Why make an Electronic Thesis and Dissertation?

Craig Bellamy

School of Creative Art, the University of Melbourne, 13 August 2002.

How I will frame this discussion is through the idea of an on-line Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (or ETD) within the broad field of Humanities Computing.

I will then introduce you to my own work, which is called milkbar.com.au, which is an oral history about change within our very own Fitzroy. (And as this is the first time that I have shown this is public, please be kind).

1) What is an on-line thesis and dissertation?

This is still relatively new ground as there are not a whole lot of models to work with within the humanities. The first two ETD’s that I know of (that were both produced as PhD qualifications) were by Simon Pockley of RMIT and by Matt Kirschenbaum of the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. They both were produced in 1995.

For whatever reason, the Southern states of the US, especially Virginia, have been extraordinarily innovative in Humanities Computing scholarship. You have Virginia Tech that is perhaps the leading university in the promotion of ETD’s, and there is the Centre of History and New Media at George Mason University, (where I am perhaps getting my own work assessed), and of course, you have the University of Virginia, which has made enormous inroad into Humanities Computing scholarship. (the university of Virginia has just introduced a Masters degree in Humanities Computing). (Humanities computing is mostly concerned with text and text manipulation and mark-up).

I will just briefly offer a definition of an ETD

This is how Virginia Tech describes an Electronic thesis.

"An ETD is a document that explains the research or scholarship of a graduate student. It is expressed in a form simultaneously suitable for machine archives and world-wide retrieval. The ETD is similar to its paper predecessor. It documents the author's years of academic commitment. It describes why the work was done, how the research relates to previous work as recorded in the literature, the research methods used, the results, and the interpretation and discussion of the results, and a summary with conclusions. The ETD is different, however as it provides a technologically advanced medium for expressing your ideas."

And, UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation) is also trying to promote this type of research. They have formed a group of 140 universities worldwide whose aim is partly to unlock the huge potential of research produced by post-graduate students for broad publication and distribution, especially among developing countries. However, they are not just interested in providing an efficient and cheap means of publication, but also in promoting new forms of electronic scholarship.

A quote from their web site states:

(snip) Our goal…is to identify "technologically innovative" theses and dissertations. We want to provide models of new media scholarship for the next generation of scholars and researchers. (snip/)

And if you go onto UNESCO’s site, you will find a much more in-depth discussion of ETD’s and standards and models of this type of research (etdguide.org)

Within Australia, there is an ETD project that comes out of UNSW, but it not really about promoting electronic scholarship; it is more about distributing the traditional thesis in electronic form.

However, some of the centres and individuals within Australia that are pushing electronic scholarship are the Archaeological Computing Unit at the University of Sydney (Ian Johnson and Andrew Wilson who are into GIS or Geographical Information Systems (or Maps, because that is what Archaeologist do) and University of Newcastle has the Linguistic Computing Centre, there is Paul Turnbull of ANU, who is an Historian and has been working on a project for a number of years that has the aim of placing Captain Cook’s diaries on-line, and creating electronic publishing standards especially in relation to data-interoperability (what this means is that what he is producing can be shared and incorporated into the work of other researchers). Paul also until quite recently was the president of H-Net, which stand for Humanities network on-line (which comes out of Michigan State University), and is possibly the world’s largest academic on-line email discussion network with about 250, 000 subscribers (thankfully they aren’t all on the same list, but it is divided in to about 600 lists). And there is Adrian Miles of RMIT, who is my supervisor, and is presently on his way to perhaps the peak conference in Humanities Computing which is Digital Resources in the Humanities at Edinburgh University, which is very exciting if you are into Text encoding or Meta Data?

Now I will introduce you to milkbar.com.au

(And I will need to read to you the synopsis because as it is a thesis it is designed to be read and you might not get it otherwise).

Milkbar.com.au: An Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD) that utilises ethnographic history approaches to explore a global/local nexus utilising an alternative model within Humanities Computing

Milkbar.com.au is fundamentally an oral history project about Fitzroy, an inner city suburb of Melbourne, Australia. It is an oral history project that seeks to both record and understand the significance of a local community within a broader understanding of ‘globalisation’. However, Milkbar.com.au differs from many other oral history projects—both off and on-line—as this particular project was framed from the outset with the Internet as the communication medium in mind. Different mediums require different methodological approaches and thus, some historical questions may be better suited for this medium that others. [1]

The Internet is certainly one of the more participatory mediums and is the medium that has become almost the archetype of what we understand as globalisation. There is a link—either metaphorical or otherwise—between the study of a local community (in terms of understanding the global/local nexus) and its articulation through the Internet. One is about place and locality, the other is imagined as placeless. What makes this project unique in many ways is that it was theoretically conceptualised from the outset with the particular historical question in mind. More precisely, every photo, every video interview, every question, and every paragraph of text was constructed with the consideration of how it would be communicated through the Internet. Most Humanities Computing projects deliver pre-existing archives to the web through large-scale digitisation projects. [2] This project in part utilises the archival potential of the Internet but with ‘artefacts’ that were captured specifically for it.

Milkbar.com.au could be described as a ‘contemporary history’, or a history of a small Australia community in the early stages of the new century to help us understand how individual and groups resist or embrace the forces of their world. The production and arrangement of the ‘archive’, along with the capture and categorisation of the recorded video interviews, to a certain degree form an authorial ‘analysis’ of the archive. The archive is situated within an informed understanding of globalisation discourse and within this, it records aspects of the everyday that are usually overlooked in official public archives. Simon Schama, a well-known American Historian, claims that the digitisation of archives is a huge step forward in the democratisation of historical knowledge. [3] Likewise, the digitisation and publication of artefacts of often over looked people and practices is also a huge step forward in providing for future researchers traces of our past.

As we are told, one of the defining aspects of our present historical period is the globalisation of various aspects of our national societies and cultures. This is evident through both a burgeoning academic focus, and through a civic discourse that is both embracive and resistant of globalisation. This may seem a big leap to make from an inner city Australian community, however it is in local communities everywhere where most of us live and develop our inescapable relative understandings of the world. These understandings are often overlooked in discussions of the global and are a good place to test some of the claims of globalisation discourse.

Globalisation is not an indiscriminate theory of everything; but is a very particular phenomenon that is specific to industries, cultures, individuals, and geographical locals. The suburb of Fitzroy is an exceptional area to explore aspects of the global/local nexus simply because it has such a diverse demographic and because is typifies a certain brand of post-industrialism. This research cannot possibly seek to provide concrete links between globalisation and the local knowledge offered by the participants of this study, however it can provide an informed speculative framework for users to explore the relationship. The present discourse on globalisation frequently utilises methodology that is inadequately framed and excessively general. A local history can test the validity of some of the generally accepted claims of globalisation within a more personal framework.

Although primarily this work set out as an oral history, the opportunities offered by the medium means that the methodologies utilised often expanded into the realm of the ‘ethnographic’. The line between oral history and ethnographic filmmaking is tenuous in this medium partly because of the convergence of various mediums and approaches (such as on-line digital video and oral history), and partly because disciplinary frameworks within the Internet are not yet well defined. New media objects are inherently less stable, less understood technologies than, for instance, the academic monologue, and thus the methodologies are a lot less formulaic and clear. Although knowledge advances rapidly in the humanities, the preferred ‘container’ for this knowledge being the codex, largely remains stable. The process of constructing a large new media object is inherently ‘interdisciplinary’ which is however, highly problematic in terms of independent post-graduate research (meaning that you have to cover an great range of skills).

(What I will show you now is stage one of the work, as I have not moved onto the second stage yet which involves providing close analysis of the film within four rudimentary frameworks of globalisation).