The SAGE Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses

SAGE Publications

Richard Andrews, Erik Borg, Stephen Boyd Davis, Myrrh Domingo, Jude England, Richard Andrews, Erik Borg, Stephen Boyd Davis, Myrrh Domingo, Jude England, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780857027399
• eBook ISBN: 9781473971813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education

This handbook sets out the processes and products of ?digital? research. It is a theoretical and practical guide on how to undertake and navigate advanced research in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Topics covered include:

- how to make research more accessible

- the use of search engines and other sources to determine the scope of work

- research training for students

- what will theses, dissertations and research reports look like in ten years? time?

- the storing and archiving of such research

- ethics and methodologies in the field

- intercultural issues

The editors focus on advances in arts and practice-based doctorates, and their application in other fields and disciplines. The contributions chart new territory for universities, research project directors, supervisors and research students regarding the nature and format of Masters and doctoral work, as well as research projects.

This handbook is an essential reference for researchers, supervisors and administrators on how to conduct and evaluate research projects in a digital and multimodal age.

Richard Andrews is Professor in English, Faculty of Children and Learning, Institute of Education.

Erik Borg is a Senior Lecturer at Coventry University?s Centre for Academic Writing.

Stephen Boyd Davis is Research Leader in the School of Design, Royal College of Art.

Myrrh Domingo is Visiting Assistant Professor in English Education and Literacy Education at New York University.

Jude England is Head of Social Sciences at the British Library.

SECTION 1

Institutional Perspectives

The turn to digital in the conception, design, supervision, production and examination of dissertations and theses might be said to have significant implications for institutions: graduate schools, doctoral schools, senior academic bodies and their administrators. It is the institutions who set the parameters for study and who award the degrees. In many ways, they are the gatekeepers of how knowledge is presented; and certainly they control how research is presented for academic awards. It is thus appropriate that the first section of the present handbook is devoted to institutional perspectives.

In the opening chapter, Erik Borg and Stephen Boyd Davis take a historical perspective, looking in particular at the relationship between the means of production and the nature of the thesis that is produced. One of the key moments that they examine is the establishment of the written doctorate by research in the early nineteenth century, emerging from von Humboldt’s reform of the German higher education system. This move from the oral to the written form as the principal qualification for teaching at university level was significant as it reinforced the centrality of words in the expression of knowledge. Whereas in disputation or other forms of oral delivery there were always the accompanying modes and modalities of gesture, physical presence, voice; in the written form, the message depended more heavily on words themselves (albeit as arranged visually on a page). This close association of written language and research-based knowledge has remained with us, sometimes to the extent that those of a classical bent cannot see that a thesis or dissertation can be composed by any other means than the written word. Related to the emergence and dominance of the written word in the doctoral thesis, Borg and Boyd Davis identify the invention of the typewriter in the late nineteenth century as crucial to the arrangement and presentation of advanced knowledge. As they say, the typewriter, with its affordances of being able to produce writing quickly, to reproduce it via carbon copies and thus to begin to disseminate research more widely was part of the toolkit – social, institutional and material – that enabled the expansion of doctoral study during this period.

Andrews and England, in their chapter on the seminar series that gave rise to the present handbook, first describe the series itself. It was funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council between 2008 and 2010, and consisted of six-day long seminars, culminating in a conference at the British Library in London. The series was entitled ‘The nature and format of the doctoral thesis in the digital and multimodal age’, and attracted researchers, students, academics and administrators from across the UK and internationally. The patchy nature of provision for the digital thesis or dissertation in the UK universities became clear during the series, as did the wide spectrum of practices in the actual production and examination of student submissions. One of the significant angles that is reported in this chapter is the influence of arts- and practice-based degrees upon what is possible in the humanities and social sciences. Through studio- and exhibition-based doctoral submissions in the arts (usually accompanied by words to some extent), the possibilities of non-verbal forms of thesis and dissertation have been practised in the arts for several decades. Andrews and England’s chapter concludes by providing suggestions for universities as to how they might frame their regulations and guidance to graduate students who are thinking about, or are in the process of submitting a multimodal and/or digital work.

The third chapter in this opening section is by Richard Freeman and Andrew Tolmie, psychologists who work in a leadership role in the Doctoral School of the Institute of Education, University of London. First, they consider the nature of doctoral schools in European universities, then go on to discuss the range of doctorate degrees that is available. While the focus of the seminar series that was the basis for the present handbook was originally conceived to be the Doctor of Philosophy degree (PhD), Freeman and Tolmie indicate the range of professional and/or practice-based doctorates available in a social science institution such as the Institute of Education. They then go on to consider the implications for examiners in reading theses and dissertations via electronic media (e.g. the iPad), and also of making theses available online. In the latter case, they suggest that graduate or doctoral schools need to work closely with libraries to make sure the formats in which work is finally presented is conducive to storage and access. They set the debate about the nature and format of the thesis within a wider shift from the thesis as product to an emphasis on the process of the doctoral experience for students; this process appears to coincide with increasingly provisionality in the nature of knowledge in it social context, a theme developed later in the handbook by Gunther Kress in the section on multimodality.

