Life, The Universe and Academia
I am supposed to be designing an experiment and finishing of my de-bugging but as always happens when you have a tight deadline to meet I have got a bit distracted. I am firmly blaming robin_anne_reid's post for this diversion.
I think it is fair to say I am pretty multi-disciplinary - my BA is in Ancient History, my MSc is in Archaeological Computing and my PhD is officially in Computer Science but with a massive helping of Fan Studies.
I am at the point where I am finishing up corrections and beginning to wonder what the heck I should do next. The choices seem to be:
* leave academia and get job
* try and get a reseach post in computer science
* try and get a research post in digital heritage due to my arch/hist backgraound and the application of my work with pop culture to cultural heritage.
* try and capitalise on the digital fan studies work that I did in my PhD with probably means switching discipline again to Media Studies
* some combination of the above
All of which means that I have been thinking alot about my place in academia quite a lot recently.
robin_anne_reid's post got me thinking because I do know some male academics (post-grad and up) on LJ *waves at friends list* but they are all computer science types. Probably more will be reading this (if the want to) via the fact that my LJ posts feed into Facebook. One odd thing I noticed about myself was that I was much happier friending my departmental collegues on Facebook that I was on LJ because my Facebook account I got purely through university events (I had to give a few talks on social networks and thought I should join one that wasn't LJ) whereas LJ I got through my fan ties. While I get some academic feeds and occasionally post about my research on LJ it is at heart where I interact with non-email-based fandom. Equally while I am a member of some fannish communities on Facebook I can't stand the format and do little with them.
In some ways this ties to robin_anne_reid in her post about the LJ/not-LJ Fan/Academic multiple-personalities thing that a lot of us seem to have going on. This came up slightly in the Semantic Web/Web 2.0 Web Science research discussion that we had a few months ago. The talk got slightly hijacked by a discussion on ontologies (possibly even on the ontology of ontologies - it was disapearing up its own meta at the time) and it was very interesting but 1. it would have been nice if there was more time to talk about the social aspects. A small discussion did happen but I think TBL was wrong *shock* in thinking that just letting people create more than one persona would solve the issues of people having more than one 'life'. The discussion among aca/fen and fen in general on fan-life and real-life will tell you that (eg. discussion of naming of fans in newspaper article etc) and I would have liked to dicsuss it more. 2. why wasn't I on the panel? Okay I might have got a pass for being busy with the defending the thesis thing but a discussion on the social aspects of the internet/semantic web & web 2.0... why are people not beating and path to my desk? How is this not my thing? Jim is even quoting my thesis to journalists as this is 'web science'. In some ways I agree and in some ways I disagree - I'm 'begining to understand it' only because that is how it is being defined, in every other sense I am way ahead of the computer scientist who are just thinking 'hey, maybe we should play social scientists at the same time'. (That came out way more arogant than I intended but if web science really is about the people then you need to look at it from a soc sci rather than comp sci way and for that you need to at least look at, if not care about, the soc sci perspective).
To start with what is 'Web Science'. Disregarding some of the more cynical views going around the department and pretending it is actually something 'real' it is something to do with the social side of the Internet or how society and the Internet work together. I think. It seems a bit vague from the people I have talked to. Personally I think the Web Science is a bad name - it is more Web Social Science but that just has bad connotations, like why are is this computer science and not anthro/soc sci/etc? Or come to that how is Web Science different from the transmedia/convergent cultures research? For example that being done at MIT's C3. I think part of the answer is just that Web Science is growing out of Computer Science and Convergent Culture grew out of Media Studies. And just for the hell of it lets stick the Institute of Creative Technologies into the mix as well. Again a bit different because they are looking at the whole internet/user/community thing from an Arts/Lit perspective but with an Access Grid. All creeping into the same area of concern but from very different directions and barely talking to each other.
And just to bring this around full circle, I'm sure the Translitracy/New Media guys are talking to the Fan(Fiction) Studies people but there seems to be so much re-inventing of the wheel going on. The IoCT has courses on online writing and new media, they have a blog on Writing and the Digital Life. But they are talking about literature and 'proper' writing not that funny fan fiction stuff, never mind that it has been a significant part of writing in people's digital lives when new media was but a twinkling electron in the Internet's eye. De Montfort's been the host of a one day workshop on Slash for a few years now - where were the digital writing people? Maybe it is just the standard issues with bringing fanfic (legality, appropriateness, 'legitimacy' etc etc) to the fore which is keeping it quiet - I know I have difficulty wading into a conversation on the WDL mailing list and saying 'actually have you concidered the evidence from fan fic here' but then it isn't supposed to be my area of research.
Talk to each other people! (And then employ me)
Getting back to where this all started: the above points on usage also relate to one of the aspects of the discussion that was occuring in the review of Media in Transition 5 that sparked off a lot of this. There are a number of things of interest in this piece. My little compsci persona was intregued by all the side comments about the comparisons between LJ and Blogger. Helloooo HCI peoples lookie over here. Trackbacks vs Threading. And possibly linking to the LJ vs BB comfort divide which I quickly pondered on ages ago while considering social networks. I mean the whole question of whether LJ is better for discussions/usability/gender issue is just needing to be looked at (or someone pointing me to the study that has already been done on this).
