Digging Into That First Paper
Nov. 15th, 2015 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogMy class tomorrow was cancelled (or more accurately, rescheduled into dinner this past Wednesday), so I don't have to leave the apartment tomorrow. I do have to get back to my daily four hours of RA research, and there are weekly class assignments I need to spend time on too. But it will be nice to have another day to work without being interrupted by going to campus for a three hour seminar. I'll probably take a quick trip to the drug store at some point though. I have a $10 gift certificate for having moved in (I'm not sure why it took so long to get here....) and it's for a drug store that I hadn't even known was nearby. It's near the grocery store at triple dollar corner, which actually has the family size vegetable lasagnas that Danae and I like. They're one of the few things that the grocery store I'm going to now doesn't have, so that's convenient.
Speaking of Danae, she's going to be flying in to the Syracuse airport on Wednesday! I lose track of time; I'd forgotten that until my dad mentioned it on Skype this weekend. I'm so very happy to be spending a week and a half with her! I'm also feeling a little nervous about getting around. She doesn't bike, and as I've thought more about her visit, I've realized that Syracuse doesn't seem to be the easiest place to get around without a car. A city or town can offer very different experiences depending on your mode of transportation. I'm going to further ponder the bus system map this week.
I want to write some more about my thoughts and feelings instead of all the daily-doings stuff I've been writing, but a lot of that is tied up in school. So, I'm going to post another Forevertron picture, and then write about my poli-sci paper work. Feel free to ignore that if it's uninteresting.
This is the wing of one of the many metal birds that stand in flocks around the Forevertron. There are a number of things I love about this. The way these blades have been repurposed into something as delicate as feathers; it has a swords-to-plowshares feel. The repeated shapes and lines draw me in too, as does the blue of the sky on bare metal juxtaposed with the browns and reds of rust (assisted a touch in my post-processing).
====
Other than going grocery shopping, I spent a lot of today trying to frame out my poli-sci term paper and looking for sources. I've never tried tor ead through the Congressional Record before, so some time went into figuring out how it's organized, what's in it, and what's not. Then I had to figure out just who governs the District of Columbia, anyway, since some of the discussion about traffic problems related to DC. (A congressional committee, more or less.) There seems to have been no coherent national traffic policy up through the Traffic and Motor Safety Bill of 1966, so I'm going to have to look at state and/or municipal level stuff.
It will be hard to get at behind the scenes details of lawmaking at that level. Most of those records are going to be undigitized, and either on microfilm in libraries, or in archives. But I do have access to a couple of historic newspaper databases that should help me get a picture of popular discourse around automobile vs. pedestrian rights. Writing about the social reconstruction of Japanese-Americans from a problem group to a model minority, Stephanie DiAlto describes three venues of action: policy, discourse, and the courts. I hope to use that framework to shape my paper, but policy and courts will be hard to get at directly. Peter Norton's Fighting Traffic gives me a lot of places to start, but he's also already covered some of this ground, which makes me nervous that I'll seem derivative or will rely on him too heavily in the absence of other sources.
I'll likely pick two cities whose newspapers are well represented in the databases I have access to (Chicago and New York City) and comb them for an idea of what was going on. Hopefully there will be some relevant documents in HathiTrust as well; there's all sorts of interesting stuff in there. But other political scientists writing in the field of social construction are citing varieties of sources that I won't be able to lay hands on and sort through in the time frame I have for this paper. So I feel like the whole thing will end up being a little half-assed, but I'll do my best with it.
And I still need to decide on what the heck I'm going to write about for my urban social justice paper! I'm thinking about looking at the construction of highways from the history-society-space perspective that Edward Soja advocated in Seeking Spatial Justice; that was the most influential book I read through that course. But oh, do I feel behind.
Speaking of Danae, she's going to be flying in to the Syracuse airport on Wednesday! I lose track of time; I'd forgotten that until my dad mentioned it on Skype this weekend. I'm so very happy to be spending a week and a half with her! I'm also feeling a little nervous about getting around. She doesn't bike, and as I've thought more about her visit, I've realized that Syracuse doesn't seem to be the easiest place to get around without a car. A city or town can offer very different experiences depending on your mode of transportation. I'm going to further ponder the bus system map this week.
I want to write some more about my thoughts and feelings instead of all the daily-doings stuff I've been writing, but a lot of that is tied up in school. So, I'm going to post another Forevertron picture, and then write about my poli-sci paper work. Feel free to ignore that if it's uninteresting.
This is the wing of one of the many metal birds that stand in flocks around the Forevertron. There are a number of things I love about this. The way these blades have been repurposed into something as delicate as feathers; it has a swords-to-plowshares feel. The repeated shapes and lines draw me in too, as does the blue of the sky on bare metal juxtaposed with the browns and reds of rust (assisted a touch in my post-processing).
====
Other than going grocery shopping, I spent a lot of today trying to frame out my poli-sci term paper and looking for sources. I've never tried tor ead through the Congressional Record before, so some time went into figuring out how it's organized, what's in it, and what's not. Then I had to figure out just who governs the District of Columbia, anyway, since some of the discussion about traffic problems related to DC. (A congressional committee, more or less.) There seems to have been no coherent national traffic policy up through the Traffic and Motor Safety Bill of 1966, so I'm going to have to look at state and/or municipal level stuff.
It will be hard to get at behind the scenes details of lawmaking at that level. Most of those records are going to be undigitized, and either on microfilm in libraries, or in archives. But I do have access to a couple of historic newspaper databases that should help me get a picture of popular discourse around automobile vs. pedestrian rights. Writing about the social reconstruction of Japanese-Americans from a problem group to a model minority, Stephanie DiAlto describes three venues of action: policy, discourse, and the courts. I hope to use that framework to shape my paper, but policy and courts will be hard to get at directly. Peter Norton's Fighting Traffic gives me a lot of places to start, but he's also already covered some of this ground, which makes me nervous that I'll seem derivative or will rely on him too heavily in the absence of other sources.
I'll likely pick two cities whose newspapers are well represented in the databases I have access to (Chicago and New York City) and comb them for an idea of what was going on. Hopefully there will be some relevant documents in HathiTrust as well; there's all sorts of interesting stuff in there. But other political scientists writing in the field of social construction are citing varieties of sources that I won't be able to lay hands on and sort through in the time frame I have for this paper. So I feel like the whole thing will end up being a little half-assed, but I'll do my best with it.
And I still need to decide on what the heck I'm going to write about for my urban social justice paper! I'm thinking about looking at the construction of highways from the history-society-space perspective that Edward Soja advocated in Seeking Spatial Justice; that was the most influential book I read through that course. But oh, do I feel behind.
