Why you should keep a PhD notebook

This guest post is by Eloise Zoppos, a PhD Candidate  in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University who is researching social media use by young adults. In this post Eloise offers some tips for keeping a research notebook.

Recently I had a life – or at least research – changing experience…I began keeping a PhD notebook! By PhD notebook I don’t mean a workbook where meetings, seminars, results and research progression are recorded, I mean a good old fashioned notebook where essentially anything that comes to mind can be noted.

Although this is probably already common practice for most people, for me the lesson to accept and embrace the messy, the illegible and the plain nonsensical was a hard one. However once I began to realize that it’s perfectly okay to scribble, deviate, muse, draw and think (or write!) out loud, keeping a PhD notebook solely dedicated ideas, thoughts and reflections changed my research life.

Here I want to offer some easy tips for other students who may be finding hard to see the benefits of a notebook, and may be finding it even harder to actively maintain one.  So here are 5 tips that I’ve found helpful in making a PhD notebook an effective part of my research life which I hope some of you may find helpful:

1. Use one book for all your notes

If you’re anything like me you probably you have various places where you note down ideas, thoughts and reflections about your research ranging from a formal notebook to pieces of scrap paper that are handy at the time! When it comes to actually embracing these ideas however, having one notebook – or at least having one notebook for each subset of your research – is one of the easiest ways to ensure you can easily keep track of your thought process.

I’ve found that documenting my ideas, thoughts and reflections – no matter how minor – in one notebook has not only helped me to become more organized in the way I conduct and approach my research project, but it also meant that I no longer have to worry about misplacing or just downright forgetting a potentially significant idea.

2. Take your notebook everywhere

When I first began rigorously keeping a PhD notebook one of the first mistakes I made was not taking it whenever I went to work. This of course defeated the whole purpose of having a notebook as I resorted to writing my notes on scrap pieces of paper, which as I mentioned above was not conducive to tracking the progress of my research project. So if you’re starting a PhD notebook or just wanting an easy way to make it an effective part of your research life, then this is one of the easiest things you can do!

3. Avoid using white out or ripping out pages!

When it came to maintaining a PhD notebook one of the hardest things for me was accepting (and embracing) that in this designated notebook the process of writing and the writing itself was allowed to be messy and/or plain nonsensical! At first I would spend time whiting out words and whole sentences either because they didn’t quite ‘flow’ or even because the writing was not neat enough. It even came to the point where I was ripping pages out and yes, in some instances even re-writing pages that were too messy! Not only did this mean that I was not using my time effectively, but also that I was missing out on one of the great aspects of having a notebook; being able to track both the thought process as it happened and the evolution of the research project itself.

I soon began to realise that often the things I disliked and felt uneasy about such as the words that I had crossed out and replaced, and the arrows swapping paragraphs and ideas around, were the most telling of how my thought process and my research project had evolved. And this point leads on nicely to my fourth tip:

4. Hand-write notes

Although most of my writing is done on a computer, when it comes to note taking I almost always rely on hand writing instead. I realise that many readers will not agree with this and that’s fine, however I found that by taking notes by hand I was able to see my thought process as it happened rather than relying on a set of perfectly typed notes.

For me, typing notes on a computer may have been faster, but it was less spontaneous and it became too easy to merely delete something that I didn’t like or something that I deemed as unimportant. I also found that with computer notes I missed the nuances that emerged from various word choices, sentence re-writes and structural changes that were evident with hand written notes. Although this aspect of the research process can be easily overlooked, it can be one of the most formative parts of the research process in the early stages of the formation of the project right up to the stage of writing up the final product.

5. Re-read your notes

The last tip for making a PhD notebook an effective part of the research process is continually going back and re-reading your notes. Although this seems obvious, with the amount of notes you produce (especially when you start documenting them in one book) the number of pages starts to build up. When you start working on something else, it can become easy to forget all the various notes that you actually took. Looking over them when you start on a new sub-project or section, or even just looking back through them every week, can be inspiring, reinvigorating, or may even spark a great idea that you may forgotten about or just didn’t have time to chase up!

So that’s 5 quick and simple tips for making a notebook an effective part of your research life! For those of you who have a notebook or are thinking about keeping one, what are your useful tips for making it an effective part of your research process?

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What if your CV is not enough? (part one)

Editor’s note: Recently I read an article in Forbes magazine which claimed the Curriculum Vitae (CV), which we all use to describe ourselves when we apply for jobs, will be replaced with your ‘digital footprint’ in the next ten years. In other words, people will understand you and what you do via searching for you on Google. There’s some evidence that how you behave on the internet already affects your employment prospects.

I don’t know if this future will really come to pass and the CV will die, but it’s an interesting idea for those doing a PhD to think about. If you need to have a clear digital identity to compete in the job market, what should you be doing now toward that aim? So I have asked a few of the PhD students who I think are already doing their digital identity well to write about the strategies they use.

