Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities

EDITORS' BIOS:

Abstracts

Part 1: Issues in Digital Scholarship and Doctoral These

1. “Dissertating in Public," Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Michigan State University, USA

Kathleen Fitzpatrick analyses the sudden isolation graduate students find themselves in during the dissertation process. In the humanities, she observes, graduate students are regularly habituated into an anxiety of intellectual independence whereby sharing ideas, collaboration and publishing work in progress is to be considered suspect and potentially diminishing scholarly value. Digital scholarship, she argues, can eliminate or at least sideline such anxieties (and their untimeliness) by creating a participating public, testing ideas, interesting possible publishers early and creating a community of scholarship that, together with the support of PhD-granting institutions, endorses ‘new kinds of open work’.

2. “Publication Models and Open Access,” Cheryl Ball, Wayne State University, USA

Cheryl Ball emphasizes the need for open work in the form of open access facilitation. Adding a historical view towards digital scholarship formats and highlighting the library’s role in archival practices, she suggests that digital dissertations play a significant role in embodying the possibility of sharing scholarship publicly and that librarians are pivotal collaborators for any digital scholarship endeavor. Significantly, Ball also emphasizes the need for openness when evaluating digital dissertation forms: why not approach digital work ‘on its own terms’ in order to allow for ‘radical scholarship’?

3. “The Digital Monograph? Key Issues in Evaluation,” Virginia Kuhn, University of Southern California, USA

Since defending her own digital dissertation in 2005, Virginia Kuhn has honed a loosely established rubric, refined in collaboration with a group of students, with which to assess digital theses. Three areas, ‘Conceptual Core, Research Component, Form + Content’, each feature three additional foci that leave ample room for epistemological play and space beyond a traditionally alphabetized, linear text-only dissertation. For example, digital scholarship need not be ‘thesis-driven prose’, it can establish a ‘controlling idea’ presented in media other than text. Any kind of rubric or assessment measure, Kuhn warns, also requires a rethinking of review formats, however: annotation and feedback, too, will necessitate multimodal features such that radical scholarship and deep collaboration, echoing Ball’s and Fitzpatrick’s terms, become part of evaluative considerations, and feedback formats allow for non-linear, creative interruptions.

4. “#DigiDiss: A Project Exploring Digital Dissertation Policies, Practices, and Archiving,” Kathie Gossett, University of California, Davis and Liza Potts, Michigan State University, USA

Outlining the trials and tribulations of archiving born-digital dissertations, Kathie Gossett and Liza Potts detail a study they have conducted over more than a decade, the ultimate goal being the formation of a persistent, searchable database of these projects. The results of a National Endowment for the Humanities funded workshop conducted with stakeholders from several academic institutions, Gossett and Potts note their current focus as they partner with the Humanities Commons framework and also work on establishing a network of like-minded scholars for support when working in non-traditional formats.

5. “The Gutenberg Galaxy will be Pixelated or How to Think of Digital Scholarship as the Present,” Anke Finger, University of Connecticut, USA

Anke Finger presents an incisive argument about the shifting nature of the book as both a ‘medium and artifact’, and one which offers exciting possibilities with the affordances of the digital. However, academic institutions, Finger notes, have not kept pace with these new forms and this is due, in large part, to a lack of evaluative measures and experience in applying them, making it risky at best to embark upon a large-scale digital project. Using her experience as a PhD advisor and founding director of the Digital Humanities and Media Studies initiative at the University of Connecticut, Finger argues for support for digital literacy in humanities-based graduate education. Specifically, students need ‘access to scholarly inquiry and research innovation beyond print’, and this should come early in graduate education in order to provide the type of scaffolding needed if universities are seriously committed to digital scholarship.

