the notebook » digital matters

Raising questions about the digital dissertation (part one)

leeann — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:48:28 +0000

Digital Dissertation is a tricky phrase. Google-search it and you’ll note that the first quadrillion responses refer to the ProQuest Digital Dissertation Database or to standards for formatting and submitting the dissertation electronically to university depositories and archives.

But look further: search for born digital examples of dissertations in the humanities, dissertations in which digital technologies are core elements of analysis, intrinsic to the thesis. You’ll eventually stumble across the pioneering dissertations of Chris Boese, Chaining Rhetorical Visions from the Margins of the Margins to the Mainstream in the Zenaverse (Department of Rhetoric and Communications, Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1998).

Or that of Virginia Kuhn, Ways of Composing: Visual Literacy in the Digital Age (Department of English, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 2005).

Seek prototypes in history scholarship and you’re likely to enter a black hole.

Digital technologies, we are told again and again, are redefining the practice of history in academia and in public history, “yielding transformations so profound that their nearest parallel is to Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type more than half a millennium ago.”

The dissertation is an ignored product in this redefinition. Not even a proverbial elephant in the room, the dissertation is an unacknowledged step in scaffolded progression of ...

Raising questions about the digital dissertation (part two)

leeann — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 17:14:55 +0000

[Recap, part one]The results of a survey of students in the doctoral program in history at George Mason University demonstrated that two-thirds of respondents were either fully committed to or seriously considering including a digital component in their dissertations.

As the culmination of doctoral study, the history dissertation exemplifies that the author is able to construct, present, and defend an historical argument adding to an existing body of knowledge. The concept of a digital dissertation presents unique challenges to students and to universities to re-explore how the dissertation achieves these scholarly goals and to qualify, quantify, and institutionalize revised standards for dissertation evaluation, publication, and preservation.

Looking at hard questions

Before we can create it, evaluate it, defend it, and submit it, we need to know just what it is. The seminal inquiry, then, is the logical, Just what is a digital dissertation? The digital dissertation may fall in a vast middle ground between the totally text-based traditional dissertation and the funded digital project realized over numbers of years by large staffs and collaborative teamwork. It is also differentiated from the work published digitally in open-source scholarly journals such as the Journal of Digital Humanities.

Certain qualities seem integral ...

One small step in technology; one giant step in historical analysis

leeann — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 23:41:20 +0000

The syllabus for Fred Gibbs’s graduate course, Programming for Historians, is ambitious.

Even for this class lurker, shadow-in-the-corner, and tech-stalker, the thought of working through the modules and the extensive list of the skills to explore (with practicum)–HTML5, CSS3, databases in theory and practice, mySQL, PHP, mark-up languages and more–is grist for intimidation or perhaps evocative of a giant time suck.

But the syllabus is at least as compelling as it is daunting. Why? Partly because requirements include “Must be able to have fun and learn while accomplishing nothing.”

It’s also the emphasis on digital tools to refocus the way we look at historical resources and how we think about them and use them. As analytical tools, these technologies promote creative thinking, but they’re also eminently practical for organizing research and resources en route to the dissertation and building foundations for complex projects.

The extensive records of the Tredegar Corporation in the nineteenth century comprise a core resource for my dissertation. They are not atypical of a mid-sized, family-owned corporation whose external accountability was limited in contrast to today’s regulatory standards and for whom the rational factory was a futuristic system. They wouldn’t pass muster today, and in fact, didn’t in 1913 ...