
What Is a Dissertation? New Models, New Methods, New Media
#remixthediss — this event will be livestreamed and live tweeted: Join us!
When: October 10, 4.00-5.30pm (EST)
Where: English Department Lounge (Room 4406), The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, NY NY 10016
Livestreamed: http://videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu/videos/video/1956/
Twitter Hashtag: #remixthediss | Follow on Twitter:http://bit.ly/remixthediss-twitter
What is a Dissertation? (Public Google Doc):http://bit.ly/remixthediss-models
Think-Pair-Share Activity (Public Google Doc): http://bit.ly/remixthediss-questions
TAGSExplorer Hashtag Archive: http://bit.ly/remixthediss-twittermap
Virtual partners and participants welcome! (See COMMENTS section below for 4 ways to become a virtual partner.)
This Forum showcases recent and current doctoral students whose dissertations exemplify innovative, experimental formats--Scalar, video, websites, comics, multimedia inter actives. The event will be livestreamed and live tweeted (#remixthediss) by Futures Initiative and CUNY DHI fellows. The Fellows, HASTAC Scholars, and any other interested parties are also invited to contribute to an open public Google Doc that is designed to record and model successful institutional change--and to celebrate individuals and institutions leading such change.
Our goal is to model success stories (and challenges overcome) on the way to inventive, digital, experimental new forms of dissertations.
Chair: Cathy N. Davidson, Distinguished Professor and Director, Futures Initiative and HASTAC@CUNY
Panelists:
Jade E. Davis, Communications, University of North Carolina
Dwayne Dixon, Cultural Anthropology, Duke University
Gregory T. Donovan, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University (PhD, Graduate Center, CUNY)
Amanda Licastro, English, Graduate Center, CUNY
Nick Sousanis, Teachers College, Columbia University
The Forum is co-sponsored by the Futures Initiative, CUNY DHI (CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative), HASTAC (@CUNY and @Duke), NY2020, as well as by distance partners: the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge at Duke University, HASTAC Scholars (an international graduate student network), and the online journal Hybrid Pedagogy, and a growing list of programs at the GC and beyond. We also invite you to contribute to and join HASTAC's Digital Dissertation Group.
Panelist Biographies
Jade E. Davis is in the final year of her doctoral program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Communication Studies. She is a member of the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge at Duke University, and a member of the HASTAC steering committee. She is a former PhD Intern with Microsoft Research New England’s Social Media Collective. Her research looks at how digital media’s role in the making, understanding, and accepting of knowledge and culture. More specifically she is interested in spaces that make digital information into knowledge and culture and the ethics and ownership of the data traces that are left behind. Her born digital dissertation, titled Historical Glitch is an examination of how digitization affects cultural narratives through an archive of digital photographs of black women. You can find some of her work on her website and follow her on twitter @jadedid.
Dwayne Dixon recently completed his PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and is a visiting instructor in Duke’s Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department. His research is focused on young people in Tokyo and their relations to globalized urban space, their use of visual technologies, and their understandings of self amid changing conceptions of adulthood and limited economic possibility. His research is intertextual, combining ethnographic video along with traditional scholarly writing, presented digitally using Scalar, an open-source publishing platform. His writing has been published in The Journal of Postmodern Culture and Pastelegram and his photographic and video works have been exhibited globally, including NYC, North Carolina, and California.
Gregory T. Donovan is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, a researcher at the Public Science Project, and a founder of the OpenCUNY Academic Medium. Gregory received a Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology and a certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy from the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published and presented widely on the mutual shaping of people, place, and proprietary media, and is co-editor of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy's special issue on Media and Methods for Opening Education. His dissertation, in the Department of Environmental Psychology, was entitled MyDigitalFootprint.ORG: Young People and the Proprietary Ecology of Everyday Data.
Amanda Licastro is currently completing her doctoral studies in the English Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY focusing on the relationship between technology and writing, and has certificates in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and Teaching in the Two-Year College. Her dissertation applies digital humanities methods to issues concerning composition and rhetoric, with a particular focus on pedagogy. Amanda is an instructor in NYU’s Gallatin School and an Instructional Technology Fellow at Macaulay Honors College. She is also the co-founder and project manager of the Writing Studies Tree, serves on the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and is on the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative team. Follow her work on her CUNY Academic Commons site Digitocentrism and on Twitter @amandalicastro.
