Ellie Bennett

Seminar Talk: Being Online As A Researcher

Last week on the 16th of September I was invited to speak at the Cultural Heritage, European Ethnology and Museum Studies (CHEEMS) seminar for PhD students at the University of Helsinki. The Seminar was about how to have an online presence as a researcher, which can be daunting – particularly to PhD students, who are just getting used to being thought of as ‘researchers’.

The seminar was in two sections. The first was my presentation, where I outlined some of the platforms and methods open to PhD students to advertise themselves. I wanted to highlight that you can use online tools in two major ways: to disseminate your academic work to colleagues; and let the public know about your research.

Powerpoint Presentation of How to Be Online As A Researcher (please credit me if to be used)Download

The second half was a really useful discussion. A lot of it was focussed on Twitter, and I think that reflects just how important it is to connecting and networking academics in the modern world. There was an important comment made, which was that one PhD student pointed out that they don’t remember the last time they read a blog post. Definitely food for thought, considering how many institutions think making a blog constitutes a digital platform.

I definitely learnt a lot from the seminar, and many of the concerns brought up I’m going to take with me in my work on the Science Communications Workgroup at ANEE.

End of my first working week!

I might have neglected explicitly saying this, but I got the position of Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki!

So the past few weeks have been very hectic, and this week I’ve spent settling in to academic life.

I’m part of a wider research group called the Centre of Excellence: Ancient Near Eastern Empires (ANEE for short), and I’m working in Team 1 (of three). The group’s goal is exploring social identities across a huge timespan in order to see how they change during different empires. It’s a huge project, and Team 1 is looking into using tools from Digital Humanities (the buzzword of the moment) to investigate this more.

My own project is going to be using these tools to investigate masculinities in texts that have survived which have been written in Akkadian and have been digitised. I’m hoping to see changes and developments of how Mesopotamians thought about ‘being a man’ based on time, place, age, ethnicity, so on and so forth.

(I’m still working on my elevator pitch for my project, so please bear with me)

I am SUPER excited to be part of this amazing team and a group full of lovely and wonderful people, so fingers crossed I get good results!

Finland, Finland, Finland!

I GOT THE JOB, PEOPLE!!!!!

You are now reading the blog of the new Postdoctoral Research at the University of Helsinki’s Centre of Excellence: Ancient Near Eastern Empires!

My research is going to involve using computer code to work out the cultural associations of words relating to ‘masculinities’. So I am essentially finding out what the Akkadian equivalent of ‘man up’ was.

It’s pretty daunting – so far I have a limited experience with coding, but I was able to pick up a lot from a quick visit there in June, so I’m hoping that small amount will carry me a long way.

I’ll also be helping out with the team’s wider goals, so I’ll be doing some extra reading on ethnicity, Neo-Babylonia, and Late Babylonian records and texts.

An important thing about postdocs is that they are normally short-term in my field, so my new position is for two years. That doesn’t mean I don’t have to deal with all the legalities and loopholes of moving countries, though! Luckily the University (like most) have a relocation service that help with stuff like this, so I have someone to guide me through the Finnish paperwork (thankfully).

So after receiving that news I very happily turned off all my notifications for funding deadlines, and I sent off my paper to my tutor. They’ve had a skim of it, and recommended some people to give it a once-over for me. This will be the most peer-reviewed paper under the Sun….

And for the rest of the week I (finally) got on with prepping for my viva (or thesis defence – it’s the examination for PhD students). I’ve taken the approach of just reading widely, read the stuff my examiners have written, and annotate my thesis.

So overall, a pretty good week! Definitely deserved spending too much money on a Nintendo Switch and a new tablet….

Week 2: One Helluva Pizza Order!

Report: HTC in Final Negotiations to Sell Smartphone ...

I have had a doozey of a week.

So on Saturday, as part of my new ‘Ellie will do ALL THE WALKING’ I walked up a hill with Erik. It was lovely, but we accidentally walked 11km when we should have done, like, 4. Woops….

So to celebrate (and soothe my aching hip) we ordered pizza. To order the pizza, for some reason they had to send a code to my email, so I dutifully opened by email to see…. A JOB OPENING AT HELSINKI!!!

Now, for clarification: all my research interests point towards Helsinki. Helsinki is literally the perfect place for my work. I’ve visited it recently and kind of fell in love (granted, it was in the middle of Summer). So to see this in my inbox whilst full of insecurity about my future was AMAZING.

So naturally I said ‘yes, I’m up for that’, and the first few days of the week was spent making sure I had all the documents for the application. Academic job applications are pretty intense, with 3 page CVs, 2 page cover letters, and a research proposal (depending on the position, this can be 12 pages long). So I got all of those together and sent them off.

The rest of the week was… well… less productive.

I’ve noticed that when I don’t have a dedicated workspace away from my house, my productivity tanks. Especially during periods of high stress (like this week).

