Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities

Virginia Kuhn, Anke Finger

Open Book Publishers, May 4, 2021 - Education - 290 pages

This volume is a timely intervention that not only helps demystify the idea of a digital dissertation for students and their advisors, but will be broadly applicable to the work of librarians, administrators, and anyone else concerned with the future of graduate study in the humanities and digital scholarly publishing.

Roxanne Shirazi, The City University of New York

Digital dissertations have been a part of academic research for years now, yet there are still many questions surrounding their processes. Are interactive dissertations significantly different from their paper-based counterparts? What are the effects of digital projects on doctoral education? How does one choose and defend a digital dissertation? This book explores the wider implications of digital scholarship across institutional, geographic, and disciplinary divides.

The volume is arranged in two sections: the first, written by senior scholars, addresses conceptual concerns regarding the direction and assessment of digital dissertations in the broader context of doctoral education. The second section consists of case studies by PhD students whose research resulted in a natively digital dissertation that they have successfully defended. These early-career researchers have been selected to represent a range of disciplines and institutions.

Despite the profound effect of incorporated digital tools on dissertations, the literature concerning them is limited. This volume aims to provide a fresh, up-to-date view on the digital dissertation, considering the newest technological advances. It is especially relevant in the European context where digital dissertations, mostly in arts-based research, are more popular.

Shaping the Digital Dissertation aims to provide insights, precedents and best practices to graduate students, doctoral advisors, institutional agents, and dissertation committees. As digital dissertations have a potential impact on the state of research as a whole, this edited collection will be a useful resource for the wider academic community and anyone interested in the future of doctoral studies.

About the author

Virginia Kuhn is Professor of Cinema and Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy in the Division of Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. In 2005, she successfully defended one of the first born-digital dissertations in the United States, challenging archiving and copyright conventions. Kuhn recently published (with Vicki Callahan) an anthology titled Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies (Parlor Press, 2016) and has edited three peer-reviewed digital anthologies: ‘The Video Essay: An Emergent Taxonomy of Cinematic Writing’, (The Cine-Files, 2017) with Vicki Callahan; MoMLA: From Panel to Gallery (Kairos, 2013) with Victor Vitanza; and From Gallery to Webtext: A Multimodal Anthology (Kairos, 2008) with Victor Vitanza.

Anke Finger is Professor of German and Media Studies and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has published widely in Modernism, Media Studies, and Intercultural Communication. She is the co-founder and co-editor (2005-2015) of the multilingual, peer reviewed, open access journal Flusser Studies. From 2016 to 2019 Anke Finger served as the inaugural director of the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative at the Humanities Institute; she also co-founded the German Studies Association’s Network on Digital Humanities and served as co-director from 2017-19. She founded the NEHC-DH network, affiliated with the New England Humanities Consortium; and she co-founded the CTDH network.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities
• Editors: Virginia Kuhn, Anke Finger
• Publisher: Open Book Publishers, 2021
• ISBN: 180064101X, 9781800641013
• Length: 290 pages
• Subjects: Education / Computers & Technology; Education / Research; Education / Teaching Methods & Materials / General; Technology & Engineering / General