Last working day before Christmas

Our last bit of Christmas related shopping this morning and my last bit of work before a break of a few days.

After a couple of weeks where I have spent quite a lot of time organising and sorting out my work for the coming months, the last couple of days have been mainly spent writing stuff. My note taking is hugely compressed compared to previous cases, and then I am trying to find ways to summarise material down to just a few sentences. So my notes on, say, a 20 pages article might be 3 or 4 sides long. These will consist of some quotes with comments from me, together with outlines of chains or agument and the various references used. Then I will try to summarize it down again to maybe 10 lines, which will form the entry into the "working bibliography". I hjave been very pleased with this process - the main downside is that there is so much material to read!

So for the last couple of days I have worked through an article by Jan Golinski entitled The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory: Sociological Approaches in the History of Science, Ernst Mayr's When is Historiography Whiggish?, James McAllister's Theory Assessment in the Historiography of Science and Shapere's long review essay of Blemenberg's The Genesis of the Copernican World.

I am increasingly intrigued by the latter book. The main downside is that it is so long (700 pages +). But I am wondering if it could feature prominantly in my dissertation and therefore would be worth buying. Maybe I should go and have another detailed look at it in the Bodleian?

So at 5:00 today I have downed tools and am having 3 days off - though I will possible read something relevant when we are all at Andrew and Julie's on Boxing Day.