The first in this series is Andy Coverdale, a PhD research student at the University of Nottingham who is exploring how social media facilitates doctoral practices and identity development. He blogs at http://phdblog.net and is on twitter as @andycoverdale. Over to Andy:

I use my blog to develop ideas, to disseminate work in progress, and to create links with other academic bloggers. My blogging practice is invariably informed and shaped by my role as an educational researcher interested in social media, but I wish here only to present a personal perspective based on my ongoing experiences as a PhD blogger, and explain how those experiences have come to influence and contribute to my doctoral studies.

Blog Writing Contexts

The discipline of regular blogging has helped me shape and refine my writing skills, and has been particularly useful when I’ve not been writing towards my thesis, such as during intense periods of data collection and analysis. Blogging has given me the opportunity to experiment with personal and expressive forms of writing, and challenged me to engage with non-specialist audiences. Whilst guides to blogging often recommend developing a consistent writing style, I’m happy to do the opposite. I have no problem mixing lengthy ‘academic’ posts with short, quirky anecdotes and musings, and integrating writing with multimedia such as images, video and sound files.

Blogs can encourage academic enquiry within a social and discursive environment, and celebrate diversity and freedom of expression. As PhD students, we should be instinctively curious. Many of my blog posts address ideas, concepts and issues beyond the relatively narrow focus of my thesis, exploring social, cultural and political aspects of my research field, and peripheral and interdisciplinary contexts.

No academic writing need exist in isolation. Restructuring and re-appropriating texts for different formats and different audiences is not only an efficient way of working but also a valuable academic skill. I have found blog posts can provide ‘building blocks’ of content for a thesis chapter, a journal article or a conference paper. But I think this process works equally well in reverse. I may find it useful to choose a specific topic, problem or argument from an existing text – writing I may have submitted to my supervisors, a draft paper, or part of a thesis chapter – and ‘blogify’ it; perhaps in response to another blog post or a current debate, to emphasise a personal perspective or experience, or to engage a different audience. And if you think about it, blog-like texts are prevalent in academic writing: in proposals, poster texts, and abstracts – in fact anywhere where you need to summarize, or disseminate to a specific or general audience.

Process and Documentation

Over time, my blog has accumulated to represent a comprehensive documentation of my doctoral practice, charting the incubation and development of ideas, concepts and arguments. As such, it provides a powerful and searchable narrative of my doctoral experiences and my academic and personal development. In adopting this approach, I concede some of this content is (and will become) academically naïve and critically contestable, or may simply be no longer relevant, but collectively it contributes to a transparent and authentic representation of progress that is routinely removed from formal academic dissemination. In this regard, I often find it useful to ‘self-comment’ on my posts, not only in response to another comment (which I always try to do), but as a ‘note to self,’ ensuring that developing ideas, new trains of thought and reflective processes are kept within context.

Engaging and Imagining Audiences

Like most PhD students, I am part of an institutional community of scholars that provides access to formal and informal peer support and supervision. But these can be inconsistent and limited in both scope and regularity. Blogs and other social media provide an opportunity to establish additional channels of dissemination, discussion and critical feedback beyond the physical and disciplinary boundaries of immediate research communities.

My blogging plays a central role in an ongoing arrangement of integrated social media practices that has helped me develop a sustainable network of academic discourse founded on relationships of trust, friendship and professional identity. I particularly value the support, ideas and critical perspectives of a small number of readers who have come to comment regularly on my blog. I recognise the nature of my research field ensures I have access to a critical mass of academics who are actively engaged in using social media, but initially I found it difficult getting visitors to my blog. I actively promote my blogging activities through other forms of social media, in particular Twitter, and comment when I can on other blogs. Bloggers choose their own ‘imagined audience,’ and whilst mine is partly derived from clues to their identity (through comments, retweets and analytical data etc.), I’m happy enough that it is largely inconsistent, transient and unknown. Much of the time I’m probably just writing for myself anyway.

Final Thoughts…

I admit, whilst some PhD blogs are highly revealing and almost confessional in nature, I adopt a degree of self-imposed professional reserve and editorial judiciousness. As such, I can hardly claim that my blog represents a ‘warts and all’ account of my every experience and emotion of doing a PhD. But if I am to claim my blog even slightly represents my doctoral journey, then it is only right that my blogging practice is, on the one hand, confident, coherent and developmental, and on the other, messy, hesitant, inconsistent and inconclusive.

I don’t think academic blogging should be immune from scrutiny and critique, and there’s no real excuse for sloppy or offensive writing or poorly constructed arguments. But I’m not overly concerned about so-called blogging etiquette. With its strong historical links to personal biography, citizen journalism and social commentary, academic blogging has inherited deeply embedded and culturally acknowledged values of subjectivity, informality, openness and experimentation. Blog writing needn’t be subject to impositions of formal academic protocols and orthodoxies.

There are many platforms for academic discourse and research dissemination where opportunities for risk-taking, provocation, creativity and personal reflexivity are virtually eliminated. A blog needn’t be one of them.

Related Posts

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Social media and your PhD

What if your CV is not enough? (Part Two)

Who cares about authority?!

My supervisor eyed me keenly,  ‘You’re aiming to become the expert on this particular subject’, he reminded me.

