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PhD acknowledgements: the YouTube version
Although I haven’t actually had my thesis bound yet, I thought I’d celebrate just a little anyway. So I made a video that I hope does a better job of thanking the people who cheered me up, listened to me whinge, or made me laugh while I was doing my PhD than the ‘official’ acknowledgements…
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no title necessary
I just got my PhD examiners reports via email after a long day at work. Both of the examiners say that no corrections are required in order for the degree to be awarded (although there are lots of productive comments and suggestions about what I might extend/improve on for publication, pretty much all of which…
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farewell…
…to the phd. I submitted my thesis for examination today. But not before: getting a flat tire on the way to work yesterday my ibook’s hard disk dying, also yesterday, subsequent to which… While waiting for my new macbook pro to be formatted (WOO!), I completed the edits on a windows machine, which then… crashed,…
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tagcloud of my phd
This is a tagcloud that I generated from the text of my entire PhD thesis at tagcrowd. I don’t know what it tells anyone about the thesis itself, unless you put a lot of faith in word frequency. But there’s something immensely pleasurable about it for me. I was strangely excited waiting for the fraction…
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final seminar done
Last Friday I presented my final PhD seminar in front of a pretty substantial audience and an internal panel. I was unusually tense but I got through it without falling over. I enjoyed the Q&A with the audience, who threw in some pretty tough questions on issues that I had skated over in the presentation…
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small announcement
On Wednesday I submitted a draft of my thesis to the faculty research office, leading up to my final seminar, which will be happening next Friday the 8th of December, 12-2. Producing this draft nearly killed me, but not quite, and I was determined to do my final seminar before the end of the year,…
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just (describe) it
Someone in our AoIR panel on Friday asked me if I was ‘using’ Bruno Latour and/or ANT, and I more or less denied it, probably misinterpreting the question slightly, under the influence of adrenaline. Anyway, afterwards I realised that I was far too flippant in my response. Because of course, at least implicitly I kind…
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spaces of vernacular creativity
It seems the concept of vernacular creativity has legs that carry it into various disciplinary territories. Interestingly, this Call for Papers for a panel at the American Association of Geographers conference in San Francisco next year uses it in almost exactly the same way as I do. Every day that passes, there’s more stuff to…
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flickr & relational aesthetics
First decent new sentence I’ve added to my PhD draft for a couple of weeks: Flickr can be viewed as the site of a vernacular ‘relational aesthetics’ (Bourriaud, 2002), where the object of the aesthetic is no longer the image itself, but the ‘modes of social connection’ (McQuire, 2006, pp. 263) that are both made…
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fieldwork finished
Tonight I wrapped up my Flickr interviews, which were the last bits of fieldwork for my PhD. I could have kept talking to people forever, because the whole process has been so rich and productive and interesting, and, well, fun, but you have to stop somewhere. I’m going to be saying this many more times…