Faultlines

From Alex Halvais' blog

A Thurmatalogical Compendium.

I can't link to this entry for some reason - the URL gives a 404. It's the entry dated March 24, 2008.

Start quote from Alex...
I’ve written my own advice to students seeking a Ph.D. Here is Norbert Wiener’s, from 1954 (The Human Use of Human Beings, p.133-4):

Properly speaking, the artist, the writer, and the scientist should be moved by such an irresistible impulse to create that, even if they were not being paid for their work, they would be willing to pay to get the chance to do it. However, we are in a period in which forms have largely superseded educational content and one which is moving toward an ever-increasing thinness of educational content. It is now considered perhaps more a matter of social prestige to obtain a higher degree and follow what may be regarded as a cultural career, than a matter of any deep impulse.

[...]

I mean merely that if the thesis is not in fact such an overwhelming task, it should at least be in intention the gateway to vigorous creative work. Lord only knows there are enough problems yet to be solved, books to be written, and music to be composed! Yet for all but a very few, the path to these lies through the performance of perfunctory tasks which in nine cases out of ten have no compelling reason to be performed. Heaven save us from the first novels which are written because a young man desires the prestige of being a novelist rather than because he has something to say! Heaven save us likewise from the mathematical papers which are correct and elegant but without body or spirit. Heaven save us above all from the snobbery which not only admits the possibility of this thin and perfunctory work, but which cries out in a spirit of shrinking arrogance against the competition of vigor and ideas, wherever these may be found!

In other words, when there is communication without need for communication, merely so that someone may earn the social and intellectual prestige of becoming a priest of communication, the quality and communicative value of the message drop like a plummet…

Apaprently there's a whole industry devoted to support of PhD studnets in Aus

Apparently there's a whole industry devoted to support of PhD students in Aus.

How come I haven't already discovered them?

I'm now a member of PhinisheD, and that's how I found the link above. Not many Aussies on the site, though.

Online Research communities

Some thoughts:

Candidates (and other researchers of course) who would once have bumped into people in faculty common rooms and university coffee shops are now bumping into each other on the internet. Several comments left here, and comments I have left in other places, are evidence of the networking that is taking place.

I have just had an email from A., a research Masters student at a non-research intensive Uni. I first met her at QPR, but now we are talking about her ethics approval for a project involving blogging. Her ethics committee has never dealt with these issues before, and I have been able to give her some references to follow up for her application. In turn, her experience might be a vignette for me, if not in my thesis then in an article. I also get interesting and useful emails from a friend in Canada who works in research support and has a wide range of academic clients, and who has given me a couple of contacts. And of course there is the AOIR email list where I have found really useful information, and contributed to a few discussion.

It may be surprising, but the huge Knitting and Crochet community Ravelry has also provided me with some useful stories for vignettes. I have started a group called PhD Procrastination, and there is lots of sharing about process going on there. Most of the members are in the US, of cousre, but in many ways those with ABD status (All But Dissertation - those whose coursework requirements are complete and who are now writing their dissertation) have the same experience as Aus candidates do, especially if they aren't on campus. It seems that the coursework requirement doesn't prevent isolation or loneliness while the dissertation is being written, as some people seem to believe that it does. Also, it seems to me that they provide evidence that dissertation 'advisers' in the US are not always trained for this work.

Peer-reviewed article

Sandra and I have had an article published in an online journal. This is a biggie for me: my first publication that wasn't in conference proceedings and my second peer-reviewed article. I still get the odd enquiry about my publication in the Ascilite 2006 proceedings; recently I gave permission for it to be republished in an anthology that will be published in June.

Annette Markham on the shifting ground of ethnography

Life online, pp79-83. This echoes what I wrote here.

I really like the structure of this book. With a lot more academic underpinnings added (as would be appropriate for a thesis as opposed to a book) it will be a useful one for me to keep in mind. I especially like the way she splits the text between 'conversationalised' transcripts and commentary (same font but a device on the page to separate them - I think a lot of fonts can be really messy and irritating to read - this was a problem I have been wrestling with). And her use of 'Interludes' between the chapters is a really good idea for me.

So she uses two fonts: Courier for the actual transcripts and a serifed font (Times or similar) for everything else. Apart from the device I mentioned (actually a centered asterisk) and italics for the reflections on the transcripts and events of the project that she's adding at the time of writing, there is no other 'play' with the fomatting, and I think that's a good way to go.

It's funny that I first read this book a couple of years ago, but it's only now I can really appreciate it. I sometimes think that my general stubbornness in life goes against me in academic work - it seems to take me a while to really internalise an idea and until I do I have trouble working with it. But once I've got it, it's there for good and it becomes an integral part of my thinking.