6. "Findable, Impactful, Citable, Usable, Sustainable (FICUS): A Heuristic for Digital Publishing," Nicky Agate, Cheryl Ball, Allison Belan, Monica McCormick, Joshua Neds-Fox

Creating digital projects that are findable, impactful, citable, usable, and sustainable (FICUS) is a challenging task, one that most authors, supervisors, editors, and publishers have difficulty fulfilling in this still-relatively-new digital publishing environment. Projects that don’t prepare for these challenges from the outset will face assured obsolescence quicker than authors might anticipate. This chapter presents a heuristic with a series of questions, presented as the FICUS checklist, that authors can work through to plan their digital projects, either in collaboration with other team members, their supervisors, librarians, or publishers they might work with.

Part 2: Shaping the Digital Dissertation in Action

7. “Navigating Institutions and Fully Embracing the Interdisciplinary Humanities: American Studies and the Digital Dissertation,” Katherine Walden, University of Notre Dame and Thomas Oates, University of Iowa, USA

Katherine Walden and her advisor, Thomas Oates, describe the questions they contended with and the steps taken to create and defend Walden’s interdisciplinary digital thesis project in the field of American Studies. While there are signs of the field’s recent support for and of digital scholarship, they note, many questions remain. And since many of the obstacles to Walden’s dissertation were logistical and administrative in nature, her dissertation became a springboard to a larger conversation among faculty at the University of Iowa. Walden and Oates argue for the power of a precedent, and their chapter joins the expanding catalogue of models, offering both conceptual and instrumental advice to future doctoral students as well as their advisors.

8. “MADSpace: A Janus-faced Digital Companion to a PhD Dissertation in Chinese History,” Cécile Armand, Aix-Marseille Université, France

Cécile Armand extends the call for rethinking the nature of the dissertation and academic argument in general. In MADSpace: A Janus-faced Digital Companion to a PhD Dissertation in Chinese History, Armand describes a digital database she created as a companion to her dissertation in Chinese history. This companion allowed her to make use of primary source materials that are not typically considered in scholarly work; these include newspaper advertisements as well as ‘professional handbooks, business materials, municipal

archives (including correspondence, regulations and technical sketches), street photographs, and to a lesser extent, original maps and videos’. Although Armand’s first concern was the creation of a permanent home for these materials, this database actually impacted the written portion of her dissertation project since it allowed her a spatial view of her subject, for instance, which opened up new insights.

9. “Publish less, Communicate more! Reflecting the Potentials and Challenges of a Hybrid Project,” Sarah-Mai Dang, Philipps University of Marburg, Germany

Sarah-Mai Dang, working from within the context of German academic parameters, questions a publication process that relies on economic structures often beyond the reach of the graduate and maintaining the ‘symbolic capital of the book’. Instead, she chose to publish her research in four different formats, trying to undo a staid and costly convention that not only prevented affordable (for both author and reader) public dissemination, but also a speedy delivery of scholarship and access to an international audience. Simultaneously, as a media studies scholar, she turned this process into a research project, taking stock of data to measure impact.

10. “#SocialDiss: Transforming the Dissertation into Networked Knowledge Production,” Erin Rose Glass, Senior Developer Educator at Digital Ocean

The desire for and influence of a larger audience for academic work is the focus of Erin Rose Glass as she describes the background and process of #SocialDiss, a project in which she posted drafts of her dissertation to a variety of online platforms for public review. Gauging the reviews and the many types of public and community engagement produced, Glass argues that academic writing, especially at the student level, would benefit from digital infrastructure, practices, and incentives that emphasize collaboration and community building.

11. “Highly Available Dissertations: Open Sourcing Humanities Scholarship” Lisa Tagliaferri, MIT, Cambridge, USA

Lisa Tagliafari reinforces the need for academic work to reach a wider audience using her own dissertation as a case study. In Highly Available Dissertations: Open Sourcing Humanities Scholarship, not only does Tagliafari advocate for open source, hers was also the first chapter offered as a preprint to this collection, via MIT’s database. Her essay describes open source, open access and Creative Commons before offering suggestions for stakeholders to consider when navigating various levels of access.

