The Cost of a PhD
A recent article published on Quartz, titled “Get a PhD – but leave academia as soon as you graduate” has been doing the rounds on twitter. There were a few things that irked me about the piece, despite its seemingly glowing account of undertaking a research degree.
The gist of the article is this: […]
Reframing Space for Ubiquitous Computing
My PhD thesis is now available as a free PDF download (28mb), a free eBook and a print-on-demand book.
With sufficient space between me and the end of the PhD process, I feel like it’s time to share the fruits of 3.5 years with readers of this blog. Whilst there’s still much within the […]
Headlines
In between various overseas trips and general convalescing at home since I submitted my thesis, I’ve been reading a heap of fiction. For some reason, I just didn’t feel like it during my research, or couldn’t justify the time spent reading non-academic texts.
At the same time, I’ve also tried to keep up the writing […]
Submission
Two weeks ago, I handed in my thesis for examination. In Australia, we call this event the ‘submission’, where three heavy, bounded copies of your work are entered into all manner of administrivia before being distributed to two anonymous examiners, and a third if those two disagree.
There’s no defence as such; just a presentation […]
A New Abstract
The last 6 months have been a whirlwind of writing, reframing, designing, and presenting as the deadline for my thesis submission approaches. I haven’t posted any of this new work here as it’s been such a dynamic process that I haven’t wanted to document it in public. However, a few weeks ago I was forced […]
Head down
This is a quick post to break the drought here, and to let the world know that I have been working. The above picture is from Scrivener – my writing program of choice – showing the word target for my literature review. Writing this has been enjoyable so far (sort of), and has […]
Emerging outlines
As an activity today I went through this blog and conducted a card sort on the posts. What emerged from it was a rough outline of my overall thesis (and the realisation that I’ve written many more words than I had originally thought). There is a lot of manipulation to get these words into a […]
Notes
I’m increasingly relying on my notebook to test out ideas and document progress. In the last 3 months, there’s been about 100 pages of content similar to this: trying different ways of analyzing data, and prototyping chapters. It feels much less formal than this blog, but today I was suddenly struck with the realization that […]
Another refresh
It’s a common story that the focus of a PhD changes dramatically as you progress through it. In almost two years I think I’ve written about 10 different abstracts, all with some kind of common thread but with decidedly different implications for the activities and outcomes of the project. In that spirit, I’d like to […]
Designing a case study
When I started my research, I didn’t fully understand how lucky I was to have an industry partner attached to the project. As part of an existing Design Research Institute project, my PhD position was essentially like a normal full-time position, with a project ready to kick off; all I did was slot in and […]
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Geoplaced
This is a notebook exploring the gaps between geography, sociology, technology, science fiction and things between.
I used to write about my PhD here, which I finished in July 2013. You can download a PDF or order a print-on-demand copy of my PhD thesis.
Themes
- art (1)
- Augmented Reality (2)
- Brain Dump (17)
- Conducting a PhD (13)
- Context (6)
- essay-a-fortnight (2)
- fiction (1)
- Government (1)
- How to: Get a PhD (5)
- inspiration (4)
- Knowledge (15)
- Location (19)
- Methods (6)
- Mobile (2)
- Parks Vic (17)
- Place/Space (5)
- Research Questions (11)
- Technology (3)
- travel (1)
- ubicomp (7)
- Uncategorized (11)
- Visualisation (10)