I’ve been doing some reading this week on what it means to dissertate in the open, and as there are many different ways to do it, I thought I would talk quickly about my plans moving forward.

First, here are some of the sources informing my ideas:

• Dissertating in the Open by Laura Gogia
• Granularities of the Open Dissertation by Laura Gogia
• The Integration of Web Culture into Higher Education by Laura Gogia
• Opening the Dissertation by Bonnie Stewart
• Shifting my research question by Rebecca J. Hogue
• The Open Dissertation by Maha Bali

Laura Gogia’s visual article and post on granularities sum it up best. I can open up my dissertation process and/or my dissertation content, using a variety of tools. So far, I’ve done a combination of both: I’ve offered insight into the process and shared documents such as my literature review, prospectus, and proposal.

For now, I’m going to focus on sharing process. I will come back around to content, especially as I want to share my research with cosplayers, but my primary audience right now is other researchers - especially doctoral students and early career researchers.

To that end, I will be blogging my process memos. In the course of working on my PhD, I’ve discovered it’s far too easy to forget how we got to a certain point, so I’m going to keep daily process memos about the work I did that day. I’ll probably be a day behind in posting them, since I’ll write them at the end of my workday. So you’ll see today’s process memo on Monday.

Have a lovely weekend!

I’ve been trying to establish my data collection/analysis workflow and I’m running into the age-old problem with qualitative research: you don’t really know what you need until you’re in the middle of it.

One of the things I heard repeatedly from professors was that the difference between quantitative and qualitative research wasn’t how much work you would do, but at which end of the process you would do it. Quantitative research requires a lot of up-front work, designing surveys or experiments, etc. , but analysis can go pretty quickly as long as you already know which statistical tests you need. Qualitative research requires a lot of work in the analysis stage, and the beginning of the design process is a little more free-flowing and improvisational.

(She said, thinking about her detailed interview and observation protocols and meticulous research design…)

I’m the kind of person who likes to have structures in place ahead of time so that when I’m in a thing I can just do it. If I don’t get those structures in place, I can be a bit of a mess. For example - life example, not work example - if I don’t do all of my pill-sorting at the beginning of the week, there is an almost 0% chance that I will take anything besides my prescription medications. (I take 24 pills a day, when prescriptions and supplements are added together.)

So I wanted to have a data collection structure in place, so that my data would not become a mess.

I realized, though, that creating an elaborate data collection structure was a form of productive procrastination. After all of the complaining I’ve done about being ready to start on my own research, though, I really ought to get down to it.

I settled on only setting up the data collection structure for the first phase of my research, sustained, systematic observation. I gave myself permission to work exclusively on that for a couple of weeks before I design the next set of structures.

I’m going to start on that tomorrow, and my plan is to write a blog post about that process in hopes of helping future scholars who might use connective and affinity space ethnography.

I successfully defended my dissertation proposal on February 3, 2020.

I have one huge piece of advice for writing your dissertation proposal: buy or borrow Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches by John W. Creswell and J. David Creswell, and do what it says. It will guide you through the proposal-writing process down to the sentence level. It is expensive. It is worth it. It is the most useful graduate school textbook I’ve ever bought.

It’s possible you’ll discover at this point that you haven’t made as many decisions about your methods as you thought you had. That’s fine. Make them now.

For example, I realized that I had no idea where online I wanted to do my observation. This stalled me out for a few days, until I remembered that figuring that out was the whole point of the sustained, systematic observation part of affinity space ethnography (PDF). So I wrote about how I didn’t know that yet, about how my design is emergent, and about how I imagined that observation might play out.

In November and December 2019, I wrote the first draft of my dissertation proposal. I submitted it to my committee ahead of my comps, so they were able to quickly peruse it and offer me some feedback during the oral exam.

At first, some of the feedback overwhelmed me. Dr. Casey Rawson suggested that rather than a wide-scale ethnographic approach, I might take a case study approach, following just a few cosplayers through their process and attending to their information practices. This was an intriguing possibility, but the logistics overwhelmed me, as I’d have to know a few cosplayers well enough that they would allow me to actually physically be with them throughout their process, plus I would have to manage the time (i.e., childcare) to actually be with them. I decided that this was a cool idea, but it was a different study than my dissertation, so I ended up putting it in my suggestions for future research in the second draft of my dissertation proposal. Now I had a research program, not just one study.

