Public Group active 2 months, 3 weeks ago

Digital Dissertations

This group is for anyone who is interested in writing a digital dissertation (or creating a digital component to an otherwise ‘traditional’ dissertation). Please join, introduce yourself in the “welcome and introductions” section, and keep the conversation going in the forums.

Admins:

  • “The Dissertation Can No Longer Be Defended”

    Posted by Matthew K. Gold (he/him) on February 11, 2013 at 3:31 pm

    Hi All —

    Please see this piece on the dissertation in the CHE, with quotes from Bill and Chase about the new GC fellowships. It includes discussion of digital dissertations:

    “A 21st-Century Dissertation
    “To the extent that dissertations have changed already, technological advances have been largely responsible. The rise of the digital humanities has opened up new interpretive and methodological possibilities for scholars and has challenged conventional understandings of the dissertation. Graduate students looking to take advantage of the interactivity of online platforms are doing digital dissertations that integrate film clips, three-dimensional animation, sound, and interactive maps.”

    – http://chronicle.com/article/The-Dissertation-Can-No-Longer/137215/

    Best,

    Matt

3 replies
    • Erin Glass
      Participant
      February 11, 2013 at 4:56 pm

      Really exciting! Also, the history phd candidate mentioned in the article has a fantastic blog (http://www.saritaalami.com). I checked it out after reading the article and she has a lot of posts about open source digital tools that might be useful to mull over as we consider our workshops.

    • A.L. McMichael
      Participant
      February 22, 2013 at 5:14 pm

      Hillary just sent me a link to this blog post about a history digidiss at George Mason:
      http://www.leeannghajar.com/the-born-digital-dissertation-an-idea-whose-time-has-come/

    • Steve Brier
      Member
      February 23, 2013 at 1:32 pm

      While useful, this intervention is limited, by its nature, to history dissertations. It suggests how far we still have to go, given that this emanates from a PhD program at GMu that offers a doctorate in digital history (thanks to my late friend and colleague, Roy Rosenzweig, who launched it in the 1990s)! Yet, traditional faculty in that department resist changes in the dissertation’s form. Our challenge is how to launch the conversation most effectively here in the coming months (and, I fear, years) that it will take to make headway on this critical issue. We need to add our own ideas and thoughts, drawn from a rich disciplinary mix of programs and projects represented in the NML, ITP program and elsewhere, to move this forward at GC. I think the stars are finally becoming aligned here to allow that to happen.

3 replies

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