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Sep. 23rd, 2003 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksI have met with my thesis advisor to work out the kinks in my proposal, and now I have structure! Yay! She helped me figure out and cast into standard academic language the exact project I had been intending to do when I conceived the whole mess, and hadn't been able to correctly express. So now I have it to the point where I could outline. Have mentally outlined. Am delighted with. It's an insane thing. I am out of my mind to enjoy the prospect of working on it so much.
It just goes to show, you can take the girl out of the Catholic school, and you can even take the Catholic school out of the girl, but it keeps showing up in odd little echoes and quirks of interest, since, in defiance of all likelihood, I am writing my thesis on the Vatican City.
To be specific, I am making a visual comparison, using original maps and composites I will make myself ('Have you taken architectural drawing?' 'No.''Well, you can pick it up as you go; buy a scale rule.''Right'.) between the changes, additions and restructurings made by the Popes on the Vatican palace and environs from the time of their move from the Lateran palace, c. 1300, to the time when the buildings had assumed approximately their present form, c. 1600, and the changes, additions, and restructurings the Popes ordered made in the larger City of Rome during the same period. Ideological, scalar, and effectual analysis. At least one composite map of each per twenty years.
I think it's going to say some really, really interesting things about religious power, architecture, and the structure of cities, and what has me salivating over it is that *nobody has ever done this before in any way*. My first original research, baby. Mine. My work, my idea, my justifications, my evidence, my job to call in every single academic connection I have ever made to anyone who might know something, my job to make sure I include every significant source and don't leave out huge chunks of data. Mine to conceive, mine to fuck up (*crosses fingers*), mine to leave behind after this semester or run with later for a dissertation or a book. 'Cause there aren't any books. Or dissertations, for that matter.
And this has relevance, it really does, to lots of debates going on in the worlds of architecture and city planning today, to the ongoing human discussion about the ways power should work and the ways buildings can influence people.
*Relevant original research as an undergraduate*. At the moment, I think those are the most beautiful, mocking, terrifying, interesting, and downright aphrodisiac words I have encountered in a hell of a long time.
This while writing a novel. Holy gods preserve me.
It just goes to show, you can take the girl out of the Catholic school, and you can even take the Catholic school out of the girl, but it keeps showing up in odd little echoes and quirks of interest, since, in defiance of all likelihood, I am writing my thesis on the Vatican City.
To be specific, I am making a visual comparison, using original maps and composites I will make myself ('Have you taken architectural drawing?' 'No.''Well, you can pick it up as you go; buy a scale rule.''Right'.) between the changes, additions and restructurings made by the Popes on the Vatican palace and environs from the time of their move from the Lateran palace, c. 1300, to the time when the buildings had assumed approximately their present form, c. 1600, and the changes, additions, and restructurings the Popes ordered made in the larger City of Rome during the same period. Ideological, scalar, and effectual analysis. At least one composite map of each per twenty years.
I think it's going to say some really, really interesting things about religious power, architecture, and the structure of cities, and what has me salivating over it is that *nobody has ever done this before in any way*. My first original research, baby. Mine. My work, my idea, my justifications, my evidence, my job to call in every single academic connection I have ever made to anyone who might know something, my job to make sure I include every significant source and don't leave out huge chunks of data. Mine to conceive, mine to fuck up (*crosses fingers*), mine to leave behind after this semester or run with later for a dissertation or a book. 'Cause there aren't any books. Or dissertations, for that matter.
And this has relevance, it really does, to lots of debates going on in the worlds of architecture and city planning today, to the ongoing human discussion about the ways power should work and the ways buildings can influence people.
*Relevant original research as an undergraduate*. At the moment, I think those are the most beautiful, mocking, terrifying, interesting, and downright aphrodisiac words I have encountered in a hell of a long time.
This while writing a novel. Holy gods preserve me.