Well, that was only a few months into my doctoral research.  I didn’t feel much like an expert on anything at that stage!  Indeed, even though I’ve now been awarded the doctorate and am trying to get published, natural diffidence would prevent me from claiming to be the expert on all aspects of my subject.  Certainly, there are some areas where I can be fairly sure I’ve delved deeper than anyone before me – but not necessarily every topic I touched upon.

It wouldn’t be possible.

Anyway, this isn’t about me.  Stepping  briskly over the metaphorical wall which demarcates Karen-the-researcher from Karen-the-librarian, I want to write about the whole issue of authority. It’s such a large and complex issue I’m going to approach it from five  different angles.

Librarians think about authority – more often than you’d think.  And I don’t mean in the “who’s in charge round here?” sense. Questions of authority particularly come to the fore when we’re selecting books to add to stock, or when well-wishers want to donate materials. These may be something they’ve inherited, have finished with, or have even authored themselves.

Whenever this situation happens I have to ask myself some questions:

• Do I want to add a whole load of simplified editions of piano classics?
  (Answer: No. Our students want to know they’re looking at the real thing, with expression marks and tempi – not to mention the notes themselves – exactly as the composer intended.)
• Do I want to add a substantial collection of Beethoven sonatas published 80 years ago?
  (Only if the editor was an expert in his field.)
• Do I want to add an unpublished paper by an unknown, self-appointed ‘expert’?  (Hmmmm.)

Your librarian tries to ensure that what goes on the shelves is authoritative, but it goes without saying that you will be much more of an expert in some aspects of your field. This means you have to accept some of the responsibility for checking out your sources.  Are they fit for purpose?

Postgraduates should think about authority too.   When you’re researching a subject, you need to be sure that your sources are authoritative. This is of paramount importance when you come to write your literature review or to cite references in the body of your thesis.

Actually, Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “I keep six honest serving men” – often quoted to trainee news reporters – isn’t a bad one for PhD students, too:

I KEEP six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

Let’s think again about that unpublished paper that I was asked to add to stock: 

What was the author saying?
Why did he need to conduct the research or write the paper?
When was the research conducted?
How was it carried out, and how had he tried to disseminate the results? 
Where was the author placed, in terms of a research community, college or specialist society?
In short – Who was he?  Did his opinion carry any weight amongst his peers?

(These are the kind of questions you ought to be asking when you’re doing web-based research, too.)

Established academics certainly think about authority.  ‘Peer-review?’, a disgruntled author said to me, ‘Oh, these journal editors can be so stuffy! They only accept your article if they know you.’

Not so, dear friend!  I happen to believe that peer-review is an excellent system.  Two or three experts are asked to read your work – they probably won’t be paid for doing it – and to write a critique assessing the paper, the work behind it, and whether it’s suitable for the journal that you submitted it to.  This dis-interested quality control system is why if you’re published in a peer-reviewed journal, it carries more weight.

Conversely, if you cite a peer-reviewed article, you’re citing something that has been deemed worthwhile by members of the academic community.  Self-published works don’t necessarily come with the same guarantee.  And the writer of an internet article could be a total genius, a well-respected author or an unknown crank!

Your supervisor thinks about authority.  S/he needs to know what you’ve read, and where you found the information – if you found it on the web, who said it?  Can you cite a weblink?  Does the author have an academic reputation?  Is it sufficiently up-to-date in your field?

Examiners are doing you a favour when they think about authority.  You’re submitting a serious piece of work to get that all-important doctorate.  Without that vital qualification, your future progress – certainly in academia – will be very much more difficult.  (Let’s face it, it’s hard enough to get on with a doctorate!). So if your examiners insist on correct citation of authoritative sources, they’re training you well for your future in academia.

Who cares about authority?  As far as I’m concerned, anarchy is only for the very young, very immature idealist.  You absolutely should have an enquiring mind.  Question everything.  Don’t rest until you’ve satisfied yourself that arguments can be sustained and can withstand the most rigorous testing.  If they can’t, then say so.  But do demonstrate a healthy respect for authority.  It’s the first step to becoming an authority yourself!

I was told my thesis was a solid, well-researched piece of work, in part because I understood the complexities around academic notions of authority.  No-one said it was brilliant, but it was good enough to get the PhD. By the time you’ve struggled that far, that’s really all that matters.

5 ways to Poster = Fail

This week I overheard @VGoodyear asking on Twitter about tips for doing poster presentations at conferences. I thought it would make a great post topic because there’s so little guidance in the ‘how to do a thesis’ books.

A poster is a good starting point for your conference career. It’s less confronting than giving a paper because you don’t get peer reviewed and you don’t have to get on stage and defend your ideas. Most of the time posters are looked at during breaks when everyone is milling around, so it’s likely that more people will see your poster than a verbal presentation. You will probably have to stand in front of your poster at least some of the time, so it’s a great way to meet people, especially if you are new to a recurring conference.

But doing a good poster is surprisingly hard. My first conference poster was an utter failure. This is a shameful admission because I am no stranger to the concept. I endured 8 or so years of pin ups in architecture school and worked in advertising.  But I’ve seen plenty of terrible posters since then, so I feel better about it now. I’m no graphic designer, but I consulted with my sister Anitra who is and I feel confident enough to tell you what NOT to do.