I sent this second draft to my committee right before the winter holidays, starting the clock on the 30 days I was required to give them with the proposal before the proposal defense. We scheduled the defense for February 3, and I spent January creating my proposal defense slides. (As always, if you are a cosplayer whose photo I used and you would like it removed, please let me know and I’ll oblige ASAP.)

As I was working on the slides, I read through the proposal and asked myself what questions I would ask if I were a committee member, and then set out to answer them in the slides.

First, I realized that there were some terms I mentioned in the proposal and had defined in the literature review, but that probably needed to be defined again at the proposal defense:

• Collective intelligence
• Information literacy
• Affinity space
• Blended affinity space
• Constellation of information

Then, I realized that my research methods were still not as detailed as I would like. I wanted to be able to show the committee what my research would actually look like, in practice. I remembered that for my theory development class, I had created a grounded theory proposal and included sample data that I had actually coded. I decided to do something similar for this presentation.

First, I demonstrated what the sustained, systematic observation would look like, using a librarian-recommended cosplay resource as my starting point. I created a specific observation protocol for this stage based on the affinity space ethnography literature, and applied that observation protocol to the resource. I evaluated that resource to determine if it was information-rich, and it was. I followed links out from it to other resources, evaluating them as well. I determined that the original resource was information-rich, and showed what it would look like to pull down data (in this case, YouTube comments) and code them using both my information literacy and collective intelligence coding schemes.

I put all of this stuff in my slides:

(I’ll say it again: if you are a cosplayer whose photo I used and you would like it removed, please let me know and I’ll oblige ASAP.)

The proposal defense went really well. I felt very prepared, having done all of this. My committee members said it was a thorough proposal and appreciated the demonstration of the methods. They also gave me several helpful suggestions for revising the proposal further before I submitted it to the Institutional Review Board. I submitted my final dissertation proposal to the review board on February 5, and a copy of it went to the SILS library, as well.

After one round of revisions and one correction of a typo, my IRB application was approved and determined exempt from further review. Time to get to work!

Most of my blogging has been micro this month, which is appropriate since I’m hosting my blog on micro.blog now. It has really made a difference in my comfort level and ease-of-blogging; much lighter weight than WordPress. I don’t feel like I have to have a 1000+ word essay to bother posting (obviously).

I do want to get back into longer form, though. The reason I haven’t this month is because at the beginning of the month I was getting ready for my dissertation proposal defense. As soon as I passed that, I had to write my Institutional Review Board application. Once that was done, I had to write an application for a dissertation completion fellowship. And then when that was done, the IRB application came back with 7 revisions I needed to make. I did that this morning.

I didn’t think all this stuff would take 3 weeks. I thought it would be done in the first week of the month, that I’d sail through IRB (more the fool me!), and then be doing data collection already. I also thought that during that brief wait from IRB application to IRB approval (again, haha, brief, apparently they’re moving very slowly lately), I’d come up with a beautiful data collection and analysis workflow.

Let me tell you what. Based on my quick Googling and visiting my favorite resources on academic writing (okay, my one favorite, Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog) and my lit review, people really don’t want to share the nitty gritty details of their qual data collection workflow/process. Usually, when I bump up against something like this, my instinct is to then be radically open with my own process and create a resource other people can use so they don’t have this problem. (See: the Intellectual Freedom Toolkit I created with W. when there was a book challenge at the school library where I worked.)

But, well, for now, I’m at a loss as to where to start. I went back to my syllabi for what we call babydocs at SILS, and it had some good stuff for navigating the early part of a PhD, but not as much project management lit as I would have liked. I’ll dig into my qual methods course syllabi next, but I suspect they won’t offer much either.

Everybody wants to tell you: 1. why a given research design is appropriate 2. big picture how to do those methods And of course those are SUPER IMPORTANT!

