[This has been in drafts for a while, so don't be surprised with the date :)]

Following PhDs across the globe on Twitter helps to realise that the process and customs for a PhD differ between countries. For example, from what I understand in the US, dissertations are not published; a dissertation might be shared as unpublished version and/or converted into a book to be published. In the Netherlands PhD dissertations are usually published as books. The text is not adapted; instead, it’s formatted nicely and turned into a book with a cover and few extras.

So, my dissertation will be published too. Finishing it to be evaluated by the PhD committee was tough, but it did not feel definite, since I knew I could change a few minor things. I did not realise then that sending it to a printer is much scarier as it is definite: it will go public in that form.

The things that make it difficult are those that I should be comfortable with, given what I blog and I study blogging – passion, imperfections and confessional writing.

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Historically dissertations in the Netherlands are accompanied by stellingen, propositions that sum up one’s PhD work. I always saw them as an outlet that reflects the author’s values/thinking/reflections in relation to the work done. I anticipated the pleasure of writing stellingen – as a legitimate part of the dissertation that would reflects my passions and my beliefs – and I even wrote the first version of “stellingen-to-be” in 2004.

To my surprise I did not feel like doing it when finishing my dissertation. Given that in Utrecht University, where I defend it, stellingen are not required as a formal part of the dissertation, I decided to go without stellingen.

I guess the main reason behind not writing something, which I view as a personal stance behind an academic work, is that I put all what I wanted to say in the stellingen in the dissertation itself. In that sense, the dissertation title “Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers” reflects not only the content, but also the format of it: my own passions are present throughout the book, in the choices of topics, methods and ways to write about those.

It is scary to get that printed as a book: while being present as an author and confessional writing is normal and even desired in a weblog, this is not the case with most of the academic work. As a reader of confessional academic texts I know how helpful it is to see someone’s far-from-perfect work-in-progress, but it is scary to write such a text myself even if I believe that this is important.

Learning to show imperfections of my own research was a big part of the PhD process. In that respect I just loved the way Penelope Eckert puts it (in a “How I Write” conversation which is part of the series of conversations about writing with academics at Stanford University):

..the purpose of writing is not simply to tie a neat package around what was really frequently a very flawed process, but to actually discuss the flawed part of the process, because people can learn from that and I can learn from that, too.

She explains how it became part of her writing choices:

…one of the things that I am most concerned with in academics, because that’s where I live, is lack of confidence, insecurity. I was plagued by lack of confidence as a student and for years, and I know when my own students are plagued by lack of confidence; and the thing we learn to do in academics is to cover it up and act really cool. And when we do research we get—and when you teach—I remember as an assistant professor learning to act how I knew more than I did. And in research, learning how to make the final product look as if there had been no glitches beforehand, or as if everything had been done perfectly. And all that is doing is contributing to other people’s insecurity, and it doesn’t help mine because I know that I have been covering up.

Having been there myself I find it important to break the tradition and to make sure that I don’t add to other people insecurities by showing a polished version of my research. I try not to cover up in my dissertation, so it has a lots of traces of my passions and imperfections of what I did. But gosh, confessional writing is a scary thing to do, especially since doing it in an academic document is an art by itself (and I’m not sure that I mastered it :).

Well, the good thing is that the dissertation is out of my hands now. I can be scared as I want, but at least nothing could be done about it. And, hopefully, blogging about those fears helps someone else to get over theirs, pretty much as danah boyd‘s posts on sharing her dissertation online helped me to deal with my own.

danah in Taken Out of Context — my PhD dissertation

Knowing that I would share my dissertation publicly, I desperately wanted to create a perfect dissertation. Anyone who has been through this process knows how impossible that is. [...]

There was a huge part of me that wanted to hole up and not share this document with you, for fear of your criticism. This is not a perfect document. Not even close. There are holes in my argument structure, problems with my description, and loads of places where I can’t help but smack my forehead at my simplicity and lack of depth. With all of its imperfections, there is one very important thing about this document: it is done. And by the end of the process, I accepted the age-old PhD mantra: the only good dissertation is a done dissertation.

and in licensing your dissertation under Creative Commons

Part way through my dissertation, I realized that I had never read a dissertation. I was surprised to find that very few people make their dissertations easily available. Why? In some senses, the diss is quite embarrassing. It’s imperfect. You’re sick of it. But there are huge advantages to making it available. At the very least, it allows future students to get a sense of what they should expect. (There was nothing more nerve-calming than realizing that my mentors’ dissertations were totally sloppy at points.)

I will share my dissertation online, very soon. It’s under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 (that’s another story of learning from danah and other PhDs who wrote about their experiences :)

• Writing PhD dissertation
• Notes on my PhD methodology: introduction
• Discovering your passion

Just finished and submitted :)

Efimova, L. (2008). Blending blogging into an academic text. Paper submitted IN THE GAME: Ethnographic relationships, mediation and knowledge, workshop at Internet Research 9.0, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15-18 October 2008.

Abstract. For my research blogging has been a blessing and a curse. While it has turned into a set of research practices that brought rich results, it also resulted in a search for methodologically sound ways to justify those practices, put me into a struggle of being a researcher and a blogger at the same time, and challenged everything I knew about academic writing. As I work on the chapters of my PhD dissertation, blending blogging into an academic text to bringing together the blogger and the researcher in me, this paper provides an opportunity to reflect on this process. I start from introducing my research and the roles blogging played in it, and then discuss bringing my own weblog in the dissertation through autoethnography and confessional writing as well as the challenges of representing other bloggers in the text of it.

Looking forward to the workshop – the list of the workshop participants and their papers is intriguing…

• Weblog research: artefacts and practices – and contexts that influence them
• PhD is done
• Weblog as a research notebook (2): types of notes