London Gazette Adverts to Download
There are a lot of advertisements on this blog but I thought you might like a Word document to download. This is a collection of print trade advertisements found in copies of The London Gazette in the university libraries in Durham and Newcastle (UK).
print-trade-advertisements-in-the-london-gazette.doc
As I go through my old research notes I am acutely conscious that I should have put the advertisements on a database and run some kind of statistical analysis on them. Instead I worked like a Victorian antiquarian with reams of paper and a tick chart.
I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. The purpose of my PhD was the whole relationship between portrait print advertising and the news thing. It was never a statistical analysis of print trade advertising. Plus I’ve met very few PhD student who really knew what they were doing in the first couple of years of research and I’ve met many afterwards who have been disappointed by their thesis.
A PhD is not a life’s work. The really sharp academic work comes after the PhD, when the scholar has learnt from her or his mistakes and is ready to build on the first step which is their thesis. That will never happen in my case as my life has taken a different direction, but I hope the material I have put online here will at least encourage others to look into this area of research.
I must admit I am paranoid about exposing so much of my PhD online. I remember meeting a PhD student once who commented on a PhD thesis that we had both read. The student was very critical of it and said it wasn’t a very good PhD. I agreed, because at the time I didn’t know what I was talking about. Looking back, this PhD thesis (which I will not name) was actually good for the time when it was written. Its achievement was that it gathered together a lot of unknown material. PhDs like that can come across as superficial to readers who can’t see the work that went into them. My work was the same, I was covering virgin territory and so the achievement was in that.
I can imagine somebody looking at my work and being very critical of it. I didn’t store the information in the most efficient way (i.e. no database). I didn’t engage very much with scholarship in cultural studies and the public sphere. I also didn’t present the information in the most effective way. As a catalogue style work it really would have been better off written in bullet points, but as it was a PhD thesis I used the most turgid prose imaginable.
It’d be a lie if I said that I wasn’t disappointed that my thesis didn’t reach the soaring pinnacles of perfection. With distance and a happy adaptation to the world outside academia I am starting to care less about it. For those of us who leave academia the real achievements of a PhD are:
- Learning to manage a large research and writing project alone.
- Sticking with something that becomes increasingly challenging as you realise there is no job at the end of it. i.e. It’s a lesson in character.
