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ii. Electronic Theses and Dissertation

As a segue into new media technologies (especially as a post-graduate Humanities student), perhaps one of the best ways forward is through the framework of an Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD). This is for a number of reasons, most notably because it is within the academic monologue in which most Humanities knowledge advances. It is a robust and well-understood technology and does provide rigorous transitory positions into new technologies from a position that most humanists can identify with.(1)

One of the Universities that is pushing the model of the ETD is Virginia Tech in the United States and this is how they define it:

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.(2)

Likewise, UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation), have formed a group of one hundred and forty universities worldwide whose aim is in part, to unlock the huge potential of research produced by post-graduate students through the ETD. Their web site states:

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. (3)

Within Australia, there is an ETD project that comes out of UNSW (the University of New South Wales), but it is not really about promoting electronic scholarship; it is more about creating standards for distributing the traditional thesis in electronic form. (4)

Fundamentally, the ETD serves the same function as the traditional thesis, however as a ‘container for knowledge’ it allows the student to include digital objects in their work. A Musician may find it useful to include sonnets in their thesis or an Art Historian, paintings, or in the case of this study, oral history. Not only this but the objects can be arranged and analysed in such a way that it may bring new meanings to the work. It advances the cognitive capital of post-graduate research, something that is perhaps more important now than in any time in our recent past. more>>

[1] There are still not a whole lot of models to work with within the Humanities, and the first two ETDs that I know of (that were produced as PhD qualifications), were by Simon Pockley of RMIT University and by Matt Kirschenbaum of the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. They were both produced in 1995.

Pockley Op.Cit

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum “LINES FOR A VIRTUAL T[y/o]POGRAPHY: Electronic Essays on Artifice and Information” PhD Project Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, The University of Virginia

<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~mgk3k/dissertation/title.html> (Accessed 21 September, 2002)

[2] “Definition of an ETD” Virginia Tech

<http://etd.vt.edu/background/whatis.html> (Accessed 22 August, 2002)

[3] “The Guide to Electronic Thesis and Dissertations” UNESCO

<http://www.etdguide.org> (accessed 22 August, 2002)

[4] “The Australian Digital Thesis Project” The University of New South Wales

<http://www.ceenet.org/workshops99/Jean_Claude_Guedon/Australian-theses.htm> (Accessed 22 August, 2002)

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