- The document discusses the emergence and current status of digital dissertations. It provides examples of early digital dissertations from 1998 and 2005. - A survey found that two-thirds of PhD students in history at George Mason University are considering or committed to including a digital component in their dissertation. However, others cited concerns about the additional workload and lack of standards/recognition for digital dissertations. - The document concludes that universities need to define digital dissertations, set standards for evaluation, and incorporate digital skills into history programs to fully validate and support digital dissertation formats.

1. Raising Questions about
theDigital Dissertation
Lee Ann Ghajar
ABD, American History
Department of History and Art History
George Mason University

2. It started with Xena,
Warrior Princess
In 1998, Chris Boese,
doctoral candidate in the
Department of Rhetoric
and Communications at
Rensselaer Polytechnic
University, published a
path-breaking, on-line,
interactive dissertation,
Chaining Rhetorical
Visions from the
Margins of the Margins
to the Mainstream in the
Zenaverse

3. Along came Virginia Kuhn
In 2005, Virginia Kuhn
defended a media-rich
digital dissertation, Ways of
Composing: Visual Literacy
in the Digital Age in the
Department of English at
University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee.Two hundred
pages of text, hyperlinks,
moving images, still
images, and intensely
layered annotations
comprise her work.

4. Examples in history
scholarship?
Sorry, your search returned 0 results.

5. Present status
At the time I write this, it has been quite a few years
since I completed my dissertation and yet there
has been little movement toward expanding the
typical form. My dissertation represents
progressive research and it preserves the tenets
of academic scholarship. …the academy’s
resistance to the digital is deep-seated…
While print is still absolutely crucial to advanced
literacy, it is simply not the exclusive mode any
longer, or for very much longer.
Virginia Kuhn, August 2012

6. A holding pattern
Why is the digital dissertation in a holding
pattern?
Because
nobody’s quite sure what constitutes a digital
dissertation
the digital dissertation is not yet widely recognized
as a critical methodology for presenting and
defending scholarly argument.

7. The student perspective
Responses to a recent survey of history doctoral
students at George Mason University raised the
following questions:
What is a digital dissertation?
What are standards for a digital dissertation? how is it evaluated?
What changes to the graduate curriculum are vital to support
academic work in digital history?
What institutional changes in dissertation submission and
preservation are requisite to support digital formats?
What changes in the academy are requisite to validate the digital
dissertation as a viable milestone in career development?

8. Who’s writing one?
At George Mason
University, 60
percent of the
students in the
PhD program in
history responded
to a questionnaire
about digital
dissertations.
Two-thirds of
respondents are
either fully
committed to or
seriously
considering
including a digital
component in the
dissertation.

9. Comparative responses
Students who have not yet advanced to candidacy
indicated a greater likelihood of including a digital
component in a dissertation than ABDs.
Students who have not yet advanced to candidacy
have generally enrolled more recently in the doctoral
program than those who are ABD.
The academic experience of more recently enrolled
students reflects increased availability of courses,
research assistantships, and other academic and
financial support for digital scholarship in the
institution as well as universal expansion of the digital
humanities field.

10. ABD and non-ABD

11. Why did 33 percent say
“No!”?
Respondents who stated they did not intend to
include a digital component in their dissertations
were asked, “Why not?”
They could select several responses from a
multiple-choice list or write their own
explanations.
Their answers reflected personal concerns and
intellectual considerations, but also emphasized
the nebulous status of the digital dissertation in
history scholarship.

12. Why stick to the traditional
dissertation?
Two-thirds said digital work would not add to the
exposition of their thesis
One-half believe that a traditional dissertation is
more advantageous for career advancement
Two-thirds believe a digital dissertation is too
much work because it requires learning technical
skills in addition to research and writing.

13. What they said
I want to finish as soon as possible, and if a
digital component slows me down, it may have to
be a post-PhD project.
Too time consuming even though I have the
technical skills.
My first goal is to finish the dissertation, so time
and the number of additional skills I would need
to learn to accomplish this is critical

14. What they said, part II
My dissertation committee will be hard to convince.
My technical skills aren’t adequate. Don’t know where I
could learn the technical skills I might need.
There are few examples for students to use other than big
data collection/visualization projects.
With the rapid growth of technology the skills that I learn
this year to create a component may be outdated by the
time my dissertation is ready to present whereas a written
project doesn’t have the rapid change in formatting.

15. Why some said, “Yes!”
Those who said “Yes!” described the
following plans:
Mapping location of events
Possibly creating a website as a supplement to the
dissertation rather than a replacement
Interactive mapping
Presenting multiple images for analysis and
comparison
Searchable catalog of images accompanying items
discussed within the written component

16. Why some said, “Yes!”,
part II
Visualizing changes in a nineteenth-century
industrial site over time
Much of the data for my dissertation will be
organized in a database which I have built, but
the final product will probably be a traditional
manuscript.
Digital archive of images at the core of my study,
interactive maps for the people in my study, and
a digital presentation of the overall dissertation.

17. Why some said “Yes!”, part
III
Planning to link dissertation footnotes to primary
sources in an on-line archive in Omeka.
An Omeka archive with analysis in an
accompanying exhibit
Text-mining a corpus of newspaper articles to
which I will apply ngram analysis and topic
modeling.
Study of residential segregation patterns using
Omeka and Neatline to display data and
research text

18. Technical skills?
Asked what technical skills they needed to build
digital components into the dissertation,
respondents answered

19. What do doctoral students
need?
Define the concept of digital dissertation?
Institutionalized standards for evaluating the
digital dissertation commensurate with academic
standards for the traditional text-based
dissertation.
Revamped the graduate history curriculum to
incorporate theory and practice of digital history,
including courses in technology.
Validation of the digital dissertation as a viable
milestone on professional career paths.

20. Conclusions
The digital dissertation presents unique challenges to students
and to universities to redefine what a dissertation is and to
explore and institutionalize revised standards for
dissertation evaluation, publication, and preservation.
As the culmination of doctoral study, the dissertation
exemplifies that the author is able to construct, present,
and defend an historical argument adding to an existing
body of knowledge.
It seems counter-intuitive to suppose that these new arguments
must live in old bottles, that new exposition modalities
possible through the expansion of publishing formats and
research technologies would not also enable–perhaps
even mandate–alternative dissertation formats.