12. “Digital Thesis as a Website: SoftPhD.com, From Graphic Design to Online Tools,” Anthony Masure, University Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, France

Anthony Masure’s approach deepens the notion of his dissertation work’s readability, working from inside France’s academic system. Noting the technical hurdles of constantly updating a webpage, for example, he designs his PhD-thesis website by cleaning HTML code and without using a CMS, thus aiming for a ‘true’ version of his dissertation that, in fact, supersedes the version he submitted to obtain his degree. Ultimately, Masure leads us back to Tim Berners-Lee by advocating for sharing knowledge without borders and critically engaging with the potentially limiting affordances of specific media prescribed for knowledge production.

13. “Writing With Images, Sounds And Movements,” Lena Redman, Monash University, Australia

Dismissing the epistemological confines of traditional thesis composition software such as MS Word, Lena Redman (aka Elena Petrov) devises her own theory of multimodal creativity by analyzing what she calls ‘deep remixability’ and its interdependence with ‘cinematic bricolage’ as a research methodology. Her thesis, composed with InDesign and the Adobe Cloud, employs mnemonic material and autobiographical information to enhance what Redman calls feedback loops. These loops deepen the researcher’s individualization of knowledge as her intellectual work merges with memory-work to allow for unique meaning-making processes and what Brier has called ‘cybernetics of human knowing.’

14. “Precarity and Promise: Negotiating Research Ethics and Copyright in a History Dissertation,” Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe, Carleton College, USA

If the digitally networked world provides the ability to author with images as well as a more open form of academic scholarship, it also raises concomitant ethical considerations around areas such as privacy and copyright. Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe confronted these issues in her own dissertation project completed in a department of History in the United States. Sharpe’s research included extensive archival research of sensitive materials in her exploration of visual culture and disability. Given the topic, Sharpe found herself weighing the need for visual evidence with the ethics of exposing images culled from the March of Dimes.

15. “Lessons from the Sandbox: Linking Readership, Representation, and Reflection in Tactile Paths,” Christopher A. Williams, University of Music and the Performing Arts Graz, Doctoral School for Artistic Research, Austria.

Christopher A. Williams explores the deeper layers of web design to discover the communicative potential of ‘sticky web galleries’ for the multimodal and broad public dissemination of improvisation in music. He describes in great detail the collaborative process necessary to design his thesis, complete with paths and multimedia files that align with musical knowledge, beyond linear text. As a team, he and his collaborator arrive at a site that ‘as a whole functions as a sort of meta-score for improvisers’. At the same time, the thesis becomes not only a milestone within a research path, it also turns into a resource for practitioners outside of the usually closed publication loop as a ‘living meta-work.’

Author bios (alphabetically)

Dr. Nicky Agate is the Snyder-Granader Assistant University Librarian for Research Data & Digital Scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-PI on the HuMetricsHSS initiative, which promotes a values-based, process-oriented approach to evaluative decision making in the academy. She serves on the steering committee of the Force Scholarly Communication Institute and the editorial board of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Cécile Armand is currently a Postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, Department of History and Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) in the Mellon Foundation/DHAsia program. She completed her PhD in History at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon (ENS Lyon, France) in June 2017. Her dissertation dealt with a spatial history of advertising in modern Shanghai (1905-1949). She also led an interdisciplinary junior research lab devoted to digital humanities at ENS Lyon.

Cheryl Ball is Director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University Library. Since 2006, Ball has been editor of the online peer-reviewed open-access journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which exclusively publishes digital media scholarship. Her recent research in editorial workflows and digital publishing infrastructures can be found in multiple journals and edited collections, as well as on her personal repository, http://ceball.com. She is the Project Director for Vega, an open-access multimedia academic publishing platform, and serves as the executive director of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

Allison C Belan is the Director for Strategic Innovation at Duke University Press. Allison leads critical strategic initiatives and drives the development and execution of the organization's strategic plan. She manages the Press's IT, business systems, and digital content teams. Prior to assuming this role, Allison worked at Duke University Press in a variety of roles, including Journal Production Manager and Director for Digital Publishing. Early in her career, Allison gained valuable experience in publishing and technology through work as a typesetter and later as a custom web development project manager with a consultancy. She received her MA at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Sarah-Mai Dang is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Media Studies at Philipps University of Marburg, Germany. Previously, she worked at the Department for Media Studies of Bayreuth University, at the Collaborative Research Center “Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits”, and the Department for Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research and teaching focus on media practices in scholarship, historiography, feminist theory, audiovisual aesthetics, film history, film genres and spectatorship.