Here’s 5 things to avoid:

1. No story

The poster reading experience is more like being at an art gallery than reading a book. You need to tell a story of your research (or part of it) with images and text. Both have different design considerations.

Your poster must accommodate multiple people reading it at the same time, so breaking the text up is a good idea. However many posters end up with a lot of disconnected bits of text on them because the author hasn’t thought enough about the ‘story’ that holds it together. You can use standard story structures to create logical ties between each part; a time line is a good way to do this, or outline steps in a process.

Use images sparingly – more on that later – and consider what purpose they serve. They aren’t mere decoration, but every image adds more ‘noise’ to your poster. Excess noise, at the expense of ‘signal’, can make your poster hard to read. Image placement is a complex issue, so don’t be tricky with angles unless you feel confident; if in doubt line them up with imaginary grid lines. Remember that it’s hard to read detailed text at the bottom of a poster and hold a cup of tea at the same time, so the bottom of the poster is a good place for images and the title.

2. Badly chosen text

Where do I start with this one? It’s hard to know how much text you need, you want people to stand there for about 5 – 10 minutes at the most. Less is more in this instance – resist the urge to tell them everything. The idea is to provoke interest and questions, not tell the whole story of your research.

Sometimes people cut and paste text directly from their thesis draft, which is almost always a bad idea. At the very least your poster should contain an abstract that describes the purpose of the work and write it as plainly as you can – you can’t rely on all conference attendees having the same knowledge and background as you.

3. Horrible typography

It’s hard to manage the text on a poster, but remember that people are reading it at two scales: from far away and close up. You should aim for no more than three kinds of text: one for the title, a second subheading style and then body copy for reading. You will need to have a few headlines to guide people around the page, but not so many that they compete with each other – hierarchy is important.

Make it easy for yourself by arranging the bits of text in a way which takes advantage of the way English speakers tend to read: it’s the same way they write – from left to right and top to bottom. Anitra suggests you start with 15pt font for body text and 24pt font for subheading and more for the title, but be sure to test it out in a full scale mockup and see how it looks. Remember that text is easier to read if it’s flush to the left and ragged to the right (ie: not justified to both sides, which can create unsightly ‘rivers’ down the paragraph).

4. No ‘hero’ image

Images are great to illustrate your text and provide interest, but remember trying to emphasise everything usually means you end up emphasizing nothing. One of your images should be the ‘hero’ – it should be eye catching and bigger than all the rest. The purpose of the hero image is to seduce people to your poster, so it should speak about the project in some way. Don’t be tempted to put it at an angle to make it more obvious and never run text over the image unless you have a good grasp of basic graphic design principles.

5. No takeaway

I recommended having a more detailed handout pinned up next to your poster, or ready to hand, which people can take away with them. This should be beautifully written and include all your contact details – clip a business card to it if you have them as people are more likely to file these. Forgetting to include a takeaway means missing a fantastic self promotion opportunity. You never know where that piece of paper will end up – maybe in the hands of someone who wants to give you a job!

So that’s my top five – does anyone have any other tips to offer? Have you seen any good ‘hacks’ to the poster presentation format which you want to share?

Related Posts:

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PhD Detachment

I co-supervise a student, who surprised us at lunchtime last week by saying:

“I just don’t care anymore. What ever changes you suggest, I’ll do. I want this thing out of my life”

Whenever I hear this sentiment I am relieved because I know the student has reached an important stage in the PhD process: Detachment. I thought it would be good to talk about PhD Detachment because earlier this week @soilduck asked me on Twitter:

“What are some strategies people have used to get through last 6 months of #phd? Emotionally etc … I just realised I have t-minus 6 months (exactly) until my thesis is due… Was thinking of practical things to help people regardless of situation?

I asked on Twitter for suggestions for such a post and many people chimed in with advice. Some took up the theme of general craziness of end times; @julianhopkins quipped “last 6 months? Am in it… do people survive it?”; @fiona_rachel confessed “I’ve got 4 months left and I’m listening to a lot of country music. Is this normal?” to which @JanetFulton replied “I’ve got about 8 weeks to go and I’m reading The Bobbsey Twins so country music sounds pretty normal to me”.

Others had very practical suggestions about managing your life through this period, such as @julialeventon who warned people not to try anything new, like moving house or learning a language. She also suggested “a regular day off where you don’t turn on your computer” (which sounded like a great idea to me). @danya suggested that you “Resist the temptation to get more articles and rerun analysis”; counselling that you need to learn to “accept less than perfect and move on” and our regular supervision correspondant @sarahthesheepu wisely advised: “don’t panic, write, most importantly read all the regulations”.

The most surprising contribution of this sort was from @sharmanedit who told me she had continued with volunteer work. She claimed that doing work for others reminded her not to get too insular. This seems like a neat solution to the almost inevitable selfishness which can manifest under thesis pressure.

