It's finished!
A complete PDF version will be up at some point for anyone who's interested.
:)
Showing posts with label Dissertation-related. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dissertation-related. Show all posts
Tuesday, 25 November 2008
Thursday, 28 August 2008
Side-effects of research(!)
On another note, I realised a few days ago that my research has generated MASSES of extra documentation of many kinds (handwritten and electronic notes by the bucketload, tables of blog posts, tables of categories of my own and others' invention, all the postings on this blog of course, my personal research diary from last term...).
What IS all this stuff? What happens to it when I finish? It's a kind of record of the process of thinking through all these ideas and it bears eloquent witness, I think, to the fact that a dissertation is no mean feat.
What IS all this stuff? What happens to it when I finish? It's a kind of record of the process of thinking through all these ideas and it bears eloquent witness, I think, to the fact that a dissertation is no mean feat.
Sunday, 3 August 2008
Something strange...
...I thought I'd seen the last of Teen Second Life back at the Lib 2.0 You? conference...
...and it struck me as very strange at the time. Since my PC at home doesn't seem capable of much more than a few Word documents and a bit of 'Net browsing at any one time, I haven't experimented any further with the memory-intensive SecondLife, but looking for some education theories to bolster my dissertation introduction I stumbled on this:
http://www.schome.ac.uk/
Yes, "Schome" is coming, neither school nor home (actually it's a surreal educational online graphic adventure roleplay, in pre-1990s language!).
There are some truly bizarre photomontages on their blog, of these kids with strange digitally-created heads. I hope this isn't the future of education, just for the sake of good taste!
Seriously, I am a library school student who spends more than half his time online, but come on! This is very strange. It's not like I'm unfamiliar with change in IT; my lifespan has exactly (to the day, actually) coincided with that of the PC, so I've pretty much "tracked changes" since the beginning, and only just kept up, but now I feel like a digital old-timer!
I suppose blogging is just "so '90s" now.
...and it struck me as very strange at the time. Since my PC at home doesn't seem capable of much more than a few Word documents and a bit of 'Net browsing at any one time, I haven't experimented any further with the memory-intensive SecondLife, but looking for some education theories to bolster my dissertation introduction I stumbled on this:
http://www.schome.ac.uk/
Yes, "Schome" is coming, neither school nor home (actually it's a surreal educational online graphic adventure roleplay, in pre-1990s language!).
There are some truly bizarre photomontages on their blog, of these kids with strange digitally-created heads. I hope this isn't the future of education, just for the sake of good taste!
Seriously, I am a library school student who spends more than half his time online, but come on! This is very strange. It's not like I'm unfamiliar with change in IT; my lifespan has exactly (to the day, actually) coincided with that of the PC, so I've pretty much "tracked changes" since the beginning, and only just kept up, but now I feel like a digital old-timer!
I suppose blogging is just "so '90s" now.
Writing a Dissertation - Part 1
While I may not have "done" much on the dissertation work this last fortnight, I have actually been very busy!
I've been settling into my summer job, had an interview up in London, and been working through a "real" content analysis using my new, improved (probably to be re-improved!) coding scheme!
Also, I've been mulling over the ideas my amazing supervisor and I thrashed out over a coffee last meeting. Plus, I've been reading the research guide in the latest ed. of Turabian. It's a rather good, concise, yet detailed, punchy and warmly encouraging blow-by-blow method for just getting down and DOING the dissertation writing!
I've realised that I've taken a rather "interesting" approach to dissertation drafting: I've actually written up most chapters of the thesis already, before I've done the definitive research upon which it is (to be) based!
This is actually an approach vindicated by authors such as Bolker - to get down and write without worrying at all if what you're writing is good, or properly organised etc. It's just a nice way to get oneself moving, get the ideas out of one's head and onto paper where they're not so daunting and may actually suggest new and better ideas.
In addition to this "zero draft", I have a small ream of notes produced in the Bolker free-writing style just documenting the progress of the whole thing - I think it's really helpful to have a "personal blog" which you only use for yourself. Taking back the "journalistic" roots, actually writing a "journal" for one's own personal benefit!