Nick Sousanis completed his doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University in May 2014. Titled “Unflattening: A visual-verbal inquiry into learning in many dimension,” his dissertation, written and drawn entirely in comic book format, argues through its very form for the importance of visual thinking in teaching and learning. A book version of Unflattening is slated for publication by Harvard University Press in Spring 2015. Before coming to NYC, he was immersed in Detroit’s thriving arts community, where he co-founded the arts and cultural web-mag www.thedetroiter.com; served as the founding director of the UofM’s Work:Detroit exhibition space, and became the biographer of legendary Detroit artist Charles McGee. He developed and teaches a course on comics and education at Teachers College and teaches a comics readings course at Parsons. See excerpts from his work at www.spinweaveandcut.com.
17 comments
4 Ways to Be a Virtual Partner in "What Is a Dissertation?"
Our goal in "What Is A Dissertation?" (aka: #remixthediss) is to showcase, celebrate, and model what it takes to not only produce an innovative dissertation but how to enact the institutional change required to have one approved by your university. That means knowing institutional rules, having the right mentors, being willing to explain yourself in terms of existing structures, goals, and aspirations and how your work moves those along, etc.
This session is about success strategies. We want to name names, praise, document---so others who are at universities where people are not so sure, can use these as a test case ("Hey! This guy at Duke did this, and this other one at Columbia Teacher's did that, and this gal at UNC did so and so, and these two at the Graduate Center CUNY were both able to x, y, and z . . . . so why can't we?")
To that end we hope for many virtual partners and participants. Here are some ways you can join us, and feel free to add others in the Comment box below.
IF YOU WILL BE JOINING AS A VIRTUAL PARTNER, PLEASE USE THE COMMENT SECTION BELOW TO SAY SO. WE WANT TO INCLUDE YOU IN OUR PUBLICITY AS A COLLABORATIVE PARTNER.
(1) Schedule a local What Is A Dissertation? workshop at the same time, same date. Watch the video of our panel and use twitter as your backchannel: #remixthediss
(2) Use Twitter to send questions to the panelists at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and one of the Futures Initiative Fellows will pass your question on to the panelist.
(3) Contribute to a live open access Google Doc where we collectively take notes on the best advice from the session--including non-official advice (i.e. "Bring the best chocolate you can find to the dean on the day she/he has to make that decision for or against your innovative proposal and thank her/him in advance for considering it"---NB: I just made that up.)
(4) Contribute to the second live, open access Google Doc on "How To Write and Defend a Non-Traditional/Digital Dissertation." We will be making a grid of questions with tags so this can become a useful, searchable Web document. For the workshop document sprint, we need you to name your successes,your institution, thank the right people, tell us what worked. You can tell us what did not work only as part of a narrative for what worked. In other words, we all know the failure stores. This is what you did, how you did it, on the way to success. And then full bibliographic reference to your defended dissertation as you want it to appear on a future Hall of Fame.
There are lots of projects out there on the digital dissertation. This is the first we know that is really a how-to. If anyone knows any others, please add those to the comment section below. We do not want to re-invent the wheel. We want to make a better wheel . . .
Again: IF YOU WILL BE JOINING AS A VIRTUAL PARTNER, PLEASE USE THE COMMENT SECTION BELOW TO SAY SO. WE WANT TO INCLUDE YOU IN OUR PUBLICITY AS A COLLABORATIVE PARTNER.
And follow us on Twitter: #remixthediss
Rutgers-Camden Digital Studies Center
We'll be holding a virtual session here at the Rutgers-Camden Digital Studies Center - feel free to include us on promotional materials!
We'll have an announcement on our website soon, which you can find here:
http://digitalstudies.camden.rutgers.edu/
Welcome!
That is fantastic. if you can email your logo to us, we'll include you as a partner. You can use the contact box and someone will get back to you.