Many mentioned the importance of food and beverages in the writing process, such as @peatyg who found herself: “eating lots of ice-cream, which I never liked b4″ (a problem to which I could relate). Along with wise words about a clearly articulated time line, @tassie_gal suggested: “coffee – lots of. Chocolate – double the amount you think you need”; advice which was taken a step further by @TheEndeavour who suggested “guarana tablets over coffee for those looking for extra study energy” (She did add that you should always check dosage guidelines!). The best one was, from @kiriwhan: “At a rate of 0.75L of Pepsi Max per 1000 words, I’m going to need 60L to finish my thesis…” which I thought combined the time line and food advice nicely.

Amongst all this practical advice @boredpostdoc said: “I probably could have applied for an extension, but by that point I just wanted out”, which echoes our student’s sentiments – and my own. I remember there was a point where I stopped caring whether what I was doing a good job or not and just wanted out. I felt like I was in a bad marriage with this alien thing, which was no longer bringing me any joy, which is why I could relate to this very funny Open Letter, which reads like a break up note written by a student to their thesis:

“I am tired of people asking about you: they always ask about you, how you’re doing, how far I’ve gone with you. To be honest, I want to see this through to the end, I want to go all the way with you, but then I want to put this relationship behind me.” (I encourage you to read the whole thing, it’s worth it).

Clearly this detachment thing is a bonafide #phdemotion. This made me wonder, why is ‘detachment’ so necessary to completion?

In western knowledge cultures (a fancy way of saying the world of scholarship which you live in, right now) we tend to promote an attitude of attachment – to ideas, our writing, our thoughts. In fact the whole of academia is built on ownership of ideas – hence all the fretting over issues like plagiarism.

Ownership is very important to the process of making a thesis, which is why some of those who have very dominating supervisors can find the process a struggle. I believe a sense of ownership is necessary; it helps us fight the battles we face with supervisors, with spouses, with university guidelines and all the rest of (what feels like) an uncaring world who just get in the way of  finishing the damn thesis.

But I wonder if perhaps, at a certain point, this sense of ownership just gets in the way and it is better to strive for a state of detachment. I mean Detachment in the Buddhist sense, which doesn’t have the same kind of negative connotations as it usually does in English.

Now I am only an interested dabbler in Buddhism, but as I understand it the problem with attachment is that it leads to craving, and craving can lead to pain. For example, when we cling too tightly to people in relationships, it can lead us to craving their presence. A fear of losing the person can lead us to act in ways that are harmful to others, as well as ourselves (you only have to go through one bad break up to feel the truth of this insight).

Many of us do a thesis for the status and recognition it is meant to bring – and the employment opportunities we hope it will enable. But this craving can provoke a fear of failure – which can be crippling. The fear of failing can lead us into the valley of perfectionism (which is the enemy of done).

The best way to detach yourself from this fear is to understand the examination process as one which will make the thesis better, not a pass/fail proposition.

However aiming for detachment is no guarantee that we will reach it. I’m wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this. Have you experienced this state of Detachment before? Is it a desirable place to be or not? Maybe those those of you who are Buddhist might have some suggestions on how we can achieve this kind of inner peace?

More posts by Inger:

PhD Paralysis

PhD Rage

Can you hear me?!

While we’re talking about public speaking, can you spare a minute to think about people with hearing impairments? Last week, here in the UK, was Deaf Awareness Week (2^nd - 8^th May).  I normally talk about researchers and  libraries on this blog, but since I have a minor hearing impairment I have a vested interest in this event.

I attended a meeting last week.  Now, I may wear hearing aids, but they don’t have a ‘T’ setting for telephone and induction loop. (I won’t go into technicalities – but I don’t generally need these settings, anyway.)  So, there I was, in a roomful of 25-30 people.  When one person was speaking at the front of the room, it was fine.  But then we split up into three groups for discussion.  It was noisy!

Hearing aids tend to pick up more sound behind the wearer than a person with normal hearing would generally notice.  I could neither HEAR the other people speaking at the furthest point in “my” circle, nor SEE them speaking.  Even without knowing how to lip-read, it does help to watch people’s faces, but most people were facing the group leader – and facing away from me.

At this stage in your career, you may not have given a thought to the practicalities of speaking so that hearing-impaired people have the best chance of hearing you clearly, so I thought it maybe wouldn’t go amiss to give you a few tips.  (You can then bask in the praise when you get an unexpected appreciative comment for your thoughtfulness and clarity of diction!)

• There ought to be an induction loop in most lecture theatres.  However, you won’t know for certain, and sometimes they aren’t working.  So, if a mic is available, make sure you use it.  And begin by asking if everyone can hear you.  That’s all! You don’t need to make a meal of it.  If someone asks you to speak up, take heed.  Speak clearly and confidently – you don’t need to shout.   (It also helps if you don’t gabble!)
• If you’re taking questions from the floor and your questioner is softly-spoken, do repeat or summarise the question more loudly and clearly, for the benefit of everyone present.
• If you’re organising an event and need to have break-out groups, then ideally, having separate small rooms is preferable to having all the groups in different corners of one big room.
• If you know there’s someone with a hearing impairment in your audience, make sure they can watch your face – don’t mumble – and don’t cover your mouth as you speak.  Don’t be embarrassed to repeat or rephrase what you’ve just said, if you think they may not have heard you.
• In an informal, social situation, I find it useful to sit round the edge of a room, with my back to a wall – it’s easier to hear the person I’m talking to, than if we sit in the middle of a room with sound all around us.  So if you’re taking a hearing-impaired friend for a coffee, a meal or a quick beer, this little bit of thoughtfulness may help you enjoy each other’s company all the better.