Anke Finger is Professor of German and Media Studies and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. A specialist on the idea of the total artwork in modernism (with a monograph, Das Gesamtkunstwerk der Moderne, 2006; and a collection of critical articles, The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments, 2011), her discussion of the total artwork ranges from conceptual art and atmospheres to architecture and design. She is the co-founder and co-editor (2005-2015) of the multilingual, peer reviewed, open access journal Flusser Studies. Her latest Flusser project, Flusser 2.0: Remediating Ideas, Reimagining Texts (with Britta Meredith and Katherine Riedling), is a multimodal collection composed with Scalar. From 2016 to 2019 Anke Finger served as the inaugural director of the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative at the Humanities Institute; she also co-founded the German Studies Association’s Network on Digital Humanities and served as co-director from 2017-2019. She founded the NEHC-DH network, affiliated with the New England Humanities Consortium; and she co-founded the CTDH network.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. Prior to assuming this role in 2017, she served as Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association, where she was Managing Editor of PMLA and other MLA publications, as well as overseeing the development of the MLA Handbook. She is project director of Humanities Commons, and co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons. She serves on the editorial or advisory boards of publications and projects including the Open Library of the Humanities, Luminos, the Open Annotation Collaboration, PressForward, and thresholds. She currently serves as the chair of the board of directors of the Council on Library and Information Resources.

Erin Rose Glass is a researcher and consultant whose works focuses on education and ethics in digital environments. She is co-founder of the online learning community Ethical EdTech, co-founder of Social Paper, a networked platform for student writing and feedback, and founder of KNIT, a non-commercial digital commons for higher education in San Diego. She currently works as a Senior Developer Educator at Digital Ocean.

Kathie Gossett received her Ph.D. from the Center for Writing Studies at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. She is currently a member of the faculty in the University Writing Program and an affiliate member of the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests include digital dissertations, open-source design, digital media theory & practice, and medieval rhetoric. Kathie has published in journals such as Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, Computers and Composition Online, and MediaCommons. She has also contributed multiple book chapters to edited collections, and has led several digital development projects. Her research has been supported by multiple grants, including an NEH Start-Up Grant in 2012 for the project, “Building an Open-Source Archive for Born-Digital Dissertations,” with Dr. Liza Potts (MSU). She is a member of the editorial review board for several multimedia journals and was the associate editor for the journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy from 2009-2011. Before returning to graduate school she worked in the information technology sector as a project manager, systems designer, user experience specialist, web designer/architect, and technical communicator.

Virginia Kuhn is Professor of Cinema and Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy in the Division of Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. In 2005, she successfully defended one of the first born-digital dissertations in the United States, challenging archiving and copyright conventions. Committed to helping shape open source tools for scholarship, she also published the first article created in the authoring platform, Scalar, titled “Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate,” (IJLM, 2010), in which she discusses teaching with the video essay. Kuhn recently published (with Vicki Callahan) an anthology titled Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies (Parlor Press, 2016) and has edited three peer-reviewed digital anthologies: “The Video Essay: An Emergent Taxonomy of Cinematic Writing,” (The Cine-Files, 2017) with Vicki Callahan; MoMLA: From Panel to Gallery (Kairos, 2013) with Victor Vitanza; and From Gallery to Webtext: A Multimodal Anthology (Kairos, 2008) with Victor Vitanza. She directs an undergraduate Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program, and a graduate certificate in Digital Media and Culture, and teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes in new media, all of which marry theory and practice.

