PhD sketchbooks: SBG (23/10/22 - 30/12/22) and SBH (1/1/23 - ongoing)

I made both of these books! (Timelapse video of both of them here!)

The cover of Small Book G (23/10/22 - 30/12/22) is a test sheet from (U)KA that I coloured on the other side using alcohol-based markers, so they bled through the paper and made strange indistinct shapes. Most of its contents relate to the thesis in some way.

Right: thinking about naming conventions for characters based on people in the past (referring to the actual individuals by their full name and surname, such as Charles Mackay or just Mackay, and referring to characters by first name, such as Charley); also some kind of diagram about connections with other works (which didn't make it into the thesis). (The (U)KA fragment in the middle is because I broke the book trying to open it for the first time, so I glued that in to fix it. Swipe through these to see the break.)

Left: woe and misery, thesis-flavoured. Right: thinking about image list for the end of the thesis.

Key words and such. THESIS THESIS THESIS I CAN THINK OF VERY LITTLE ELSE

Corralling themes in my thesis. I spent ages dealing with themes, rearranging bits, rearranging whole chapters, hunting for themes and trying different arrangements, over and over and over and over

Left: ideas I had while doing the above list. Right: realised I had a problem with some apparent binaries in character design, such as Ann/Beauty and Charley/Sublime (see SBA for earlier work on that) so I will be trying to fix this using multiplicity - further experimentation will hopefully result in other ways of sorting it out

Some of the people in (U)KA have scandals. And that's only the ones we know about!

Left: different Williams in Yorkshire schools historiography. Right: another possible problem with making characters based on real individuals - what would the subjects themselves think? (This comic ended up in the thesis)

Trying to use grids in thesis layout, thanks to my excellent supervisor KP for the idea

Doing a thesis like mine - you're not just typing things into a word processor and wrangling footnotes, you've got to work out how the images and the writing work together, playing with page layouts, working out how to use the programme (I use Affinity Publisher 2 which I had no previous experience with) - it's very involved and I hope the final outcome is worth it

Working out one of my chapter themes. I don't know how many different versions, different potential chapters, etc., my thesis has had - it kept evolving - but then I suppose that's the nature of this sort of thing?

Silly idea about using Major Arcana Tarot cards/ the fool's journey as a template for constructing a thesis with a linear narrative. Which I abandoned because it was amusing but would be a total headache to put together, and I was already considering thematic chapters (which makes a lot more sense) but potential fun and games for some postdoctoral project perhaps

More blasted themes. Sketchbooks are a place to work out problems, line things up, think on the page, etc.

Going over different sections of the thesis and trying to come up with drawings that I might need to make. Also some comparison of how I was at the start of the PhD (I had very restrictive ideas about what you could do as a historian, and then the History department at UoG introduced me to the joys of theory and an entire universe of fun) compared to now.

I got into the habit of making a new plan every week for what I was going to do that week on the thesis. I also make it lift books to make it stronger.

SBH (1/1/23 - ongoing) has a similar cover, but made from a print-out of William's card of terms from c.1831. This is also mostly thesis-flavoured. 

Left: I was unwell with a not-quite-cold and saw William in the bathroom mirror again (it happened a lot when I was recovering from my appendectomy, which was hilarious). Right: another thesis plan.

Went through my sketchbooks and made lists of all the most relevant drawings for my thematic chapters. 

Weird nocturnal incidents, notes on things I was reading, plans, and diagrams (which became the triangle diagram as seen in IBP, which ended up in the thesis)

Plans and ideas for bits that I thought needed turning into comics

There's a lot of spreads that look like this in this sketchbook - over twenty pages in total. Part of my strategy for dealing with doing a thesis: breaking work sessions into half-hour chunks, and meticulously keeping track of every change I made on the document. 

Left: silly two-panel comic done while listening to Teya & Salena's 2023 Eurovision hit Who The Hell Is Edgar? which made me wonder how William might have drawn, but there's no time left for any of that sort of thing (my deadline is at the end of September) but the word 'postdoctoral' is marching towards this conversation - but, through drawing that, I had some entertaining realisations about how I characterise William. Right: poses that I'd already used in thesis drawings

I think that might be it for PhD sketchbooks. There's still a few pages left in SBH for any last-minute things, but yeah, that looks like the end of that... To relive the ordeal, go back to the sketchbook index for more.