You can find loads more tips on being ‘deaf aware’ on the RNID website. Thank you for reading this – you’re already helping to make the world a better, more equal place!

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The tense debate

Last week my friend and PhD student @tokenlefty emailed me to ask:

“When writing literature reviews, does one use past tense or present tense?  ie: Sorensen examined the potential for .. or: Sorensen examines the potential for

I wrote back:

“I prefer present tense because it implies an active conversation. Unless the author is dead, mc dead dead and everyone knows it. Even then there’s dead and Really Dead.”

Which didn’t make much sense when I read it back to myself. In my defense I was kind of busy and @tokenlefty is accustomed to getting cryptic emails from me. Then I had a thought – is this just the way I do it? Is there a ‘correct’ way to do tense that I was not aware of? As I looked into the issue, it was surprisingly complex and I decided it needed a post on its own.

The usual advice it to pick a tense and stick to it throughout your thesis. I like present tense – most of the time. For me the use of present tense implies that a scholarly conversation is going on Right Now, and that you are commenting on it (much like a cricket game). The Scholarly Conversation may have been going on for some decades – but that is still Right Now in an academic sense. Besides I have read many times that using present tense is one way to have an ‘active’ voice in your writing – which makes your thesis an easier read.

I do ‘break the rules’ and use past tense alongside present tense, usually for rhetorical purpose. For instance, like many other disciplines, the research field I work in (education) has a heritage of ideas.  I will still routinely use present tense to refer to people who ‘grandfathered’ the ideas which I am using (sorry for the gendering there, but unfortunately they are all men). I learned this from my colleague and philosopher Dr Robyn Barnacle, who argues that although people die, their ideas live on. Following this logic I use past tense to talk about dead ideas – even if the people who wrote about them are still living. There is however the ’dead mc dead dead’ category, which I reserve for people like Socrates and Aristotle: some of their ideas are so fundamental they have never died, but to refer to them in present tense would be, well - kind of weird.

But. Should I be recommending this approach to someone in an entirely different field to me? As the Explorations in Style blog said in a post about using resources this week, we should be careful of any kind of ‘universalizing’ advice when it comes to doing a thesis. I agree with this wholeheartedly; disciplinary context matters. As Howard Becker pointed out: we all have an ‘academic accent’ in our writing which marks us as members of a certain tribe. Learning to develop this accent is part of the reason for doing a PhD in the first place.

With this in mind I raised the issue of tense on Twitter. Immediately I got back multiple points of view and rationales for various practices.It seems there are, as I feared, multiple practices and points of view on ‘the right way’. Scientists, on the whole, seemed to think passive voice was preferable, while the humanities preferred present tense. The debate generated such interest that Andy Coverdale wrote an entry on his blog clarifying the social science position.

I still didn’t have an answer for this blog, which tries to cater to all disciplines. So I tried to get clarity by consulting with the oracles, i.e.: all my ‘go to’ texts on writing a thesis which you can see in the photo. I’m sorry to say, most of them let me down. In “Helping Doctoral students to Write” by Kamler and Thomson there is an excellent discussion on active voice and passive voice (chapter seven). This seemed, from close reading, to back up what I am saying. But again, this is written for a social science / educational audience.

Facing a dead end, I emailed my back up oracle, and fellow research education nerd, Dr Judy Maxwell at the Study and Learning Centre here at RMIT, who spends most of her days teaching scientists about grammar. Judy confirmed that the debate about which tense to use is a hot topic amongst research students and confirmed that there isn’t one authoritative text on it. She noted that there is “a general feeling among science/engineering students that the past tense is always used”.

Like me, Judy doesn’t like the use of past tense, but for a different reason. She pointed out that there’s the potential for ambiguity: does the person you’re citing still think the same way, or has she/he moved on? Judy tells me, however, that when she presents this point of view to science/engineering researchers they don’t see it as a problem, she thinks this stems from:

“… the way the hard/technical sciences generally talk about the literature – they’re usually more interested in the actual research rather than what was found, which is generally the opposite of social sciences, where what was found, and who found it, is more important. This is probably why author/date systems such as APA and Harvard and more author-prominent citations are used in these areas, compared to Vancouver or footnotes and information-prominent citations are used in hard/physical sciences.”

Usually Judy’s answer for questions about writing style (and mine) is to refer students to journal articles and theses in their discipline. But, as Judy and I talked, we wondered if this is good advice. We don’t want to promote replicating present practice if the practice itself is questionable. Just like the Greeks still built stone temples like they were wood temples, we can hang onto ways of doing things long beyond their use by date: especially, I would argue, in academia.

As so often happens, I am left with more questions than answers (but you guys don’t read this blog for simplistic answers right?!). Clearly there’s the potential for choice here; maybe talking about it more will help you make a decision. So how do you ‘do tense’ in your literature review and why? Have you argued with your supervisor about it? Do you think the argument that “everyone does it this way” is a good enough reason to keep doing it that way?

