Tag: Research

Weaving a PhD via #PhDchat

My life revolves around my doctoral studies at this point (at least outside of my full-time job, of course!), as I am busily working on my doctoral thesis proposal that is due at the end of the month. While I have heard it said, and even experienced it at times, that there are few things as lonely and isolating as doing a PhD, I think that having a community of practice (here’s to you, Etienne!) for support and with which to share and grow and weave thoughts, is worth its weight in qualitative methods texts.

With this said, I find that the #PhDchat that exists on Twitter is fantastic in its communal support of struggling doctoral students, sharing of resources, answering of questions, and suggesting of apps and software. With this said, just knowing that there are others out there who are reading along while facing their own struggles and liminal experiences is beneficial–I am not working alone in a vacuum but weaving my experiences with others along shared, but different, paths.

Some of my colleagues in this synchronous chat that exists in an ongoing asynchronous manner as well have started to discuss ways of studying, or at least beginning to explore this experience. Martin Eve @martin_eve discussed the early history of the #phdchat experience in his fine post On #PhDchat: Call for Collaboration/History, Overview, Themes and Response, and Andy Coverdale @AndyCoverdale talked about considerations related to ways of understanding Twitter networks, among other things, in On #phdchat – some initial thoughts. I have previously spoken about this experience in my earlier post PhD Chat as #phdchat and Liz Thackray @lizith with her Networking post soon thereafter. While this post here is partly in response to calls for people to discuss their experiences here (such as from part of an exchange I had with Jennifer Jones @jennifermjones) among others, I am going to take a slightly different perspective on this experience.

For those who know me, it may not come as a surprise that I am not terribly interested in understanding how the #phdchat network works, who responds to whom, who retweets what and when they do it. Yes, they are all valuable questions and may very well lead to some interesting research (anybody thinking about Internet Research 12 or 2012’s Networked Learning Conference that was just announced in this regard, please let me know!), though the questions I tend to ask are more around the area of meaning and how this experience helps to form identity:

  • How does your experience of participating in #phdchat help or hinder your doctoral studies?
  • What is your experience of community in #phdchat?
  • What have you learned through active or passive involvement in #phdchat?

Ahh, so many interesting ideas come about when we involve ourselves in something really engaging. I wonder how my (current or future) colleagues involved in this see themselves as part of something larger than themselves? How do you weave your PhD?

Internet Research 12.0 (2011) Call for Papers

Thrilled to see that the AoIR (Association of Internet Researchers) call for papers for the  Internet Research 12 Conference IR12 is now available on the conference website. I liveblogged and wrote obsessively about the current year’s conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, and took many ideas away with me that are now beginning to influence my own research.

Did I see that the focus this coming year will be Performance and Participation, with a smattering of issues around identity (the interest of mine that is becoming all-consuming)? Take a look at the focus this year in the call for papers:

To this end, we call for papers, panel and pre-conference workshop proposals from any discipline, methodology, community or a combination of them that address the conference themes, including, but not limited to, papers that intersect and/or interconnect with the following:

  • Creative performances and digital arts
  • Participatory culture and participatory design
  • Critical performance and political participation
  • Identity performance
  • Exclusion from participation
  • Economic performance of Internet-related industries
  • Game performance
  • Performance expectations (as workers, citizens, etc.)
  • Ritual performances and communal participation

This increasingly looks to be a place for my work, as all of it involves Internet Research, focuses on identity formation and development, and is about as interdisciplinary as the social sciences themselves. Hope to attend and present my work for more engaged and constructive peer feedback.

Use Google Scholar for Full-Text Articles

I just learned that I can enter my university-library specific information into Google Scholar Preferences and have it check to see if the articles that come up in the search results are available in the library. This has fundamentally shifted the way I use Google Scholar, which otherwise only identifies articles without helping you to access them.

The one limitation is that this works only if you have access to a university library, and if so you must be logged into it for remote database access or otherwise have direct access for the full-text accessibility to work. The full-text is based on the library access you already have, so if your institution does not have access to a particular database, you will not magically have access to it here, either. Alas, knowledge has to be kept safely locked away from the public (though I know these companies all have to generate revenue)!

NYU has a nice tutorial on using this that can easily be adapted to any other university database.

IR11 Pre-Conference: Academic Career Development Workshop

I did something I have not done in some time at a conference; I took notes by hand during the wonderful “Academic Career Development Workshop for Research Students and Early Career Academics” pre-conference session. I did not want to hear tap tap tap, nor did I want to have the possibility of multitasking, so I used a new notebook I bought during a recent holiday in Paris. The notebook is thick, solid leather with a great pad of unlined paper (though I often prefer graph paper with the boxes), though this is fine, thick paper that was a strange pleasure to write on. Reminds me, I owe somebody a physical letter . . .

The pre-conference sesion was organized by Marcus Foth, who could not attend at the last minute, and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi (who did a wonderful job facilitating the entire session). The 15 or so of us spent the entire day discussing our work, our interests, our questions, our concerns, and our best practices to help one another. An international bunch, I felt quite comfortable with them all after the first round of introductions when it became apparent that my concerns and worries and struggles were often shared by others.

There were other learners who are also considering academe as a second career. Teaching internationally means that the same terms are used, though often in very different ways. Funding is a persistent problem. The importance of building and fostering a network. Even the value of presenting at conferences and then expanding to publish. All valuable for us to know.

Overall, I got what I came for, in that I feel a little more informed and expect that my challenges are similar enough to other early career researcher that my confidence was bolstered. Kudos.

Research Process and Methodology Course Begins Tonight

I am teaching a new graduate course at New York University that begins tonight, Research Process and Methodology. This is a required, core course in the M.S. in Management and Systems degree program. I am making my syllabus freely available for anybody who is interested in viewing it; feedback is always appreciated!