07 June 2010

study of anime presents...a copout

Hello all. Today I am bringing you a literary and journalistic device known the world over as a copout. Or rather, since I want to post something today, but am at the moment up to my eyeballs in work, I am presenting something old that I found in the dregs of my rarely used HP desktop. N, it's not a rerun of something I posted last year, it's quite new. But at the same time, it's a relic of the past.

Today, I am posting my original proposal for my Master's thesis.
For those who may not be aware (and if you are a regular, reader, for shame!), I am leaving this Thursday for Anime Mid Atlantic at the Chesapeake Convention Center, way down in Chesapeake VA. This will be my third AMA (in a row, no less), and I will be presenting Modern Mythology, Dead Like Us and Castles, Forests and Bath Houses over the course of the weekend. I will also be watching a bit of the World Cup, catching up with friends, and celebrating two very wonderful years with the love of my life.

But before I leave for the seven hour drive down the coast, I still need to run off a hundred surveys (those are never done), read three volumes of Yami no Matseui, watch 3 Miyazaki movies, raid Icecrown Citadel, hit the gym and go over my thesis outline (again). This leaves me with precious little time for new ruminations into the worlds of anime and manga. Normally, I would just delay until next week, but no sooner do I get back on Monday night, than I need to do laundry and head out for Anime Next in Somerset NJ, where I am giving all five (5!) of my panels over the course of the following weekend. Upon which returning from I will promptly collapse into a coma for two weeks until Connecticon.

So, in the interest of my readers, today I will be posting probably the most important document in my folder: my thesis proposal.

First an overview. This was written back in March of last year, cobbled together from a number of rough ideas I had been throwing around with my advisor and coach. I won't go into what lead me to this project, for that just click here and here, but needless to say, I threw together this proposal pretty fast. I needed to satisfy the questions of my department chair and graduate advisor, plus let me thesis advisor know what he was getting into (he still doesn't).

What needs to be said is that this proposal is now entirely invalid. Remember two weeks ago when I said I had to go back to code? Well, what I meant was I scrapped this, my data sets and a bunch of other things related to them, and rewrote everything from the ground up (figuratively, of course). So this bit of writing here that started the entire process now means nothing to the final product.

Still, it's interesting to read this over and remind myself of my mindset back then. This proposal was written long before I had solid surveys, long before I had met all these new friends at the cons, long before I even knew what I wanted to do with the project. It was my first step into a larger world, one that has become my life these past 8 months or so. I still saw what I was doing as a passing fad, satisfying my need to do something different with my work, something the rest of my department would find alien to the study of anthropology as they present it. I had no idea what was going to happen, or that one year later I would be tearing this to pieces and starting over with the data I so painstakingly collected.

So, I humbly present here a little piece of my world. Outdated, yes, but as important as ever.

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