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The Dead Hand of the thesis genre?

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What the Wiki?!

If you have a devilish sense of humour, you can derive endless amusement by engaging your supervisors and your librarian in some earnest discussion about Wikipedia.  Next time you’re searching for a vital piece of information, just try asking an innocent question along the lines of, “My girlfriend/ flat-mate/ brother said I should just do a Wikipedia search, but I don’t know how reliable it is – what do you think?” Then sit back and enjoy the fun.

Maybe you’re unaware just how contentious the subject is, but it won’t take you long to find out.

You might argue that, as a sensible and responsible librarian myself, I ought not to encourage you in such mischief.  Well, maybe you’re right.  But the point I want to make is that you need to take care when you’re web-searching. Many librarians vehemently oppose the use of Wikipedia and other similar sources for scholarly research.  Why might that be?

First let me give you Wikipedia’s own definition of itself, so we know what we’re talking about:-

Wikipedia … is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick”) and encyclopedia.

Now, when I started thinking about this blog post, I intended to alert you to the dangers of putting too much trust in Wikipedia.  However, if I’ve inherited one trait from my late father, it’s the ability to appreciate more than one point of view.  So I looked at a few entries on subjects that I reckon I know well; I felt it was only fair to see what Wikipedia said about itself, and to do a bit more delving into the way entries were put together.  After careful consideration here’s what I think on five key areas:-

1. Not a bad place to start.  If you’re looking for basic facts, and you’re happy to verify them elsewhere, then there’s no harm in going to Wikipedia.

You’re looking for biographical dates?  Or a definition of some technical term?  Then why not take the easy option?!  On the other hand, if what you’re looking up might be controversial, then you need to know more about what you find there.  As a researcher, you have to develop inbuilt antennae to detect where there might be bias, and to handle such information with caution.

2. Reliability.  Can you rely upon the information you find in a resource that has evolved by communal effort, and is not peer-reviewed in the conventional sense, with entries edited by nameless individuals of unknown reputation, and citations drawn from all manner of sources, both old and new?

It doesn’t sound too hopeful, does it?  However, if you look at Wikipedia’s own entry on Reliability of Wikipedia, you’ll find that at least some research has found Wikipedia’s “self-healing” properties to be surprisingly effective – in other words, errors are often (not always) picked up and corrected by subsequent self-appointed editors.  But take care: omissions of key facts or areas can in themselves lead to undesirable bias.  Ask yourself: Would you recognise a gap?

3. Unpicking the stitches.  If you’re serious about discerning how reliable a Wikipedia entry is, then you need to do some detective-work.  I view this as a similar exercise to unpicking a garment in order to establish how it was made.

Look at the structure of the article – has some thought gone into the compilation of the entry, including the coding and hyperlinks etc.  Are there references?  (More of this in a minute!)  Additionally, can you establish the author of an entry?  Sometimes, yes.  Go the tab, View History, from there to Revision History, and finally click on Contributors.  If you’re lucky you can click on their name or pseudonym and find out more.  You’ll also be able to see just how many times the article has been edited. All these are clues.

4. Identify the sources.  Towards the end of the article, there may well be footnotes, references and external links.  See if you can establish how up-to-date the information is, and where it came from.

If you’re looking for historical facts, then it may not matter that the information comes from a very old edition of Encyclopedia Britannica.  On the other hand, if that information is judgmental, then maybe there’s an undesirable bias that you won’t want to perpetuate.  Again, with a historical figure, it might be that their contemporaries viewed them one way, but that modern historians see things otherwise.

So, don’t just look for the dates of the sources and nod sagely.  Decide for yourself whether you’re happy with the dates of the sources, and keep an eye open for missing decades or centuries!  Remember that country boundaries can move, place-names can change, and even spelling conventions can change.  (We used to refer to the composer Tchaikowsky; now it’s usually Tchaikovsky.)  How crucial is currency in your particular discipline?  What’s acceptable?

5. Don’t accept the citations blindly without checking them.  Remember my example of the undergraduate looking for three books by a particular author.

Wikipedia didn’t tell her that one “book” was an article in an Italian journal (journal title, date, and volume number would have been useful); a second book had gone out of print so quickly that few libraries seem to hold it. Better bibliographical details would certainly have helped establish that fact; and a third book was still apparently being written. “Unpicking the stitches” just might have established whether there was a chance the book had now been completed – or, conversely, was unlikely ever to see the light of day!

If you see a promising reference, check it out. You can do this in many places: subject-specific abstracting/indexing database, a national library catalogue, a union catalogue (in the UK, we have COPAC, which allows you to search all the UK University and national library catalogues simultaneously) – or, indeed, even Google books, Amazon, Alibris, or another bookseller that deals in both current and out-of-print titles.

After careful consideration I can’t adopt a  black-and-white view either for or against using Wikipedia. Notwithstanding all these warnings, I must admit that I was quite impressed by Wikipedia’s “Reliability” article, and by the care that has gone into setting it up as a collaborative resource.  But at the end of the day, information is only as good as the diligence and reliability of the entry’s creator, and you need to satisfy yourself that you can depend upon the information that you’ve found.