To combat this, I’ve been trying a new productivity hack. It has a particular name, but I seriously cannot remember what it is right now…. The premise is simple. You can have a MASSIVE to do list, but you can only be working on THREE things at a time.

I’ve been using Asana for this. It’s an online task manager which can organise tasks into columns. So I have one which is my to-do list, one which is my doing list, and one which is my done list. It’s really helped me focus on only one or two items at a time, which is a Godsend when I have ALL OF THE JOB APPLICATIONS, thesis prep, a paper to finish and find time to remember how to code again…

But the main productive moment this week has been to send off an updated draft of my paper to my tutor Rocio. It’s part of a programme where you’re paired up with a tutor who oversees your work and makes sure it’s up to par so it can be published. I’m hoping I’m now at the stage that I just need to polish the Akkadian bits, spellcheck it, and it’ll be good to go. After all, it’s now been read by four people – that is basically an entire peer-review process!

So yeah, between applying for a dream job that will have a quick turnaround (I should find out tomorrow morning), and sending off a paper, it’s been a doozey of a week…

Week 1: It begins…

Good Friday, everyone!

By which I don’t mean the religious holiday, but my weekly update of what I’ve been up to academically.

It’s been dominates by applications, VIVA prep, working on my masculinities paper, and a lot of confusion.

Postdoctoral positions require a very long CV and a research proposal that would fit with the position you’re applying for, but some are pretty open. So I’ve been applying to do a project based on what I was doing at the University of Helsinki the past couple of weeks. My plan has been to then tailor to every position I apply for, and just apply for as many things as humanly possible.

One thing I’m hoping will make my applications stand out is the fact that I’m using Overleaf to make these documents. It’s an online LateX (yes, I know what it looks like – it’s pronounced ‘lay-tek’) editor, so the documents look really nice in comparison to Word.

Something I’m struggling with is condensing everything into snappy paragraphs that will make sense to a non-expert in my field, but also lays out the ‘deliverables’ and project aims in a concise way. It’s beginning to seem like a never-ending joke…

None of this will work out though if I don’t pass my VIVA. My supervisor gave me some extra articles to make sure that I definitely have a good grasp of the field. So first on my reading list has been Drewe’s important article about the MKRB in South Arabia. A summary: people agree it’s a title for rulers in pre-Islamic South Arabia, but no-one can agree on the exact definition or meaning of the title. Literally no-one. It’s kind of amazing.

An important part of VIVA prep is also including making sure I know the background of my external examiner, so I’ve made a start on some of the more important and accessible pieces of work (thank God for Academia.edu…).

Finally I’ve been working on my paper about masculinities. I found out it’s due at the end of August, and since this will be the first publication to my profile, I need to get on with it. After the feedback by someone in Helsinki, I realised I need to make sure the structure makes total sense, and that some details weren’t really accurate… But that’s being fixed now, and I like to think it’s proof that I’m developing a more adult approach to feedback. Remember Ellie, it’s all done to improve your work so you can be really proud of yourself!

I realised I had a massive gap in my knowledge about the Coronation Ritual, so I’ve spent longer than I care to think about trying to find an accessible translation. It appears this doesn’t really exist for the Middle Assyrian version, so I may need to ask around if anyone has a copy I can borrow…

One thing that became REALLY clear is the need to streamline my filing system for articles and books. The problem lies in the fact that I work best reading from a physical copy, but I’m trying to be more eco-friendly, so I’ve been wracking my brain for a system.

I think I’ve now got one. Now I’m using this reference software called Zotero (I am VERY late to the party on this one). You upload the bibliographic information of something you’re reading onto Zotero, and through a plug-in you can then easily import the information into Word. Importantly for my new system, you can add pdfs of the stuff you’re reading, and add important notes. So now my system is getting the pdf, put it onto OneNote, write notes on there, when I’m done I put the bibliographic info onto Zotero, upload the pdf file, put the key notes onto the file, add some identifying tags so I can easily find it, and then I can put the info into what I’m writing.

So that’s been my week so far. Next week the goal is to get the application for BRIHC completed, and then I can focus on preparing for my VIVA, all the while finding some time to practice the coding I learned in Helsinki and work on my paper.

What am I doing?

Hi everyone! My name’s Ellie, and I’ve just completed the mammoth task of submitting my PhD thesis. When I say mammoth, I am NOT exaggerating. In the few weeks since handing in this epic 75,000 word essay, a lot has happened, and I realised that writing everything down was probably good idea. If nothing else, future PhDs may learn from my mistakes.

A little about me: I research something called the Ancient Near East (ANE), which can be summarised as ancient Iraq and all the regions connected to it. My thesis was specifically on a group of women called the ‘Queens of the Arabs’ during the Neo-Assyrian period (934-612 BC), but I’m branching out into some cool gender research and digital humanities.

I’m planning on using this as basically an academic diary. Every week I’ll write about what I’ve been up to. Some weeks it’ll be ‘I read this thing…. it was terrible…’, but some weeks will be more like ‘I just did some AWESOME outreach to teach people that my subject exists!’.