In my last meeting, with my supervisor, we talked about the overall outline of the dissertation, or, in more immediate terms, the plan of action that's slowly taking shape in my brain. It was very encouraging to hear my supervisor talk about possible conclusions and how I could try to relate my results to my aims. I could envisage this finished dissertation sitting there, making sense and hanging together. Wow!
Sitting here with a massive stack of research papers that I've been sorting through for my literature review (and references throughout the report) has made me see this beautiful vision again; the papers seem to fall (given a bit of mental effort and re-shuffling) into various categories... and thinking of the main themes of each paper and each category as I sort through them, I start to re-imagine the "story" (c.f. the Turabian research guide) that they are telling in the context of my research, and how they will support each section!
I got another useful mental model from my last supervision; the idea that each section of the report must at least briefly reference some or all of the other sections, but have as its main emphasis the points it alone is responsible for making. The whole in the part, and the part in the whole!
The physics graduate in me immediately translated this into a series of waveforms with the peak shifting from left to right as you look down the series (the x-axis is "section of report referred to" and the y-axis is "word count") - but that's not a mandatory visualisation! ;)
I've been settling into my summer job, had an interview up in London, and been working through a "real" content analysis using my new, improved (probably to be re-improved!) coding scheme!
Also, I've been mulling over the ideas my amazing supervisor and I thrashed out over a coffee last meeting. Plus, I've been reading the research guide in the latest ed. of Turabian. It's a rather good, concise, yet detailed, punchy and warmly encouraging blow-by-blow method for just getting down and DOING the dissertation writing!
I've realised that I've taken a rather "interesting" approach to dissertation drafting: I've actually written up most chapters of the thesis already, before I've done the definitive research upon which it is (to be) based!
This is actually an approach vindicated by authors such as Bolker - to get down and write without worrying at all if what you're writing is good, or properly organised etc. It's just a nice way to get oneself moving, get the ideas out of one's head and onto paper where they're not so daunting and may actually suggest new and better ideas.
In addition to this "zero draft", I have a small ream of notes produced in the Bolker free-writing style just documenting the progress of the whole thing - I think it's really helpful to have a "personal blog" which you only use for yourself. Taking back the "journalistic" roots, actually writing a "journal" for one's own personal benefit!
In my last meeting, with my supervisor, we talked about the overall outline of the dissertation, or, in more immediate terms, the plan of action that's slowly taking shape in my brain. It was very encouraging to hear my supervisor talk about possible conclusions and how I could try to relate my results to my aims. I could envisage this finished dissertation sitting there, making sense and hanging together. Wow!
Sitting here with a massive stack of research papers that I've been sorting through for my literature review (and references throughout the report) has made me see this beautiful vision again; the papers seem to fall (given a bit of mental effort and re-shuffling) into various categories... and thinking of the main themes of each paper and each category as I sort through them, I start to re-imagine the "story" (c.f. the Turabian research guide) that they are telling in the context of my research, and how they will support each section!
I got another useful mental model from my last supervision; the idea that each section of the report must at least briefly reference some or all of the other sections, but have as its main emphasis the points it alone is responsible for making. The whole in the part, and the part in the whole!
The physics graduate in me immediately translated this into a series of waveforms with the peak shifting from left to right as you look down the series (the x-axis is "section of report referred to" and the y-axis is "word count") - but that's not a mandatory visualisation! ;)
Friday, 27 June 2008
Library 2 You? Mini-conference, mini-report!
Yesterday I attended the Library 2.0 You? mini-conference. There were five speakers and four topics:
- Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts
- Virtual Environments (e.g. Second Life)
- Facebook and the Library Catalogue
- Virtual Reference
The first session was the one I actually felt I needed to see (though the others were certainly interesting and useful in their own right). Two librarians from the University of Bath took us through the whole process of impementing a library blog, from focus groups who apparently welcomed the idea of cutting down on mass email alerts, to planning how many blogs to publish and what sort of areas to cover, to the benefits in terms of time-saving, feedback through statistics on blog views, and the problems of promoting blogs to new readers.
One of the speakers made a connection with SCONUL's "vision" for 2010, saying that blogging especially meets the criteria of Personalisation and Collaboration.
