How can digital humanities help us reimagine the dissertation? As a mid-program graduate student, I’m standing at the beginning of my dissertation project and I’m interested in hacking the dissertation.
I’ve been thinking about this from a few angles. First, digital sources provide one new way of rethinking the dissertation. Digital archives and collections that offer full text searching provide new ways to do dissertation research, especially in the current climate where graduate research funding may be difficult to find. Second, the actual dissertation itself can be rethought. For example, how could digital sources for a dissertation be archived online to provide a sort of source book for the research project? What would a “digital dissertation” look like? Lastly, how can digital technology improve the process of writing a dissertation? The dissertation is a young scholars first major project, what sort of technologies are out there that every dissertating graduate student ought to try to help them stay organized and get the thing written?
I would love to see something come out of this discussion that could serve as a guide or toolbox for graduate students wanting to hack their dissertations. There are a lot of great reviews and ideas about writing dissertations with digital technologies (for example, Tonya Roth’s blog “Hacking the Dissertation Process” ) but its very scattered and tough to track down and synthesize. We need a more systematic approach to rethinking a digital dissertation.
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#1 by Pete on February 23, 2011 - 9:27 pm
I am at the tail end of my diss. and have often considered how technology affected (or could or should) my process. I would have some things to add here, but mostly would enjoy listening.
#2 by Miriam Posner on February 24, 2011 - 7:52 am
This is great, Michael! In regard to your question about digital dissertations, I’ve been hearing similar desires and questions voiced by the grad students in Emory’s Visual Scholarship Initiative (emoryvsi.wordpress.com/). I’d be interested in combining our session ideas, since it sounds like we’re thinking along similar lines.
#3 by Jackie on February 24, 2011 - 8:54 am
I am currently writing my first dissertation chapter, and would be VERY interested in having this conversation! Thanks, Mike!
#4 by Rebecca Onion on February 24, 2011 - 6:45 pm
I’m about a year away from finishing my diss, and about to start a chapter whose source material would make a great digital project. Would love to attend this session and brainstorm ideas about integrating such a project into the chapter. I’m especially interested in the institutional side of this question – how could I convince the scholars on my committee that such a project would be a valid part of my dissertation?
#5 by dudleyg on February 24, 2011 - 9:12 pm
I am working beginning my Masters thesis and share many of your concerns. I am would love to be on board for this conversation.
#6 by Brian Croxall on February 28, 2011 - 9:27 pm
This looks like a great discussion and one that would pair well with Miriam’s suggested session. Strangely, my first thought when reading Michael’s question about source books for a dissertation is about bibliographies. It’s not all that distant that people (in English lit, at least) would produce bibliographies for their dissertations. Perhaps hacking the dissertation would mean getting away from the diss as scholarly monograph and instead making it into a tool that you (and others) could use to do scholarship for the next 10-20 years. Of course, with tools like Google and Zotero, it’s not all that hard to do good bibliographies. But it does strike me interesting that hacking the future could involve a return to the past (pace Michael J
AltmanFox).As for improving the writing process, I think a tool like Scrivener is an interesting place to have a discussion (see Ryan Cordell’s review at ProfHacker) as are other tools like DEVONthink, and 750words.com.