The "monastic phase"

Supriya mentioned in today’s meeting that I’m entering the “monastic phase” of my project, now: the final six months, where it’s pretty much expected that every waking moment will be filled by working on or thinking about my thesis. I think it’s an apt description – though other aspects of life will keep grinding relentlessly onwards, as I don’t have the luxury of taking six months off from the world.

I’m spending today working on my data analysis, using Dedoose (which I wrote a bit about over here). Over the past few months, Louise has been using it extensively for her Masters thesis, and now it’s my turn to get to know what it can do. So far, it’s been very easy to use: it works on my Mac, allows simple tagging/coding of text excerpts from interview transcripts, and has some nice visualisation tools for exploring the data. It’s quite laggy on my computer, though (running in Firefox 9.01 & OS X 10.5.8, on a fast university network). I also find that I need to use a separate mouse, as the left/right click commands sometimes don’t respond to the touchpad. Still, it’s far simpler than running a virtual Windows environment, with two different operating systems slowing everything down.

Despite needing to spend most of my time hiding under a rock, I’m going to a public talk that danah is giving at RMIT tomorrow evening – it’s called “Privacy in networked places,” and there’s a bit of info about it here. I almost missed hearing about it, as the university departments can be terrible at publicising their events. Fortunately, I’ve now discovered that we have a Digital Ethnography research centre over in Media & Communications, and will try to go to all their events in future. Hopefully I’ll be able to meet some of the ARC Creative Industries and Youth & Wellbeing CRC people while I’m at the seminar, too.

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