The virtual worlds talk was surprisingly interesting, given how little interest I'd taken in Second Life at the LILAC 2008 - and it was somewhat worrying to find out about the virtual worlds being marketed to teens and kids as young as 3...! Apparently Teen Second Life has more users in the USA than the adult version. There were a lot of mentions of cultural change and attention economy and so on... it made me feel a bit strange, having grown up in the 80s and early 90s and just sort of stumbled across all these frankly rather nerdy things which are now becoming big trends (for how long? Even blogging is sort of a has-been by mainstream media standards!) and finding them intersting but not fascinating. What do people see in them? Apparently there's a very recent report from EduServe (hat tip to lindsay55 on CILIP's Communities for that!) on this whole thing.
Facebook and the library catalogue - an interesting confluence from a programming point of view, and I learned a lot about how Facebook works (slightly alarmed by the mention of all the private data on my profile being dumped to the application server every time I access an application... I will be deleting some apps soon, I'm sure!). But is it much use for the library? It would be good to have more feedback on this. I can see the value of having a Facebook presence, certainly, and I love the new OCLC WorldCat citation app, for example. But how is this going to look in future? Will we achieve the "pervasive library" mentioned in this Talis paper? "Pervasive library" was one of the terms used yesterday, but so far it seems the worry is whether things like this will give us the image "invasive library" (I don't think we should worry!).
The final talk was on virtual reference, another application I'd had my doubts about, having seen it in "action" but getting very little use from library users... However, apparently it is in full swing at wlv.ac.uk and we had a session of audience participative evaluation of some (anonymised!) samples of real chat (ah, the excitement!). It's not so trendy any more but I think it's still a good concept and if users like it, why not? Still I only just resisted the temptation to ask, "why not just get everyone on Meebo?"...
All in all, a good day, with fine speakers and good catering ;) - it was good to see such a good turn out from all over the country too. Useful for reminding me that Web 2.0 is not just about blogging.
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
More Web 2.0 fun...
...this time courtesy of Wordle (and a hat-tip to Meredith Farkas!):
Yes, it's my dissertation literature review as a tag-cloud! I beleive it must be putting size proportional to word frequency, and clustering terms that occur close to each other in the text closer in the cloud.
That's kind of my dream method for the dissertation actually; to make some sort of automated word frequency analysis and do all kinds of cool stuff to it... but given it's only a Masters and not a PhD in computer science I think we'll have to settle for plain old crank-the-handle Content Analysis.
Yes, it's my dissertation literature review as a tag-cloud! I beleive it must be putting size proportional to word frequency, and clustering terms that occur close to each other in the text closer in the cloud.
That's kind of my dream method for the dissertation actually; to make some sort of automated word frequency analysis and do all kinds of cool stuff to it... but given it's only a Masters and not a PhD in computer science I think we'll have to settle for plain old crank-the-handle Content Analysis.
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Motivation!
This is not strictly about dissertation work, but rather about the whole Masters shebang.
I was catching up on PhD Comics this lunchtime and pondering the reasons why we go through the whole process of qualifying, especially given the well-known and thoroughly discussed and researched controversies over qualifications vs. experience in the library and information field.
Having heard all this cynicism and doom-saying since I got involved in libraries and information over 2 years ago (one can hardly avoid it even in the proffesional journals) I must say that I'm actually quite positive about my masters now that I've made it to the dissertation phase.
I am really interested in the subject and I think I'm likely to write more than I need for the dissertation. I genuinely want to share my findings and use this area of professional knowledge and practice with others, and I hope I can find some work in the academic library sector (eventually; I will be realistic enough to work in another sector if the "right" job doesn't arrive straight awy). All told, I feel pretty lucky to be doing this and I hope I'll look back on the process fondly.
I was catching up on PhD Comics this lunchtime and pondering the reasons why we go through the whole process of qualifying, especially given the well-known and thoroughly discussed and researched controversies over qualifications vs. experience in the library and information field.
Having heard all this cynicism and doom-saying since I got involved in libraries and information over 2 years ago (one can hardly avoid it even in the proffesional journals) I must say that I'm actually quite positive about my masters now that I've made it to the dissertation phase.