Some more Aus PhD blogs

Chris, recently submitted Science PhD @ Macquarie. Permission granted to use the blog by email 1 May 08.

And from there a connection to Dinesh - I can't see much about  PhD on this blog but I'll look again later.

Also, Jim reminded me that he'd sent me this. I'm glad he did - it had slipped through th cracks in the washing machine that has been the first third of this year.

Henry Jenkins comes a bit late to the party

Here he is on why academics should blog.

PhD comics

I would say that the main theme that emerges from the PhD comics series is that of lack of agency - the student is generally depicted as being at the mercy of their adviser. It seems to strike a chord with many PhD candidates. I guess this would partly reflect experience of the traditional type of candidate rather than than older candidates, but maybe not. I wonder if older candidates feel this too?

List of possible interviewees

DDOG Masud
Angela Brew, Education Fac
Diana Day, Koori Centre (article in Synergy)
Someone from SUPRA?
Alison Lee

My Research Report

It's gone to Peter and Judyth. All 10,996 words of it -  but who's counting?

Far from perfect, but with its shortcomings acknowledged.

Reading notes

Check this book: "Ash Amin and Patrick Cohendet's book Architectures of Knowledge presents some great arguments for the existence of virtual communities of practice." In Fisher Research at  306.3 205   

Reviews of Uses of Blogs

New journal

International Journal of Internet Research Ethics. Accessed here.
TOC:

Small Talk
Annette Markham

Ethical Approaches to Robotic Data Gathering in Academic Research
Gove Allen, Dan Burk, and Charles Ess

Data as Representation: Beyond Anonymity in e-Research Ethics
Annamaria Carusi

Researching the Researchers: Market Researchers, Child Subjects and the
Problem of “Informed” Consent
Sara M. Grimes

Emerging Legal Issues in the Collection and Dissemination of Internet-
Sourced Research Data: Part I, Basic Tort Law Issues and Negligence
Tomas A. Lipinski

Creating a Web of Attribution in the Feminist Blogosphere
Erin Hvizkak

Ritual

A post in Ravelry about the ritual involved with PhD in the US has made me think about the essentially private nature of the PhD here and the lack of ritual, except for graduation. Adds to the discussion about the supervisory 'relationship' and the intimacy of this. And this to the unexamined, non-transparent nature of the thing.

Storytelling

This might be interesting  - a defence of storytelling as methodology (from Mathemagenic). Need to look more closely. But may be redundant - I'm not sure I need to defend my methodology like she might have to in her discipline.

Stephen Sheely's article

http://www.herdsa.org.au/confs/1996/sheely2.html

Notes for QPR paper

A PhD comic that is relevant to the paper on what candidates learned from presenting...

ITL's list of resources for supervisors

http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/supervision/resources/biblist_themes.pdf

Writing forms

From Kamler & Thomson (2006): "Some kinds of ethnographic work...are more amenable to artistic media as a means of conveying multiple perspectives and voices, contextual specificities and researcher reflexivity" (p142) Also in this chapter, the example of Ruth Behar's 'setting the scene'.

Thoughts on Kamler and Thomson

                           

                              

Kamler and Thomson: Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for supervision

This was just published last year and it's intended for supervisors, but I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested the the process of doing/getting a PhD. They take a big picture view to the concepts of writing/research, then proceed to apply these ideas to all aspects of writing research, from using the literature through thesis structural issues down to sentence structure.

It mirrors my key concepts really well, so of course I think it's bloody brilliant. It reviews and deconstructs most of the major 'how-to' books on the market, and it talks about writing as a key research tool that as been ignored and relegated to the status of a skill, rather being seen than an integral part of research. They point out that language is no longer seen as transparent and ask why more attention isn't, then, being paid to writing and how it develops thinking when you're doing research. I feel as if someone's written my thesis! No, of course they haven't, but it certainly does pick up on a lot of the ideas that I've been developing.

                        

                              

Kamler and Thomson: Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for supervision

This was just published last year and it's intended for supervisors, but I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested the the process of doing/getting a PhD. They take a big picture view to the concepts of writing/research, then proceed to apply these ideas to all aspects of writing research, from using the literature through thesis structural issues down to sentence structure.

It mirrors my key concepts really well, so of course I think it's bloody brilliant. It reviews and deconstructs most of the major 'how-to' books on the market, and it talks about writing as a key research tool that as been ignored and relegated to the status of a skill, rather being seen than an integral part of research. They point out that language is no longer seen as transparent and ask why more attention isn't, then, being paid to writing and how it develops thinking when you're doing research. I feel as if someone's written my thesis! No, of course they haven't, but it certainly does pick up on a lot of the ideas that I've been developing.

Resources for HRD students

A useful list:

http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/hdr/resources/6.3.html