Anthony Masure is a teaching fellow in applied arts and a graduate of the École Nationale Superieure (ENS) of Paris-Saclay, where he studied design. He is an Associate Professor of Design at the University Toulouse – Jean Jaurès (France). He cofounded the research journals Réel-Virtuel and Back Office. He defended his PhD thesis about the design of programs at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. His book Design and digital humanities was published in 2017 by the Éditions B42 (Paris). Website: http://www.anthonymasure.com

Monica McCormick is Associate University Librarian for Publishing, Preservation, Research, and Digital Access at the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, where she leads IT, Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Digital Collections & Preservation, and the University of Delaware Press. Before arriving at UD, Monica was Program Officer for Digital Scholarly Publishing at the NYU Libraries and NYU Press, and Director of Digital Publishing at NCSU Libraries. The first half of her career was in university press publishing, mostly as acquiring editor for history and ethnic studies at the University of California Press. She received her MSLS at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Joshua Neds-Fox is Coordinator for Digital Publishing at Wayne State University Libraries. He helps guide the development and direction of the Libraries’ digital collections infrastructure and institutional repository, and collaborates with Wayne State UP to house their online journals. He co-edited the Library Publishing Coalition's Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Library Publishing Curriculum.

Thomas Oates: Thomas Oates is an Associate Professor of American Studies with a joint appointment with the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. His interdisciplinary scholarship has appeared in journals spanning communication, sport studies, and cultural studies. He is the author of Football and Manliness and the co-editor of The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives, and Playing to Win: Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play.

Lena Redman (aka Elena Petrov) completed her PhD at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. During her doctoral study, she developed the methodology of multimodal cinematic bricolage as an approach for knowledge construction. Expanding the concept of multimodal cinematic bricolage for wider educational practices, Redman generated a pedagogical model of Ripples, which integrates the agentic values of the individual with the concept of privatized tools of knowing. She is the author of Knowing with New Media: A Multimodal Approach For Learning. Currently, Redman is exploring the practical implementation of the Ripples pedagogy, refining the model for educational practices. Detailed information for the Ripples pedagogy can be found at: http://www.ripplespedagogy.com

Liza Potts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University where she is the Director of WIDE Research and the Co-Founder of the Experience Architecture program. Her research interests include networked participatory culture, social user experience, and digital rhetoric. She has published over 65 works of scholarship, including three books on participation and user experience. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and others. Her professional experience includes working for startups, Microsoft, and design consultancies as a director, user experience architect, content strategist, usability specialist, information architect, and program manager.

Celeste Sharpe is (celestesharpe.com): Academic tech at Carelton (PhD from george Mason) Dr. Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe is the Academic Technologist for Instructional Technology at Carleton College, exploring the vast playground of technology in education and research. She earned her PhD in History from George Mason University in Fall 2016. Previously, she was a Penn Predoctoral Fellow for Excellence Through Diversity at the University of Pennsylvania and she worked at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media on a number of projects in the Education and Public Projects divisions.)

Lisa Tagliaferri is an interdisciplinary scholar in literature and the computer sciences. Currently, she is the Kress Digital Humanities Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT in the Digital Humanities program. Her widely downloaded programming book, How To Code in Python, has been adopted in classrooms as an open educational resource. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies from the City University of New York and an MSc in Computer Science from the University of London.

Katherine Walden: Katherine Walden is an Assistant Teaching Professor of American Studies at University of Notre Dame She is finishing a Ph.D. in American Studies-Sport Studies at the University of Iowa, where she also earned an M.A. in American Studies-Sport Studies and an M.A. in Library and Information Science, with a Certificate in Public Digital Humanities. Katherine has previously worked at the Iowa Women’s Archives, Library of Congress, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and Nashville Symphony Orchestra.

Christopher Williams is a wayfarer on the body-mind continuum. His medium is music. He holds a B.A. from the University of California San Diego (Charles Curtis, Chaya Czernowin, and Bertram Turetzky); and a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden (Marcel Cobussen and Richard Barrett). His native digital dissertation Tactile Paths: on and through Notation for Improvisers is at www.tactilepaths.net. Williams is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Music and the Performing Arts Graz, Doctoral School for Artistic Research.