But whoever is writing about like… Where they put their memos, and stuff - how they organize their workday when they’re doing fieldwork - esp. virtual fieldwork - well, I haven’t found those people yet. I’m sure someone must be writing about it. Not sure how much time I’ll spend before developing my own systems.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

• I’ll probably take field notes in my personal physical notebook, originally.
• Then I’ll transcribe those into MaxQDA I guess?
• I’ll use a digital recorder to record interviews and panels, then import and transcribe those in MaxQDA, too.
• MaxQDA has space for coding memos, but I don’t know if there’s good spots in there for reflective memos, so I need to check into that. (Also I’m thoroughly pissed at myself that I can’t find my favorite qual research textbooks - Goodall’s Writing the New Ethnography and Coffey and Atkinson’s Making Sense of Qualitative Data. I might need to do some deep decluttering in the next week or so to try to track them down.) If MaxQDA doesn’t have a good spot for coding memos, I guess I’ll write reflective memos in… I don’t know. Word? I might do it in Scrivener though.
• I’m definitely going to read some advice on dissertating with Scrivener.
• I think I can pull webpages into MaxQDA, too, so that will be helpful.

Anyway. None of this process is helped by an extreme lack of sleep and hormones running wild, so. Might just call today a win with the whole IRB resubmission thing and cut myself a break.

Anyway, soon, I’m planning to write a proper Dissertating in the Open post about writing and defending your dissertation proposal, so stay tuned!

I was trying to figure out how to scrape data from YouTube for my dissertation & then I remembered I have MaxQDA which will do it for me & now I’m looking @ 410 comments for 1 video that were downloaded automatically in less than a minute & it’s so beautiful I might cry.

Sometimes I ask myself why I’m doing a PhD and what I’m getting out of it. This is actually a long set of many smaller questions. Why did I apply to a PhD program in the first place? Why did I enroll once I was accepted? Why have I not quit after any of my many, many PhD freakouts? That’s most of the Why questions. Then there’s the What questions. What was I hoping to get out of it when I applied/enrolled? What have I actually gotten out of it? What do I hope will come of it?

I don’t necessarily have answers for all of those questions, but I can kind of get at some of them.

I had been thinking about doing a PhD eventually just because I like going to school, honestly. And because I loved listening to people talk about their research when they visited for job talks or whatever (I was working at the university where I’m currently a student). But I never quite understood the discussion of their methods, and I wanted to. And I also wanted to capture good work people were doing in the world and find ways to share it. So the reasons I thought I wanted to do a PhD were those: understanding research methods better, documenting good work in education and libraries, communicating that work. And the reasons I applied WHEN I did were because all the other people in my department at work had been fired, laid off, or transferred. It was me and several graduate assistants closing out the department’s contractual and grant obligations, and I was fairly certain that once those obligations were handled, I would be laid off, too. So I moved up what was a someday thing to a today thing, and enrolled because I don’t much apply for things I don’t actually want.

Why haven’t I quit? Stubbornness. Attachment to the flexible schedule. Because I don’t think I will feel like what I’ve gotten what I came for until I complete the large-scale research project that is my dissertation. And a little bit because my mom has coursework credit toward two Master’s degrees she never finished, and I have seen her regret.

I have gotten a lot of what I came for. In particular, I have a deep understanding of qualitative and participatory research methods that I definitely didn’t have when I came in. I understand ethnography and grounded theory in a way there was no time for me to understand during my MSLS research methods course. And I’ve gotten some other stuff: an immensely flexible schedule that allows me to be there for my kid almost any time he needs me, the opportunity to work on a federally-funded grant project, an understanding of antiracist work thanks to that project, time to work with people I am always excited to work with, and time to actually do research.

Since I’m ABABD (if all goes well, I’ll only have my dissertation left to do after I defend my proposal on February 3), alongside actually collecting data and writing my dissertation, I’ll be exploring my next steps for after graduation. There are a few theoretical tenure track jobs for which I might apply, but given the fact that I want to keep my family geographically co-located (in the same house, even), it’s unlikely one of those will come up and be an option for me. So what are some other things I’m hoping this PhD will have prepared me for? Working at a research-focused organization. Working in research communication. Working as an academic librarian in a discipline familiar to me: education, library and information science, Classics, theater. Working as an editor for academic presses, academic publications, or scholars. Working as an independent information consultant and researcher. Combining independent research with web development somehow.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I’m sticking with what Karen Kelsky calls the “flexible opportunity model.” I could do a LOT of different things. My current plan is to build up my options for consulting/freelancing while also keeping an eye out for institutional work that looks good.

