Aim High

I received an email from one of my committee members today. Let's be honest; he is basically my mentor as far as my experiment goes. Anyway, he said he had looked over the timeline for my dissertation that I sent him and had a few concerns about me being overly ambitious (imagine that!). My goal is to pump out a chapter each month, while also polishing three of these chapters for publication. He didn't seem to think I would have trouble completing my ten chapters by February, but he said polishing the manuscripts for publication will take a lot more work than I anticipate. I have published a couple articles already, so I am aware of the whole rigamarole. He is probably right, but I don't regret aiming high. I think if you set your mind to something, you can do just about anything. 

According to my overall timeline, I am supposed to finish a draft of the chapter I am currently working on by mid-June. I have written a little over 21 pages so far, but I don't think I'm even at the halfway mark quite yet. I also found out recently that the trip my boyfriend and I were planning to Colorado at the end of June is actually beginning this Saturday. So, there goes a week of writing to get this chapter done by my self-imposed deadline. Maybe I can shoot for the end of June.

Anyway, today was productive. I rearranged my outline a bit last night because I felt like it was holding me back from writing more freely. This seemed to help because I wrote 3 pages this morning.

I. Introduction
II. Pre-World War II
III. Post-World War II
IV. 1979: Contemporary evolutionary cognitive archaeology begins
V. 1980s: A Piagetian framework   
VI. Alternative approaches to the Piagetian model
    A. Steven Mithen's Prehistory of the Mind
    B. Language, archaeology, and lateralization
        1. Endocast studies from the 70s and 80s
        2. Lateralization and language
        3. Evidence for brain lateralization
        4. Evidence for right hand dominance
    C. Critique of stone tools as markers of cognition
VII. Resurgence of archaeological clues for language
    A. Greenfield (1991)
    B. Wynn (1991)
    C. Davidson and Noble's (1989) depictive origin for language   
VIII. Minds and brains of hominins
IX. A coming of age in the US
X. New approaches of new millennium
XI. Introduction of neuroimaging techniques
XII. Summary

You can see that I added a new section (VI). This has been my concentration today. My goal is to read the articles for Section VI.B.1 tonight, and I'll try to write this section up tomorrow morning. I don't know how much focus I want to give to this section. I might skim these articles rather than spend time taking down detailed notes. I might finish it faster than I think, in which case I will move on to Section VI.B.2 before my next blog post.