Category: PhD thesis

Subject-specific databases

One of my main strategies for organizing information is to create databases for subjects of interest. I’m using the term in the broad Wikipedia sense of “an organized collection of data, stored and accessed electronically” here, and it includes everything from a single folder where PDF versions of all the references cited in a particular monograph of mine are stored to financial tracking spreadsheets, records of my weight, and sets of original RAW files for my photoshoots.

So far for my PhD research I have set up a few:

  • A spreadsheet of all accredited Canadian universities, with pertinent information about each divestment campaign I have identified
  • A master timeline for significant events in all campaigns, as well as events relevant to university divestment that happened in other institutions, like municipalities
  • A list of all scholarly work about university divestment campaigns, including which school(s) the authors looked at
  • A spreadsheet with titles and links to common document types at many campaigns, including detailed petitions like our ‘brief’, recommendations from university-appointed committees, and formal justification for university decisions
  • The consent database specified in my ethics protocol, which has also been useful for keeping tabs on people who I’m awaiting responses from
  • (Somewhat embarrassingly) A Google sheet where I manually tally how long each MS Word chapter draft is at midnight each day

For my earlier pipeline resistance project I had started putting together a link chart of relevant organizations and individuals, as well as a glossary and timeline.

I would love to have more formal training (and ideally coding ability) for working with more flexible kinds of databases than spreadsheets. That would be useful for debugging WordPress MySQL issues, but more importantly for more fundamental data manipulation and analysis. I haven’t really coded (aside from HTML and LaTeX) since long-passed days of tinkering with QBASIC and Pascal during the days of my youth in Vancouver. It seems like it would make a lot of sense to learn Python as a means of building and playing around with my own SQL databases…

Data collection

This is my first intense batch of academic interviews, and I feel like they have been going remarkably smoothly. It has been pretty straightforward to start getting in touch with people, scheduling times, doing preparatory research, and then having conversations people about their experiences with divestment at Canadian universities. I don’t think it constitutes the inappropriate disclosure of any sensitive or privileged information to say that everybody who I have spoken to — during the preparatory work of consulting on the research design and ethics protocol as well as during these formal interviews — has been generous with their time and enthusiastic about helping to come up with a solid and wide-ranging academic analysis of the divestment movement, incorporating its numerous dimensions including those of activist organizations using social movement strategies to pursue policy goals not offered by existing political parties (in terms of aggressive decarbonization) and those of power structures, forms of decision making, and the individual experiences of all those who have been involved. Not that I am doing all that myself! Through the process of researching campaigns I am also coming into contact with scholarly work that emphasizes dimensions of the campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) movement that my research doesn’t seek to investigate.

I’m really glad to have applied a lesson learned from my somewhat soupy theoretical project of an MPhil thesis. Coming at some subject which very smart people have thought about for decades and hoping to make a contribution just by reading the work and thinking is perhaps a bit over-ambitious, at least for me. And there is undeniable value in a research object which involves some direct empirical effort: the generation or recording of some unique data set that would not otherwise have existed, and which has some value for better understanding how the world functions politically.

Dissertation boot camp day 3

The three days of dissertation boot camp, organized by the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication, have been highly productive for me. While the advice was good, I could personally have done without the short instructional segments on things like goal setting and editing. What was extremely useful was the structure: sitting in a room with twenty or so other people for seven hours a day, minus lunch, and having fewer of the distractions than arise when working alone or even with a friend.

On the first day I largely focused on taking things I had sketched out in point form and converting them into paragraphs in my draft thesis chapters. I did more of that in days two and three, but ended up concentrating more on my ongoing census of all Canadian divestment campaigns, hoping to identify some participants from each to interview and who could help me find other organizers. I went through my whole list of Canadian universities and sent dozens of emails, actually scheduling at least a couple of interviews. I also added a lot to my big spreadsheets: one to characterize each identifiable Canadian campaign, a universal timeline with important events from each, a survey on the extant literature on campus fossil fuel divestment, and an index of standard types of documents produced by many campaigns like briefs and committee reports.

The experience has demonstrated that being well rested is not a requirement for getting research done, since both the early morning start (by my standards) and ongoing personal stress left me pretty much exhausted the whole time. There’s strength to be drawn, I suppose, from making material progress toward a self-identified goal. I don’t want this thing to stretch into an eighth year beyond September 2019, requiring me to pay more tuition and delaying the transition back into doing productive non-academic work (and having an income where the slow breakdown of all my equipment, clothes, and general belongings is to be expected).

Certainly in some ways the project isn’t going as I most optimistically hoped — particularly in terms of being able to easily get large numbers of interview subjects from each campaign in order to gain perspective on strategic decision making and disagreements — but it still seems like my broad research questions should be possible to answer using my methodology and the people and materials available. I’m also glad that I will have a reasonable amount of preliminary text to share with my committee members after academia’s standard August coma is shaken off.

Boot camp day 2

I spent much of today’s boot camp doing research online about Canadian university divestment campaigns and trying to contact people who have been involved.

Even though all the campaigns have happened since 2012, there’s a lot that has clearly already disappeared from the internet, though some of the websites established by campaigns remain in the Wayback Machine. There also seem to be some campaigns that never progressed beyond a petition on gofossilfree.org which a single person could set up in a few minutes. Helpfully the site lets you try to contact the person who set up the petition, but I don’t think I have gotten any responses so far from any campaigns that don’t offer more substantive evidence like a Facebook page or a media report.

