As you may be aware, I successfully defended my MA back in January. I said at the time that I'd be putting a copy of the thesis here shortly after I'd finished working on the revisions. Well, the revisions came and went, but I obviously haven't posted the thesis here yet.

OK, but why not?

Here's why. I submitted, with K, a proposal to the 2008 Digital Humanities conference in Oulu, Finland that is in part based on one of my chapters. Since then, I've been waiting to hear whether or not the proposal was accepted or not. Now, as open as I may be towards releasing research, I recognize that others may not be quite so open (danah boyd and Harvard's efforts notwithstanding). Frankly, I didn't want to jeopardize the Digital Humanities proposal by "publishing" work ahead of the conference.

A couple of weeks ago, we heard back from the conference, and we were accepted. K and I will be heading to Finland in late June to give a paper there. I'm both excited and terrified (I am GAWDAWFUL when presenting work; I by far prefer more informal Q&A or unstructured talk) to be going to the conference. I'm really looking forward to seeing the other papers, not only in our own panel, but in the conference itself.

For those who aren't aware, Digital Humanities (DH) is the largest conference in my field; it's roughly equivalent to the MLA or the ACCUTE Congress. DH is the combined conference of SDH/SEMI, ACH, and ALLC, and it alternates between Europe and North America. Last year it was in Chicago. K will also be presenting another paper there with our friend and colleague, Dr. Stan Ruecker, on the e-book.

But back to the open publishing of the thesis. It'll come. I'll post the thesis in its entirety on this site, but likely not until July. Until then, if you're interested in reading it, please let me know and I'll be happy to email you a copy.

Why do you care?

The fact of the matter is that I haven't completely ruled out further academic work. I'm not planning on starting a PhD any time soon; but I don't want to close any doors. I'm going to work to publish within my field, even though I don't have any current plans for doctoral work, because I think I may want to revisit the idea in a few years.

One should also keep in mind that I'm currently working within an academic environment, and even though my job doesn't require publication, it's certainly something that I should explore and engage in when I can.

And frankly, I think it's the right time to be working with blogs and other social media, especially in the digital humanities field. I think that the digital - text analysis and visualization - have been too much of a focus within digital humanities, and it's time for a healthy dose of the humanities.