convert my dissertation to pdf

that I haven’t done this yet. This is the next concrete thing after the oral history project (and follow-up on the CD).

thanks to my Dad, who scanned them all into jpg files for me while I was in London, and also put them on my flash drive. Yeah, dad!

get the score portion of this done this week. I might even be able to do the insertion into the text if I work hard. The trouble is, there are more pressing things at the moment, like my research trip next week and my classes for the fall.

a bunch more pages of musical examples today. It’s very tedious. I’m scanning everything at 600 dpi, black and white, high contrast and it’s taking a long time. I don’t even want to think of how many I have left.

The other problem is that I’m trying to do this with a bound score and often times the edges of the page have virtually no margins when scanned.

The goal for this: at least finish the excerpts from Louise by the end of the week and get them on the flash drive. I still might not be able to finish this up this summer, just because after this week I will be even more peripatetic after I leave here.

Once the scans are done, it should be a relatively simple matter of cropping and dropping them into the text.

I finally got access to the computer lab with all of the scanners, found a clean copy of Louise in the Fine Arts Library, and started scanning. Man, it takes a long time, plus it took me a long time to decide on the optimal settings. I probably did about seven pages, i.e. not too good, but the process is started, so I’m hoping I can finish most of this before I leave town. This coming week seems to be the week for tedium: scanning scores, listening to outtakes and trying to churn out prose. Oh well, it’s all part of what I do.

when I discovered that there were several pages of score that I had neglected to make into pdfs. Today I took care of some of them. Probably I’ll have some time next week to do some more.

Chapter Two. I made notes of which pages of scores I still need to copy this week. I’m assuming it will be pretty straightforward cut and pasting the pdfs and importing them into the word files.

I used in my dissertation:

If an occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ, . . . then a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally-a connection which it is impossible to establish by reason in the horizontal dimension . . . . It can be established only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding.

- Erich Auerbach, Mimesis

I now remember why I had a hard time dealing with this before. It was because I couldn’t deal with re-reading it (still too recent an experience). Now I have no trouble, and the occasional typo doesn’t bother me any more, since I no longer care if it was in some kind of “perfect” form when it went to the bindery or not.

I’m done with Chapter One, except that I have to check a quote on p. 20.

tonight! I don’t know how far I’ll get; it’s embarrassing how much editing escaped me at the time. And let’s not even get started about foreign language spell-checking!