from this position I can see the whole place

I don't talk about my work often on the internet, mostly because I want to maintain some anonymity in this space. I'm working on building a website about myself & my research, and I am on what could most accurately be called "a facebook for academics", so I guess if you're really interested you can check out my work on there. (If I ever finish that website I'll be sure to let you know.)

While I am home - technically I am "on holiday" - I still have work to do. Yes, you read that right. I've been working on a chapter (10,000 words) of my masters thesis while I'm home. Anyway, while I've been home I've also been seeing some old friends, who have been inquiring about my work. I proposed a really big project for a 12-month Master's thesis, and it's been cut down a lot to something really specific since then. This was fine, in fact, that's the nature of research. Unfortunately, it meant that I didn't really know how to explain to people what I've been doing: I was explaining it as something between my proposed project and what I thought I was striving for.

I'm not going to lie to you - no matter how interesting and invested in your work you are, when that's all you do on a daily basis, it's hard to see outside your narrow field of focus sometimes. Sometimes it's kind of boring. My research involved building a database, and that was all I did for a month. You can really only look at words so many times before they start to lose their meanings, you know? It took some time to step back and really see what I had been doing every day. And then I realized that I hadn't been doing what I thought I had been doing all along... in fact, I was doing something very different. So now I have a new(er), more accurate description of what I've been working on, which fits and feels much better.

It's also good to get a different perspective on what I've been doing. Glasgow's great because there's a lot of linguistics going on, but I'm not entirely working in linguists and I'm not quite an English literature student - I'm kind of in the middle. I mentioned to a couple other grad-school-going friends lately that I'm having a hard time finding conferences and publications to be looking at, only because my field is so very small. And they all brought up an important point - you WANT to be the one of the only people doing what you're doing, because when you're done you'll have participated in an entirely new approach to your field. (This is very good for my ego, I'll have you all know.)