Raising Questions about the Digital Dissertation

1. Raising Questions about theDigital Dissertation an idea whose time has come? Lee Ann Ghajar ABD, American History Department of History and Art History George Mason University

2. It started with Xena, Warrior Princess In 1998, Chris Boese, doctoral candidate in the Department of Rhetoric and Communications at Rensselaer Polytechnic University, published a path-breaking, on-line, interactive dissertation, Chaining Rhetorical Visions from the Margins of the Margins to the Mainstream in the Zenaverse

3. Along came Virginia Kuhn In 2005, Virginia Kuhn defended a media-rich digital dissertation, Ways of Composing: Visual Literacy in the Digital Age in the Department of English at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.Two hundred pages of text, hyperlinks, moving images, still images, and intensely layered annotations comprise her work. http://youtu.be/bpl1SPOqdOg

4. Examples in history scholarship? Sorry, your search returned 0 results.

5. Present status At the time I write this, it has been quite a few years since I completed my dissertation and yet there has been little movement toward expanding the typical form. My dissertation represents progressive research and it preserves the tenets of academic scholarship. …the academy’s resistance to the digital is deep-seated… While print is still absolutely crucial to advanced literacy, it is simply not the exclusive mode any longer, or for very much longer. • Virginia Kuhn, August 2012

6. A holding pattern • Why is the digital dissertation in a holding pattern? • Because nobody’s quite sure what constitutes a digital dissertation the digital dissertation is not yet widely recognized as a critical methodology for presenting and defending scholarly argument.

7. The student perspective Responses to a recent survey of history doctoral students at George Mason University raised the following questions: • What is a digital dissertation? • What are standards for a digital dissertation? how is it evaluated? • What changes to the graduate curriculum are vital to support academic work in digital history? • What institutional changes in dissertation submission and preservation are requisite to support digital formats? • What changes in the academy are requisite to validate the digital dissertation as a viable milestone in career development?

8. Who’s writing one? At George Mason University, 60 percent of the students in the PhD program in history responded to a questionnaire about digital dissertations. Two-thirds of respondents are either fully committed to or seriously considering including a digital component in the dissertation.

9. Comparative responses • Students who have not yet advanced to candidacy indicated a greater likelihood of including a digital component in a dissertation than ABDs. • Students who have not yet advanced to candidacy have generally enrolled more recently in the doctoral program than those who are ABD. • The academic experience of more recently enrolled students reflects increased availability of courses, research assistantships, and other academic and financial support for digital scholarship in the institution as well as universal expansion of the digital humanities field.

10. ABD and non-ABD

11. Why did 33 percent say “No!”? • Respondents who stated they did not intend to include a digital component in their dissertations were asked, “Why not?” • They could select several responses from a multiple-choice list or write their own explanations. • Their answers reflected personal concerns and intellectual considerations, but also emphasized the nebulous status of the digital dissertation in history scholarship.

12. Why stick to the traditional dissertation? • Two-thirds said digital work would not add to the exposition of their thesis • One-half believe that a traditional dissertation is more advantageous for career advancement • Two-thirds believe a digital dissertation is too much work because it requires learning technical skills in addition to research and writing.

13. What they said • I want to finish as soon as possible, and if a digital component slows me down, it may have to be a post-PhD project. • Too time consuming even though I have the technical skills. • My first goal is to finish the dissertation, so time and the number of additional skills I would need to learn to accomplish this is critical

14. What they said, part II • My dissertation committee will be hard to convince. • My technical skills aren’t adequate. Don’t know where I could learn the technical skills I might need. • There are few examples for students to use other than big data collection/visualization projects. • With the rapid growth of technology the skills that I learn this year to create a component may be outdated by the time my dissertation is ready to present whereas a written project doesn’t have the rapid change in formatting.

15. Why some said, “Yes!” Those who said “Yes!” described the following plans: • Mapping location of events • Possibly creating a website as a supplement to the dissertation rather than a replacement • Interactive mapping • Presenting multiple images for analysis and comparison • Searchable catalog of images accompanying items discussed within the written component

16. Why some said, “Yes!”, part II • Visualizing changes in a nineteenth-century industrial site over time • Much of the data for my dissertation will be organized in a database which I have built, but the final product will probably be a traditional manuscript. • Digital archive of images at the core of my study, interactive maps for the people in my study, and a digital presentation of the overall dissertation.

17. Why some said “Yes!”, part III • Planning to link dissertation footnotes to primary sources in an on-line archive in Omeka. • An Omeka archive with analysis in an accompanying exhibit • Text-mining a corpus of newspaper articles to which I will apply ngram analysis and topic modeling. • Study of residential segregation patterns using Omeka and Neatline to display data and research text

18. Technical skills? Asked what technical skills they needed to build digital components into the dissertation, respondents answered

19. What do doctoral students need? • Define the concept of digital dissertation? • Institutionalized standards for evaluating the digital dissertation commensurate with academic standards for the traditional text-based dissertation. • Revamped the graduate history curriculum to incorporate theory and practice of digital history, including courses in technology. • Validation of the digital dissertation as a viable milestone on professional career paths.

20. Conclusions The digital dissertation presents unique challenges to students and to universities to redefine what a dissertation is and to explore and institutionalize revised standards for dissertation evaluation, publication, and preservation. As the culmination of doctoral study, the dissertation exemplifies that the author is able to construct, present, and defend an historical argument adding to an existing body of knowledge. It seems counter-intuitive to suppose that these new arguments must live in old bottles, that new exposition modalities possible through the expansion of publishing formats and research technologies would not also enable–perhaps even mandate–alternative dissertation formats.