elanya

This is purely an academic ramble, so if you aren't interested in my degree plans, don't pay attention :) Also, this is mostly so that I can remember all of these conversations at the end of the term, or next year, or whenever they start to become more pertinent.

I have just come from talking to Dr. Ewen. He had a lot of helpful things to say, and is not the person I ran into in the litteral sense. A lot of profs seem quite pleased I am actually thinking about my thesis already, even though it seems like every 5 minutes someone else is telling me that I should be. Maybe they just don't expect students to take that advice seriously. However, I am seeing too many people who have been in this program longer than they have to be, and I don't want to be one of them. I think it also helps that when I was at Sheffield, we didn't have a choice about figuring out what we wanted to do - partly because the program was shorter. Still, by the end of the first semester we had to have a topic, and before the end of the second, to give a presentation on it. A presentation that I totally kicked the ass of, I might add.

Now, on to my thesis thoughts so far. I am not at a level where I can really traipse off to do my own fieldwork in some exotic locale. Also, there has not been a lot of pirate archaeology done on land. These are two little setbacks. There has been some, however, and also some archaeology of pirate ships, that I can work with. There is a question of finding a way to identify a pirate site, or evidence of piratical activity at a site. Nothing has really been done with this yet, but there may be enough material that I can be the person to do it. This would be analytical: I would be looking for patterns in the material from sites that *have* been excavated. One of the things I talked about with Dr. E. is that more pirate sites are known from the historical record, and identified that way. For my purposes, it means two things. It means that if I do something along these lines, I might be able to write something that will help people identify sites *without* documents, or that might lead them to think about checking in the documentary record for evidence of pirate activities where they have been digging. The other more *exciting* thing it means is that if I can find a potential local site to dig at, I might be able to do field work. How cool would *that* be!

This ties in to my discussion yesterday with Dr. Swanson. I want to do something about contemporary attitudes to piracy and the law for my final paper for him, and he gave me information about what kinds of resources are here in the library for that kind of thing. This includes all kinds of exciting historical stuff on microfiche. Apparently, there was this guy who thought it would be cool to create a record of everything publised in America, ever, up to about 17 or 18 something, and then some publisher thought they should collect it all, so it is all here in the library on microfiche. Again, how cool is *that*! Checking my notes, 'that guy' is Charles Evans, his compilation is the Evans Bibliography, and the is called something along the lines of 'Early American Imprints'. Dr. Swanson didn't know off the top of his head, but assured me the librarians would be able to help me if I found the right ones to ask. The library here is sneaky like that. It has a lot of students working there who are clueless... but the actual trained librarians are realy competent and helpful.

So, I have a lot to work with, and a lot of work to do. In order to get started on it, what I now need to do is get off my butt and go over and start doing some readings from the reserve desk for next week's class before the library closes at 5.

Eee!