In the final chapter of this section, Helen Beetham, Allison Littlejohn and Colin Milligan explore the nature of digital literacies and their implications for researcher development. First, they depict a world in which skills in information and communication technologies (ICTs) are essential in about 90% of employment, and in which graduate students are expected to bring a high degree of capability. Such demands have implications for the pursuit of knowledge through postgraduate study, and especially for the modes and media of research, research presentation and access to reliable information. The institutional imperative is for supervisors, examiners and graduate schools to be aware of these demands and to devise strategies for supporting postgraduate and research students. While it is acknowledged that university infrastructure may not support – in some cases inhibit – such exploration and innovation, it is beholden upon universities to provide the conditions within which such students can thrive. The implications are that research training programmes need to be well thought out, comprehensive and fit for purpose.

We can already see that such institutional demands, driven by the turn to the multimodal and digital in the production and examination of theses and dissertations, are considerable; and we can see why governments are increasingly funding large-scale consortia of universities to provide doctoral training, better support services and a richer context for postgraduate work.

1

The Thesis: Texts and Machines

Erik Borg and Stephen Boyd Davis

INTRODUCTION

In order to provide a context in which to think about the dissertation now, this chapter looks both to the past and future. We deal with earlier forms of the dissertation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and with the forms that the dissertation might take in the twenty-first. What unites these approaches is the conviction that the dissertation is contingent, changing and changeable. While supervisors may expect their students to produce a dissertation that resembles the one they wrote themselves, changes both in the available technologies and in the kinds of knowledge the dissertation is expected to represent are having a significant effect on its form as well as its content.

This chapter makes no claims to be a general survey of the media technologies relevant to the dissertation; instead it highlights some of the key issues arising from the interaction between media technologies and scholarly practice. We are engaged in a process that Haas (1996, p. 221) called historicising technology, that is, looking at the historical development of current technologies. In this case, we consider the knowledge dissemination device of the dissertation, and the material technologies that have and might in the future support it. In her discussion of Ong (1982/2002), Haas describes how writing ‘transforms sound into space’ (p. 9). The representation of sound by graphic symbols, that is, the spatialisation of language, was for Ong as well as other theorists of literacy such as Goody (1987), and Havelock (1986), a fundamental shift in human history. Haas, however, draws on other scholars (Scribner & Cole, 1981; Lave & Wenger, 1991) to argue that literacy does not represent a ‘great divide’, but that it is a material technology that is value-laden, and ‘that to treat written language as if it were neutral or transparent has severe political, theoretical, and practical consequences’ (p. 21). As dissertations increasingly allow for the possibility of de-spatialising language, as well as inscribing in context still images, sounds and other time-based data, the values and opportunities of the written text become apparent and disputable.

We first consider how the doctorate moved from a largely oral tradition, in which texts played the supporting role of framing public disputations, to the doctorate’s own ‘great divide’ with the emergence of the doctorate by research from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reform of the German higher education system at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Instead of representing a mastery of all knowledge, the doctorate by research demonstrated the candidate’s ability to carry out a research project that generated new knowledge and to disseminate that in a written text. Alongside the development of this form of doctorate, sharing in wider social trends of systematisation and industrialisation, we look back on the role of one particular technology – the typewriter – developed from various attempts to create a machine that would replicate Gutenberg’s reproductive technology in text production. The typewriter functioned synergistically in the period from the 1880s to create dissertations that were linear, objective and often gendered (dictated or handwritten by men, to be typed by women). ‘Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts’, as Nietzsche wrote (Kittler, 1999, p. 200).

We then discuss the purposes of the dissertation and the many affordances that the written text offers, possibilities that are enlarged rather than obviated by moving from the typewriter to the computer. Supplemented but not replaced by images, sound and other time-based data, texts, we argue, allow an important interplay between external representation and internal conceptualisation. With the enhancement of computer technology, texts become easily searchable in ways that other forms of representation, unless provided with metadata in the form of text, are not. Meanwhile, the dissertation on paper retains its simple accessibility and known longevity. We conclude by proposing a seven-fold heuristic which might guide our consideration of competing technologies for the dissertation. Most of these are also relevant to Masters theses and undergraduate final papers.

