a particular metaphor in literary fiction and science. Now hovering on the brink of its third year, my research is well-developed, most chapters are drafted or written, my ideas are well-honed and focused. Among other things, I am going to be looking at four novels and a couple of films which use my metaphor. However, to select these - effectively my dataset - I discarded tens of other novels which I read over the previous two years which did not happen to contain the image or symbol for which I was looking. It is therefore inevitable that I will give the impression that I "read them only to find in them what [I] was already convinced of before reading them." This is where Chapter One: The Introduction comes in, and I realise only now that in spite of it being only a small component, it is probably the most important single chapter of my thesis, since it is this that will make-or-break it in a viva.

If I fully admit the qualifications, and paradoxes of my research there, then what follows will stand or fall by the internal logic of the framework I publicly have set myself; I admit my theory works only within the orchard of texts in which I have chosen to wander. If I fail to recognise the inherent limits of my methods, however, then a single plum dropped by the examiner will falsify it, showing my data to rely wholly on my theory, rather than existing independently of it. The moral of my experience, and Calvino's story, and The Lotarian Trap, is that literary theory becomes a bad pseudoscience when it seems to explain both apples and plums.

Labels: If on A Winter's Night a Traveller, literary theory, Postgraduate Diary, Science and Culture

Johnathan Wolff has a very astute article about the innate dullness of much academic writing in the Education Guardian. In the midst of a PhD crisis at the moment deriving from precisely my feeling that a thesis should be engaging and interesting (perhaps even in the loosest sense "tell a story"), his article hits home. I will say more about how my writing is going when I am less fraught.

Labels: literary theory, Postgraduate Diary