I passed my comps last Tuesday, and I thought I’d take some time to write about it today.

Previously, on Dissertating in the Open:

1. Inspiration strikes and I write a prospectus.
2. I work with my advisor to select five areas for my comprehensive examination literature review package.
3. I contact five faculty members - 3 internal, 2 external - and ask them to be on my committee. They accept.
4. I had my first meeting with my committee and we narrowed the scope for my lit review a bit.

And then I didn't really blog about the process for 9 months because I was too busy actually writing the literature review.

Over the course of that process, some things shifted.

As I mentioned in my post about my first committee meeting, my lens on information literacy changed from a broad one to one that narrowly focused on information literacy practices as a set of sociocultural practices, tied to a particular context and set of social interactions.

When it came time to write about theory, I decided to write exclusively about the theoretical concept of affinity spaces. I discussed collective intelligence and participatory culture in the information literacy chapter instead, and decided to included Sonnenwald’s work on information behavior as part of my proposal.

As I wrote about affinity spaces, I learned about some new-to-me methodologies: connective ethnography and affinity space ethnography. I took on ethnography as my broad research design, taking a constructivist research approach, and then used connective/affinity space ethnography as my stance for how to conduct ethnography in the cosplay affinity space.

Over the next several months, I drafted chapters of my comps and sent them to my committee for review. You can see the first drafts here:

1. Information Literacy as a Social Practice
2. Cosplay
3. Connected Learning and Libraries
4. Affinity Spaces
5. Connective and Affinity Space Ethnography

I prepared for and wrote each of those drafts using some variation of my start-to-finish literature review workflow, drawing heavily on recommendations from Dr. Barbara Wildemuth and Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega. I didn't always follow the workflow in a truly linear fashion; sometimes I would find myself needing to memo a subset of literature before I could move on to another concept at all. Other times I would write a memo that was basically a draft, then mark it up with pens and rearrange the whole thing. Sometimes I would cut entire sections after writing them. I'm a little sorry I didn't document this process better.

As I finished each chapter, I sent it out to my committee. Different committee members provided different amounts of feedback, but none of them were under any obligation to provide any feedback at all. I’m grateful to them for their help.

When I started writing the final chapter, the methods chapter, I first began by memoing articles about my specific data collection methods. As I tried to turn these into a cohesive literature review, I realized I needed some guidance. So I emailed my advisor, Dr. Sandra Hughes-Hassell, and my research methods expert, Dr. Casey Rawson, asking them about this chapter. Casey suggested that this chapter should be about my research design and approach - constructivist? pragmatist? participatory? and ethnography? case study? narrative? - more than my specific data collection and analysis methods, which would be a key part of the proposal rather than the lit review. This help determining the scope of the chapter was invaluable, and let me really focus on connective and affinity space ethnography conceptually.

I revised the chapters based on my committee member’s feedback and my own notes, compiling them into a single document along with my prospectus, also slightly revised. I also sent the committee a brief statement of my research interests.

I submitted all of that to the committee at the end of October. We scheduled my comprehensive examination date for December 10. In my department, the literature review stands in lieu of a written exam.

Over the next month, I drafted my dissertation proposal, which will be another post, though I did finish it in time for my committee to have it for a few days before my comps.

For the comps exam itself, my internal examiners were physically present, while my external examiners called in via Zoom. We began the exam with me delivering the following brief presentation as an overview/refresher:

(Note: If you are a cosplayer or photographer featured in this slideshow and would like your image removed, please let me know and I’ll take care of it ASAP.)

After this, Sandra asked each committee member to ask me a question, working around the Zoom/room clockwise. Each committee member had one or more really insightful questions to ask that helped me think about my methods, my plans for data analysis, the role of theory in my study, and how I conceptualize cosplay and the relationship between cosplayer, character, narrative, and costume.

In the end, I passed and came out of the exam with several ideas for how to refine my dissertation proposal, which I’ll write more about in my next Dissertating in the Open post.

This blog post contains affiliate links. If you click them and make a purchase, I may receive a commission (at no extra cost to you). Thank you for your support. I promise not to link anything I don’t use and love myself.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m participating in #AcWriMo this year and calling it #DissProWriMo, since I’m planning to churn out a pretty workable draft of my dissertation proposal this month. Is it an ambitious goal? It sure is. Can I do it? Here’s hoping!