Finally – Can you, or indeed, should you cite Wikipedia in your own work?  Again, Wikipedia concedes that opinion is divided on this.  (Of course, sometimes you can get round the problem by citing the source from which the Wikpedia author derived their material.)  But I’d advise you to ask your own supervisor, or journal editor, if it’s acceptable to cite Wikipedia – and, of course, always to ensure that your own citations are impeccable in their detail!

Have you tried to cite wikipedia? What happened?

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WIFM

At a recent conference I was impressed by one presentation by a PhD student: an observational study of learners in online environment. The theories were interesting, the method was sound and the results were interesting, so I was surprised that I was the only one asking a question at the end.

Following the Thesis Whisperer rules of Networking, I sought the presenter out at the tea table to continue the discussion. The student was more than happy to talk, in fact she seemed relieved someone in the audience had ‘got it’ and thanked me for asking a question. She was a bit depressed at the seeming lack of interest in her work and wondered if the topic was just too ‘theoretical’ for this conference crowd, who were mostly educational technology specialists.

While it’s true that not many people in the audience were professional types who did not have PhDs, they weren’t dummies. In fact the room was full of the sort of people who could do PhD if they really wanted to. In my opinion the student’s problem was not ‘theory’ or the level of sophistication of the people in front of her, but a failure to connect with the audience.

As my friend Jonathon says: “If your audience didn’t get it – it’s your fault, not theirs”.  In this case, while the student adequately explained the theories and her interpretation of the data, she failed to explain why it mattered for this particular audience. There was no clear sense of the “What’s in it For Me” (WIFM). As a consequence, some of the audience left half way through and others looked like they were taking the opportunity to nap off some of the jet lag.

When you think about it, an academic audiences are not so different; the WIFM still needs to be there. The reason academics have a higher tolerance for theory is because academic work is largely theoretical. I enjoyed the student’s presentation because the theoretical insights were interesting for my own theoretical work. Although the student’s work could have solved some practical problems for the rest of the audience, she didn’t point these out. This was the kiss of death for question time: even if some of the audience found it interesting on an abstract level, they couldn’t think of any questions to ask so the presentation fell a little flat.

I’ve been thinking about this issue of theory and the WIFM factor because I was invited by the University of Sydney Nursing school to come up and give the keynote at their 2010 research week in July. Keynote addresses are given at the start, and sometimes and the end, of academic conferences and events, usually by well known scholars who have an interesting point of view – so I was flattered they asked me.

Giving a keynote is a big responsibility because it is meant to help set the tone for the rest of the event. A good keynote gets you thinking differently. Most keynotes are what Rugg and Petre (2010) would call “consciousness raising papers”. Papers which are speculative and attempt to provide the audience with another angle on current problems. Good keynotes are interesting, provocative – even emotionally moving. The very best one I have ever seen is by JK Rowling at the commencement address at Harvard University which actually bought tears to my eyes.

I am a keynote virgin, so I immediately started to do some research on how to go about it (ok, by ‘research’ I mean typing ‘How to do a Keynote’ into Google). After reading lots of advice my hunch is, despite the differences in scale, what makes a good keynote is the same as what makes a good academic presentation of any sort. However the problem of the keynote, as a format, foregrounds certain questions of presentation style. If you plan to be provocative or interesting, researching the audience in advance is vital because you need to be able to imagine how they are likely to react to your propositions.

When we approach a normal conference or seminar presentation we tend to think we know the audience already – but do we really? This post from the Public Speaking Blog had a good list of things you should try to find out about your audience before you craft your presentation. All the suggestions are good and useful, but one in particular stood out for me: try to understand the challenges facing the audience.

It can be easy to misunderstand the nature of the challenges the audience is facing in their professional life. Our hapless student thought she could provide a theoretical explanation and that would be enough. She illustrated the theory with data, but she never told us what problems it would help with and how exactly an understanding of the theory could be applied in practice. She could have done this easily with a case study or a story, rather than just giving us her interpretation.

You can get a better grip on the challenges your audience face by asking yourself: what do my audience have to do in their daily work? If you can help them do  it, you have the WIFM. But you don’t get very far just lecturing professional people about ‘the right thing’ to do – you must convince them that you understand the nature of the problem. Most problems in professional life are complex and those who deal with them want to see that you know this. This is where empathy comes into the picture.

Empathise with your audience and their problems and you are most of the way there. Take this blog post as an example – you, dear reader, are trying to pass your PhD, not just write a thesis. I know what that’s like because I’ve done it myself. I know from my own experience that doing presentations to people outside or tangential to your discipline is something you will probably have to do at some point. The WIFM in this post is some insight into why some of your presentations might be falling flat and a couple of techniques that can help, but – because I understand the complexity of the problem – I wouldn’t dare tell you that this post has all the answers!

So I am interested in what you think. Do you think this advice is helpful? Have you encountered some presentation advice which you think would help us connect better with a wider range of audiences? Meanwhile I’m off to finish that key note (which I think will be called: “What I learned about doing a PhD by reading really trashy novels”

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