I am really interested in the subject and I think I'm likely to write more than I need for the dissertation. I genuinely want to share my findings and use this area of professional knowledge and practice with others, and I hope I can find some work in the academic library sector (eventually; I will be realistic enough to work in another sector if the "right" job doesn't arrive straight awy). All told, I feel pretty lucky to be doing this and I hope I'll look back on the process fondly.
Monday, 23 June 2008
Library 2 You?
There is a one-day conference / workshop entitled "Library 2 You?: Experiences of Web 2.0 in the Library Environment" this Thursday at my university. I can't wait for the session on library blogging. It should be very relevant to my work and cutting-edge and so on, plus I am getting a bit bogged down in the literature review now and maybe some inspiration will shake me up and get me back on track. Hopefully I'll meet some nice people too and make some good professional contacts. I'll do a write-up of my impressions and publish it here.
Feeling a bit of trepidation now that I have my almost-full-time job scheduled for next week; I really look forward to having the structure to plan my life around, of course, but I'm also concerned how I'm going to make the dissertation happen in 3 free days per week over 4 months...! I'm sure it must be possible; others have done it in much harder circumstances. Any tips most welcome.
Feeling a bit of trepidation now that I have my almost-full-time job scheduled for next week; I really look forward to having the structure to plan my life around, of course, but I'm also concerned how I'm going to make the dissertation happen in 3 free days per week over 4 months...! I'm sure it must be possible; others have done it in much harder circumstances. Any tips most welcome.
Wednesday, 18 June 2008
The real life of a postgrad researcher
After an hour of tramping round a deserted campus with a building site obscuring the cashpoints and no food outlets open at this hour, I am safely ensconced in the 24-hour computer lab to complete a 1-day pilot test of the blog currency criterion. Oh! for the 24-hour library... mind you, the aircon is good in here!
Saturday, 14 June 2008
A lighter note...
Here's a link to some classic advice on dealing with the dissertation blues, which I first came across in a book entitled "Writing a Thesis"... I don't remember the author though.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1122129
And here's a poem which I clipped from "The Epigram", Bristol university's student paper:
The dissertation's fine and well;
My academic summit.
But social life has gone [to] hell (1)
____________________________
(1) My footnotes watched it plummet
Burroughs, D. (2008). The Epigram. Epigram, 128. 28th Jan.
The poetic image and the rhyme scheme is lovely; but I inserted the "to" in order to make it grammatically and poetically complete... I hope he checked his dissertation more carefully than his epigram!
Both of these little snippets currently grace the wall above my desk; hence the connection to my dissertation, which is progressing even now... slowly!
I'm halfway through the bloglist and checking all the start dates of the blogs. Tedious work but quite useful. Not much point doing a comparative study if they are all on different timescales, or if I don't compensate for this. Also it's handy to show longer-running vs better established blogs. I think the Del.icio.us list will be finished by Monday.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1122129
And here's a poem which I clipped from "The Epigram", Bristol university's student paper:
The dissertation's fine and well;
My academic summit.
But social life has gone [to] hell (1)
____________________________
(1) My footnotes watched it plummet
Burroughs, D. (2008). The Epigram. Epigram, 128. 28th Jan.
The poetic image and the rhyme scheme is lovely; but I inserted the "to" in order to make it grammatically and poetically complete... I hope he checked his dissertation more carefully than his epigram!
Both of these little snippets currently grace the wall above my desk; hence the connection to my dissertation, which is progressing even now... slowly!
I'm halfway through the bloglist and checking all the start dates of the blogs. Tedious work but quite useful. Not much point doing a comparative study if they are all on different timescales, or if I don't compensate for this. Also it's handy to show longer-running vs better established blogs. I think the Del.icio.us list will be finished by Monday.
I got a reply from Walt Crawford today too, after asking a bit about how he put together his two books on Academic and Public sector library blogs. I think I can safely say I have contacted pretty much everyone involved in this area of research, with a very few exceptions (authors of similiar papers). That's one of the nice things about doing this particular subject; it's very web-oriented and hence very connected.
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