Although the doctorate is an ancient qualification, the modern doctorate by research is, against this antiquity, quite recent in development. As now, it existed in the past in a complex network of tools and technologies, institutions and the societies that produced it. We will briefly discuss the development of the doctorate (Doctor of Philosophy; PhD, DPhil) and the tools that have supported it. Tools here refer both to the cognitive tools of language and to the material tools (e.g. pens, paper, typewriters, computers and software) that enable and shape written texts and the doctorate (Haas, 1996). Until recently, the doctorate has been the qualification for teaching in universities, and so the nature of that teaching will be considered. Combining the development of the doctorate with a consideration of these tools, and, in particular, the typewriter as the tool for the production of the modern research-based doctorate helps to historicise the doctorate (Haas, 1996) and suggest the linkages between the doctorate and writing technology.

ORIGINS

The doctorate is as old as the European university; contributors to Powell and Green (2007) write that the doctorate has been awarded for 700 years in Britain and a thousand in France. It entitled the holder to teach at university¹, and demonstrated that the holder had mastered the liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium (Simpson, 1983). However, in comparison with modern society, the early doctorate emerged in a society with very limited access to books and other textual material, and the role of the holder of the doctorate was to expound their interpretations of texts. Teaching and learning in the medieval universities was primarily oral, with written texts playing a supporting role (Kruse, 2006). Lectures in which a teacher would comment on passages from an authoritative text comprised the main form of teaching. These lectures were complemented by formal disputations in which participants would address set questions. Both teachers and students would engage in public disputations, which established the reputation of a university in a way similar to that of today’s published research (Kruse, 2006).

In public disputations, the participants would address a thesis or dissertatio. The disputation was rooted in the epistemology of the university; ‘knowledge had to be deduced interpretively from the old, authoritative writings. These were the primary sources of knowledge …’ (Kruse, 2006, p. 336). According to Kruse (2006), the thesis was initially laid out orally, but later took the form of a written poster. Students would defend or oppose the thesis, and an arbiter would decide the outcome. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the thesis was disseminated in a pamphlet that participants and audience would read in advance. Russell argues that the tradition that texts were primarily used as the starting point for oral discussion continued into the nineteenth century. This tradition prepared students for ‘the pulpit, the senate, the bar’ (Russell, 2002, p. 36). These professions, like teaching at university, involved oratory. The tradition of disputation continues in the oral examination (viva voce) for the doctorate; however, the doctorate by research, the modern doctorate, is different in terms of the knowledge it represents and the means by which that knowledge is presented².

In the eighteenth century, the nature of the university and its students began to change, a trend that accelerated strongly after the Napoleonic wars. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a revolution in higher education occurred. ‘The stimulus for this development stemmed from Napoleon’s military defeat of Prussia in 1806. Smarting over the loss of the university at Halle, which was situated in territory forfeited to Napoleon, a new system of higher education was formulated to assist the rebuilding of the demoralised Prussian state’ (Noble, 1994, p. 6). The Prussians founded the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin, incorporating innovations that had been pioneered in Göttingen and Halle. It was there that the Humboldt model of the university emerged. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) reoriented the university away from the analysis and debate of authoritative texts. Instead, the goal of university teaching became that of modelling and instilling the means for the discovery of scientific knowledge (Rüegg, 2004). The university was to become a factory for the creation of new knowledge. In the process, ‘… the university gradually replaced the church as the central cultural and intellectual institution of the modern nation state …’, and ‘… its indispensable economic power house …’ (Nybom, 2003, p. 147).

The shift that established research as the primary goal of the university built on changes that had occurred outside the university, primarily in academies and scholarly societies. The most notable of these was the Royal Society (founded in 1660) in which members, for the most part outside universities and unsupported by them, investigated the natural world through experimentation and observation. Knowledge creation through experimentation broke with the university’s tradition of disputation and with alchemy, the secret investigation of the natural world (Shapin, 1984). Instead of disputation or secret investigation, experiments would be witnessed, and the knowledge would be disseminated through letters to members who could not attend and directly observe the experiments.

Humboldt’s reorientation of the university along the line of the scientific societies brought public research into universities on the continent. Quoting Frederich Schleiermacher, Rüegg writes that the goal of the u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• SECTION 1 INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVES
• SECTION 2 STUDENT PERSPECTIVES
• SECTION 3 ETHICAL AND INTERCULTURAL ISSUES
• SECTION 4 MULTIMODALITY, INCLUDING THE REPRESENTATION AND PRESENTATION OF THESES AND DISSERTATIONS
• SECTION 5 ARCHIVING, STORAGE AND ACCESSIBILITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
• SECTION 6 RESEARCH METHODS
• Index