But Kimberly, what resources are you using to help you?

I’m so glad you asked. Here’s a list:

• Katy Peplin's ThrivePhD #AcWriMo resources
• Raul Pacheco-Vega's Academic Writing resources
• The 5th edition of Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches by John W. Creswell and J. David Creswell
• My Bullet Journal (a Moleskine Hardcover Large Dot Grid notebook + Pilot G2 pen)
• Paperpile
• Google Docs
• Forest app for the Pomodoro technique

Nice. What are your goals?

Final goals:

1. Finished draft of my dissertation proposal
2. Submission-ready version of a paper I'm co-authoring with Dr. Maggie Melo.

Progress goal: 1-3 pages of writing per day

What are your limitations?

I only have 17 days with childcare this month. I’m planning to spend at least 2 hours a day writing, but more if I can manage it.

Anything else we need to know?

I’ll be posting a weekly blog update on my progress. You can follow along by clicking any of the social links to the left or by subscribing for email updates (also in the left sidebar).

 

I hereby declare November to be #DissProWriMo. Writing your dissertation proposal? Me too! Let’s connect! #AcWriMo #AcWri #phdchat

When we see a finished piece of writing, we rarely see all the mess that went into creating it. As Annette M. Markham and Nancy K. Baym point out in their book, Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method,

Research reports are carefully edited retrospectives, selected among different story lines and options, depending on one's audience and goals. Within these reports, research designs are generally presented as a series of logical and chronologically ordered steps. Seasoned scholars know there's a complex backstage story line and have experienced such complexities themselves. But for novice scholars, it is easy to imagine that the researcher's route was successfully mapped out in advance and that interpretive findings simply emerged from the ground or fell conveniently into the path. Qualitative research requires a tolerance for chaos, ambiguity, and inductive thinking, yet its written accomplishments—particularly those published in chapters and articles rather than monographs—rarely display the researchers' inductive pathways or the decisions that led them down those routes.

Two of my voice values are transparency and helpfulness, and I want to share some of the messier bits of my writing process. I have hopes of showing off some beautiful, colorful pen-marked-up copies of memos and notes to you in the future, but today, I’m just offering a few thoughts on freewriting.

I often hit a point where I’ve thought and thought and thought about something, ideas are all kind of swirly in my head, I’ve made notes, I’ve mapped concepts, and I’m still not ready to do formal writing for an audience that’s not me. I might be in a good place to talk to somebody, but honestly, I’m rarely around people who actually want to hear about things like affinity space ethnography (now I’m trying to imagine explaining ethnography to my 3 year old). When I’m in that place, eventually, I realize I need to…

FREEWRITE.

So I open up a new document and type out what I’ve got in my head, with notes to myself but also with citations. I know I’m not inventing anything new here, but this is part of the writing process that I think it’s easy for academics to forget.

Here’s what I freewrote today:

Ethnographic methods are appropriate for studying information literacy practices that are social and occur in an affinity space, as this looks at a sociocultural phenomenon, in a naturalistic setting. These methods cannot produce a full ethnography, but rather must be partial (Hine 2000). (BUT WHY? LIKE, THERE ARE REASONS, LEARN TO ARTICULATE THEM.)

Online spaces, however, present challenges to traditional ethnographic methods. Primary among these is the problem of location-based research; using spatial metaphors to define ethnographic research sites is limiting, because: Practices travel across various online “spaces.” Boundaries of online spaces are porous. And, more and more, boundaries between online and offline activity are also porous.

(Hine, 2000; Leander & McKim, 2003; Wargo 2015, 2017)

Ethnography has some key features.

1. The selection of a “field site.”
2. Observation or participant observation.
3. Interviews.
4. Artifact analysis.

There are ways to approximate these features online. The field site is the trickiest bit. It’s possible to select one environment (for example, fanfiction.net) and consider its boundaries to be the boundaries of the field site, but this lends an incomplete picture.

Now, this is not a useful introduction to ethnography for anyone. It’s incomplete, it privileges data collection over more conceptual issues. But it’s helping me move forward in my writing.