I had hoped it would be possible to interview a fairly large number of people from each campaign, both to help develop a detailed timeline and to get into my core research questions about the effect the experience had on people. That may yet prove true for some campaigns – especially large ones that happened fairly recently – but my hopes of being able to get in touch with one or two people from each campaign and then easily reach a large group of others seem unlikely at this point to be fulfilled.

The early mornings of the dissertation boot camp have been a bit disruptive, especially alongside rather disrupted sleep. A friend of mine who I worry about often has been incommunicado for an unusual length of time, to which my brain naturally responds with a lot of directionless worry and speculation. There’s also another situation where I thought two friends were being treated badly by a third person, but it seems that despite being essentially vetoed my effort to encourage a change of behaviour has just left all three of them upset with me.

On the plus side, it seems like we have found someone to take over the room from our housemate who is moving out.

Boot camp day 1

I’m at my first day of a three day “dissertation boot camp”. I’m working on adding to four chapters: my issue and literature context chapters and the ones I have started on repertoires of contention and political opportunities.

In the lead-up to starting my undergrad program I bought the only printer I have ever owned. I knew I wanted a PostScript-compatible black and white laser printer to be able to print off attractive essays and a deep discount on a large office-calibre machine tempted me into buying an enormous monster which was always hard to cram into residence rooms and which certainly didn’t accompany me to England, Ottawa, or Toronto. Since then I’ve done all my printing with machines belonging to other people, reasoning that it’s better to have someone else handle the maintenance and nice not to have another big whirring box taking up a corner of my room.

Now in the context of the dissertation and some other fairly ambitious writing projects I’m thinking about ordering a Brother HL-L6200DW printer. Several run-downs of well-regarded printers mention the model, for which a 12,000 page print cartridge is $167.86. It does look pretty large but, since my room isn’t in a house where playing music from the stereo often makes sense, I could sell or give that away to make space for it. That could be fitting in a couple of ways. Tristan actually picked out the stereo in Ottawa, as a possession suitable for somebody with a new and well-paying government job and a reasonably noisy one bedroom apartment to himself. A few days ago, he strongly endorsed Brother’s monochrome laser printers for reliability and affordability. Trying to live simply it makes sense to invest in things that you would use frequently and to remove things from your life which are used as rarely as my stereo, especially if those things are cluttering a significant amount of the space you have to work with.

After a summer of expenses and little earned income I am wary of adding even more to my recent set of alarming credit card bills, but everyone who I have spoken to so far sees a printer as a reasonable purchase for somebody in my position.

Word versus LaTeX for academic publishing

There are some good discussions online about the relative merits of different types of software for writing long scholarly documents like a PhD thesis. For instance, Amrys O. Williams’ “Why you should LaTeX your dissertation; or, why you don’t have to write your dissertation in Word“.

I’ve seen the plusses and minuses of using LaTeX in academic and activism contexts first-hand and the dominant set of considerations for me concern collaboration. Theoretically, as a free and open source typesetting system LaTeX ought to be ideal for preparing complex documents. Unfortunately, whether they are university professors or student activists, it’s likely that few or none of your potential collaborators will already be familiar with LaTeX syntax or comfortable providing comments on a document in the format of LaTeX source code.

For my dissertation I have decided to write the whole thing as chapters comprised of Microsoft Word files, for the ease of my committee members. They won’t have full citations, but just the unique identifiers and any other details which I will eventually need to produce a citation in LaTeX. This way, my committee members can provide comments on Word documents and, once I have everything nailed down, I can spend a few days moving all the text into LaTeX for the preparation of the final dissertation. This way committee members also won’t be distracted by a need to minutely copy edit formatting and other trivialities, since each chapter explains that it’s just a draft for review with precise formatting to be done later.

I would rather just write the whole thing as LaTeX code in TextMate, avoiding the need to use Word at all, but a central necessity of writing a doctoral thesis is soliciting and incorporating input from committee members so all told the approach of writing in Word and later typesetting in LaTeX seems to have the most to recommend it.

Data collection and writing up

My central aim for this summer was to focus on developing my PhD research project. To that end I didn’t seek a teaching assistant position or other paid work, like commercial photography or the time I helped run the Summer Residence Program at Massey College.

Mostly that has gone well. I’ve gone from seeking ethical approval to beginning to conduct interviews with people at a variety of schools. I’m putting together a detailed timeline of events that took place in each Canadian campaign, based in part on the idea of cycles of contention from the theoretical framework behind the project. I have started writing the first three chapters — on the issue context, literature context, and activist repertoires — and I have a lot of ideas for each.

For the fall and winter terms I have accepted three TA positions. One is yet another second year Canadian politics course, with tutorials to lead and grading. The other two are grading only (though I will be giving a lecture in one) within the School of the Environment. TA work will be a distraction from the dissertation, but it can also be useful for structuring time and will help with maintaining general financial stability.

I expect that in September it will become much easier to contact research subjects efficiently, as students, faculty, and administrators awake from their summer comas. We’re looking for a new third floor housemate as well, since the current occupant of our largest room is leaving to pursue a job opportunity selling supplements.

Isolation for accomplishment

From August 21st to 23rd I will be doing an internet-free dissertation boot camp. In some ways it’s a bad match for my project and the current state of my research, since a lot of my research materials are in an encrypted archive on a computer I won’t be able to bring with me, while a lot of non-sensitive material is online in GMail and Google Docs.

Still, if it just means hunkering down with some of the literature review materials which remain that will fully justify and occupy three days.