Tabula rasa

That picture is my PhD so far. Well, of course there's more, but that is where the writing-up process starts. I got this flipchart yesterday. I was looking for a proper flipchart on a tripod, but Staples only had them in two sizes, 'massive' and 'huge', and since my room doesn't get along well with things of either description, I decided to go for a lighter model. These are essentially A2-sized post-it notes, with the sticky strip on one edge, so when you tear it out of the pad, you can easilly stick it up on the wall .

I need to visualise things. My PhD has theoretical luggage from many different fields of research, and binding them together to a coherent package is going to be a challenge. At the moment, I mostly have these "clouds" in my head, shapeless blobs of ideas that "I must discuss in the thesis". I need to link them together to a readable story. When I was drafting my research proposal in the first year, I had a similar feeling, where everything just about started to make sense, and everything seemed connected, if only I could know how... So I decided to do a mindmap. After having mapped about 1/3 of the things I had first listed, everything was clear enough for me to start writing. I'm hoping this would happen again. Of course, now my problem is a bit different; I understand the connections, but actually need to focus only on some of them to have a good structure rather than bouncing from a topic to another.

Today I will go and buy felt tip pens that I can use with the chart. Ahh, I'm making so much progress so fast... :-)