Build up to viva

It seems important to take a step back before preparing for the viva. I need to think about the PhD in terms of being a piece of work, however during its creation there were pragmatic issues to be considered. So I have now about a month before I defend the thesis, and it has taken about a month from handing in to being able to face reading it again.

I am going to create a journal paper of about 20 pages from the 250+ pages of the thesis, this will require some distillation. That is not a problem however as some of the less central parts were published before the PhD anyway. These can be referenced reducing the writing needed. Still 266 >> 20 pages is quite a compression rate.

I am also hoping to write the long sidelined paper on ambiguity in gazetteers. The main co-author asked at a conference whether I had lost interest in it. This is not really the case, but with writing the thesis I certainly lost focus. Anyway it was looking interesting, so hopefully we can revive it and turn our interesting graphs into something more meaningful.