Virtual Partner
I'll be here watching from Uruguay
Live-screening at U of T, Toronto
We will be watching the live-stream discussion in our Robert Gill Theatre at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University in Toronto. This is an initiative of the Digital Dramaturgy Lab (bRAinstorm series) in support of our graduate students, in particular those who currently take courses on Research/Professional Skills, Praxis and Performance Practice. We are very much looking forward to this event!
Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, U of T http://dramacentre.utoronto.ca/?page_id=100
Digital Dramaturgy Lab, U of T http://digitaldramaturgy.wix.com/main
Thanks for Sharing!
So excited about this! Looking forward to participating via livestream.
Cheers,
Lori Beth
Studio for New Media at Iowa State University
We'll be holding a virtual session here at Iowa State as well! We've got several PhD students who are just beginning the process of proposing digital dissertations!
Iowa State to Join #Remixthediss as Virtual Partner
Welcome, Kathie! This is wonderful news. If you use the contact box to send us a logo, we will put it on upcoming versions of the poster. I'll tweet it out right now! Welcome!
U Washington and U Victoria (BC, Canada) Join #Remixthediss
Welcome to the Simpson Center at the University of Washington and the Maker Lab and the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. This is starting to be a movement!
fantastic!
Glad to see this growing - looking forward! Thanks for making it happen, Cathy!
Welcome participants!
It is so wonderful to see the wide-spread interest in this event. Thank you for participating! I would like to extend the invitation to add your dissertations to our list and spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hLdruyTB-r7cEnljv2m1U7mzqrQyyeAiazbSO3ELZaw/edit?usp=sharing
We are specifically looking for non-traditional dissertations in the humanities that have included non-text based products (image, video, visualizations, etc) or which utilized innovative methods (data-mining, topic modelling, etc). However, we welcome models from across the disciplines as well.
Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University
We'll be hosting a sesssion as well! Details to come shortly on our website. Thanks for putting this together!
I'll be here watching on in Australia
Looking forward to this! Will it also be recorded if you're live streaming?
Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery's Image Lab
The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery's Image Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be hosting a drawing jam for graduate students and researchers while streaming the panel discussion. Drawing starts at 3pm (CST). A poster will be posted soon.
http://wid.wisc.edu/programs/image-lab/
http://thenearsightedmonkey.tumblr.com/
Thanks for setting this up!
Great!
Glad to hear about the Image Lab joining in. That's great, Ebony!
SCHEDULE: DIGITAL DISSERTATION EVENT AND LIVESTREAM
Here is the very simple format for our event:
What Is a Dissertation? New Models, New Methods, New Media
#remixthediss —
When: October 10, 4.00-5.30pm (EST)
Where: English Department Lounge (Room 4406), The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, NY NY 10016
Livetreamed: The event will be livestreamed here.
Livetweeted: It will be live tweeted (#remixthediss) by Futures Initiative and CUNY DHI fellows.
Google Doc: The Fellows, HASTAC Scholars, and any other interested parties are invited to contribute to an open public Google Doc of digital dissertations.
Join: You are invited to join and contribute to HASTAC's Digital Dissertation Group.
********
SCHEDULE
Intros, set up, settling down: 4:00-4:10 EST Chair: Cathy N. Davidson, Distinguished Professor and Director, Futures Initiative and HASTAC@CUNY
Panelists: 4:10-5:00: Each panelist speaks for 5-10 minutes
Jade E. Davis, Communications, University of North Carolina
Dwayne Dixon, Cultural Anthropology, Duke University
Gregory T. Donovan, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University (PhD, Graduate Center, CUNY)
Amanda Licastro, English, Graduate Center, CUNY
Nick Sousanis, Teachers College, Columbia University
FOCUS:.
Each panelist will feature:
5:00-5:15 Audience at the GC and virtually will be invited to engage in a Think-Pair-Share excercise: "What are your three most pressing questions for the panelists?"
We will prepare a Google Doc in which those onsite and online can enter their most pressing questions.
5:15 Q and A--including via Tweets from virtual participants using the #Remixthediss hashtag
Post-Panel:
Dissertation
What are the new models in dissertation?