Basically they said that the content is all there and the research is good, but it needs work on organization and style. Fair enough. I’m pretty pleased with that. Now it’s just up to me to do the revision and that’s it.

I still have a few other papers and projects in various stages (3 revising and 1 working on the first draft). I feel like I’m coming to the end of things, ready to move on.

About 4-6 weeks ago when I was coming to understand how long my thesis would end up becoming I got a bit nervous. I thought “I’ve written 50 pages and I’m nowhere near done. This can’t be right.” It was right, though. My first draft was 79 pages (double spaced).

I would have thought writing a longer piece wouldn’t be terribly different than a shorter one, but there were particular challenges. The main one was that I often felt lost, in need of an overview. Fortunately Omni Outliner helped quite a bit with that. I had an outline that first served as a holding place for writing ideas and quotes. Once the ideas were written out in Pages, I used key ideas from each paragraph or so as a detailed outline. It was somewhat difficult to maintain the two documents, and honestly I didn’t think I’d stick with it, but it really made it much easier to spot redundancies or reorganize ideas. I think it will also be quite useful during my defense if I want to find a particular passage on the fly during the discussion.

Right now I’m copyediting and incorporating feedback. My defense is set for August 10th The end is in sight.

Once it’s actually written I’ll start sharing blog-size bits of it here. I imagine over the summer this will become the thesis blog for a while. I should be able to share some insights from the class next week as well; it’s about bringing new ICT to the workplace, a collaboration between the MIS / IDS department and Communication.

Back to work.

When I clicked on the link I found that the page was in French, which I’ve never studied but knowing some Latin, Spanish and Italian I can make out a bit when it’s written. Having the clue of “gender” enabled me to make much more sense out if this, even just looking at the pictures, than I could have done otherwise. (BTW, the pictures themselves are interesting if you like foreign signage.)

Of course there’s less context than if this were linked in a blog post or whatnot, but in this case it was enough to make an important difference.

I’m trying to refrain from spending all of my time making charts & lists. Data visualization–particularly the more creative and qualitative stuff–is like a calling. There’s nothing so satisfying for me as making beautiful evidence, to quote the title of Tufte’s new book. It’s the best feeling when it can convey something important from your own original research, or anything “new”. Right now, though, I need to dig into the textual data and really immerse myself to get some conceptual order.

So I got through my proposal defense this morning, just a few revisions, nothing huge & I’m moving right along. I’ll be in IRB limbo for a few weeks then it’s off to the actual research, so I’m looking forward to that.

For those who don’t know, my thesis is on social bookmarking and its role in meaning making on the web. What do I think about del.icio.us being acquired by Yahoo? I don’t really know. I was a bit worried when they bought Flickr, but Flickr is still Flickr and I hope delicious will still be delicious.

My primary method for my thesis will be interviews. I’m hoping to do many of the interviews in-person (Chicago area), but I’m also doing a Skype (or whatever) online interview as well, so if you’re interested in sharing your experience with delicious please let me know (yes, just delicious, I’m trying to keep things less confusing by limiting to one system). The interviews will start hopefully late-January / early-Feb & I’ll make another announcement about that.

I’m on my way home to Cincinnati for a pre-christmas thing b/c my husband and I will be up in Chicago this year with his family for Christmas – so early presents for us Actually, Jim and I are going to go skiing or something in January instead of giving each other presents.

The thing I’m worried about right now is that maybe my method is too much to complete properly in the time frame I have. I’m proposing preliminary interviews that will help develop a survey and concurrently doing a content analysis. I’ve got a lot more experience doing interviews and participant observation, but I think this project calls for the survey and content analysis & I’d like to broaden my bag of tricks so to speak.

The other worry is if I’ve covered all the relevant areas of literature – or rather, planned to do so. It’s an impossible task of course, but I’ll just have to live with some ambiguity and ask my advisor, committee, fellow students, and everyone else I meet along the way I suppose. I’ll get that on my next actions list I suppose.

I’m getting some feedback Monday from my advisor so after I finish grading speeches for Thursday I should be back on track.

My 2 cents on what we can do with AoIR is that we should promote a tag for bookmarks, blogs, pictures and whatever else–if no one is already doing that– aoir6 would be an obvious choice.

I’ll also bring up the idea of a class tag for the same purpose – maybe nnm05.

I also have a thesis meeting tomorrow so maybe I’ll have an update on that front soon. I’ve just recently been looking at the lit on the psychology of categorization – found some good things so far. Next thing to tackle (I think) is finding the lit on categorization in linguistics.

You can read the presentation on the Kairosnews site, or as a PDF here, or watch it as a QuickTime movie here.