In January of 2023 I was working my last rotation out in Tonopah, Nevada. There was a massive solar farm being installed out in the nearby desert and dozens of archaeologists were brought in throughout the season. It was finally coming to a close and I was there to see the end of it.
The Reno office was hoping to finish the project before the snow started, but we had been snowed out for two or three days already. Luckily, the snow died down toward the end of the rotation and we were able to mostly finish. Reno elected to see if the crew could just stay on for a couple days to completely wrap everything up rather than bring people back for another full rotation.
Everyone readily agreed to stay on those extra days except me. I had to go. The first day of my first history graduate semester back home was about to start.
I was excited and a bit trepidatious. One of my previous anthropology professors, upon requesting a letter of recommendation from her for entry into the program, told me that I had to take the graduate program more seriously than I had taken her classes. I had to pick a specific specialty and I had to do my own work and research outside of the program to make it worthwhile. I couldn't do the bare minimum like she of course noticed I did in her classes. She was right and I knew it.
So going into the program I had decided to focus on modern African history, from the late-colonial period to modern day. Honestly, this was a little arbitrary. I knew I needed a specialty and that was something I had an interest in.
And by a stroke of unbelievable luck, one of my classes that first semester was with a professor who specialized in colonial and modern Africa. He was born in Mozambique, saw first-hand colonial oppression, and had spend decades performing forensic and oral investigations into Portuguese colonial violence.
Within a couple weeks of being in his class, I learned he had a trip planned to Guinea-Bissau in West Africa as part of a collaboration with UCLA to restore liberation war-era radio archives. The second I learned of it I asked if there was room in the budget to bring a student along.
I had thought I would focus more on the Congo/Great Lakes region of Africa since I had just read Reybrouck's masterpiece on Congolese history and I was completely enamored. But upon learning about my professor's work on West/Lusophone Africa I was more than happy to shift my focus there.
My professor was delighted that I wanted to accompany him and incredibly helpful and supportive when it came to getting me the required funds. Over the next two semesters, while doing my other graduate classes, (which weren't easy) the majority of my focus was on writing drafts of my thesis proposal and various funding requests.
After tons of preliminary work, the research trip actually happened. I was a bit jaded from my experience with the anthropology professors, who often promised grand research projects that never had a hope of happening and I kind of thought this would be similar. But we actually went. I flew across the Atlantic for the first time and spent nearly two months in one of the poorest countries in the world, about as stark a contrast to California as I could possibly get.
I came back with thousands (literally) of documents scanned from Bissau's colonial archives that I had to somehow turn into a thesis. I knew my thesis would be on Tite, a small village south of Bissau and the role it played in the liberation war of 1964-1973, but I didn't know what the narrative would actually look like. We had originally planned to visit Tite, but the increasingly unstable political situation in the country stopped that from happening. So I didn't have the archaeological and oral material I had hoped for. The whole thesis would have to come out of the archives.
I started by transferring my thousands of documents (which were all just JPEG images taken with my phone) to my computer. I then went through one-by-one and manually flipped all the images right side up, as many of them were sideways or upside down. There was probably a way to do that automatically and save a lot of time, but I never found one.
After all the images were right side up, I went through and organized them all into their respective documents. Series of individual JPEGs became PDF files with various page lengths. Once all the individual images had become pages in larger PDF documents, I went through each one and ran them through a program to make the text OCR compatible so text could be highlighted, searched, copied, etc. Both these processes were done through the Linux terminal, more easily and effectively than I could have hoped for.
Still, this process alone took the better part of a month for the sheer number of archival images I had.
The next step was to actually go through my organized, OCR'd documents and learn what they actually said. I am not fluent in Portuguese. Every single document was written in Portuguese. But to quote Patrick Star, "We are not cavemen. We have technology."
Because I had OCR'd the text on all the documents, I was able to feed them through various AI programs. Mostly ChatGPT. I'm as skeptical of this stuff as anyone, but when it comes to summarizing and translating, it's pretty damn amazing technology. In hindsight, I would have used a program dedicated specifically to scholarly and scientific papers, as ChatGPT's conversational priorities meant it hallucinated things pretty often. However, I always double checked all the important information so the hallucinations never made it too far.
I created a master list of all my documents and their contents in Obsidian, my favorite open-source, offline note-taking app. I created categories like "Tite as a Prison" and "Forced Relocation" and linked all the relevant documents to whatever sections they fit into.
After I had gone through every single document, which took probably two months, I had enough material for essentially three chapters: How the Portuguese forcefully relocated people to Tite, how people in Tite lived under both Portuguese and PAIGC control, and how Tite was used as a prison and execution site by the Portuguese.
With those chapters in mind, I wrote my first iteration of the thesis, aiming for about 500-1000 words per day, 5ish days a week. At the end of my writing days I'd often go to the Starbucks inside the local Barnes and Noble to read some Discworld and journal and relax.
After turning in my first draft for review, the predominant feedback I got was that I had an introduction, three separate and distinct chapters, and a conclusion. But I had no throughline, no one single overarching thesis statement. Which was frustrating to hear but of course true. I could not sum up my entire thesis in one sentence.
So I set to revising it and discovered I could create a throughline that was simply: Tite was successfully used by both the Portuguese and the PAIGC during the war to advance both of their respective war efforts.
This version was significantly better, and the various iterations of feedback I got were mostly formatting, citation, and grammatical issues. After a few back-and-forths it was sent off to the rest of my thesis committee who all signed off on it and I had my master's degree!
I definitely took one of the hardest paths possible in getting my degree. Almost all of my fellow grad students in the program take exams. The few that take the thesis option write local histories and utilize a lot of interviews. I went to the other side of the world, both geographically and across the economic divide, fought my way through abandoned archives that literally had feces, mold, poison fumes, rats scurrying underfoot and bats flying overhead, poured through thousands of documents in a language I am not fluent in, and wrote for my very first real history paper after being an anthropology major, a 100+ page thesis.
But I'm so glad I did it! It was incredibly rewarding and I'm hopeful that my taking the difficult route will set me up nicely with a PhD opportunity. Time will tell.