HCI aside, the whole discussion makes me wonder even more what I am going to do next. My thesis had so much fan/media studies stuff it that I did occasionally wonder if I was submitting it under the wrong discipline. I'd love to play more in the media/fan studies side of things but from a compsci perspective I was pushing it as it was. Why was I looking at gender? Because it never occured to me that it wouldn't be deeply important and relevent. I still think it is but I need re-write things a bit so it is clear that 'here is important and cool stuff but not necessarily interesting if you are here for the geekery'. It would probably have been more relevent if I had had time to include the HCI aspects.
In some ways reading about these issues makes me want to wade in and make my name. I'm looking at fandom from a compsci perspective - how much more percieved 'male' can you get. However then I read the discussion going on in the fan/media studies communtiy and realise just how unprepared I would be in that discipline. It all comes down to where your examinors are from. Mine, rightly, pulled the ontology/semantic side of my thesis to tiny pieces for me to rearrange back into a more perfect whole but the more soc sci/communties section pretty much got a pass. I'm sure if someone from fan/media studies looked at the first half of my thesis they would find lots of stuff that was wrong/missed and would probably give me a pass on the second and more techie half. It is a matter of where your eyes glaze over.
I still have problems explaining to people why I don't get the contribution my research is making. I think the multidiscipline thing is part of the reason. Pretty much every discipline I am involved in at the moment I am looking at shallowly through the lens of another discipline. This in itself is not necessarily a bad thing except when I think depth is needed so my work can stand paragraph to paragraph against the current research in that field and be counted, in all of them. I feel guilty because I know that the stuff for the other disciplines would probably not be up to the right level in those disciplines but noone is noticing because it is 'other'. When the hell did I become such a perfectionist - I really didn't used to be.
So I look at the discussion on MiT5 and I can't help wondering if that is me in ten years time. I would love to stay in research but damn it living in a different city to kludge for most of our marriage is getting really crap and I want to stop now. I have so many theories and ideas and potential research swimming around in my head but where am I going to do it unless I can ferret out my own funding. Does that put me on a path to being an independent researcher... not a path I really want to go down. Maybe it is academic snobbery, maybe it is just the hard work of trying to do the research and get money from somewhere else... the one thing I really liked about having a 9-5 job was not having homework to do afterwards. It just is sad to think I may walk away from it all (and people wonder why I had a hard time finishing my thesis) because there is no where to put me. If I can't make the people up the tree pay attention to my work in a place where I am known (and I think liked) then what chance have I of selling my work to strangers.
Time to learn how to sell my work to the masses and have the courage to push my work into people's aegis until they can't ignore it. The question is, is that a battle I want to fight for the next thirty years or should I just find a normal job somewhere and, like my writing, keep it about love rather than money?
I'm going to stop now and go get a drink. I'll leave the rant on the rise of the fanboy writers/directors and the possibility of the rise of the fangirl writers/directors until another time when I am having a 'my life would be different if I hadn't had to drop drama when I changed schools' day.
I think it is fair to say I am pretty multi-disciplinary - my BA is in Ancient History, my MSc is in Archaeological Computing and my PhD is officially in Computer Science but with a massive helping of Fan Studies.
I am at the point where I am finishing up corrections and beginning to wonder what the heck I should do next. The choices seem to be:
* leave academia and get job
* try and get a reseach post in computer science
* try and get a research post in digital heritage due to my arch/hist backgraound and the application of my work with pop culture to cultural heritage.
* try and capitalise on the digital fan studies work that I did in my PhD with probably means switching discipline again to Media Studies
* some combination of the above
All of which means that I have been thinking alot about my place in academia quite a lot recently.
robin_anne_reid's post got me thinking because I do know some male academics (post-grad and up) on LJ *waves at friends list* but they are all computer science types. Probably more will be reading this (if the want to) via the fact that my LJ posts feed into Facebook. One odd thing I noticed about myself was that I was much happier friending my departmental collegues on Facebook that I was on LJ because my Facebook account I got purely through university events (I had to give a few talks on social networks and thought I should join one that wasn't LJ) whereas LJ I got through my fan ties. While I get some academic feeds and occasionally post about my research on LJ it is at heart where I interact with non-email-based fandom. Equally while I am a member of some fannish communities on Facebook I can't stand the format and do little with them.
In some ways this ties to robin_anne_reid in her post about the LJ/not-LJ Fan/Academic multiple-personalities thing that a lot of us seem to have going on. This came up slightly in the Semantic Web/Web 2.0 Web Science research discussion that we had a few months ago. The talk got slightly hijacked by a discussion on ontologies (possibly even on the ontology of ontologies - it was disapearing up its own meta at the time) and it was very interesting but 1. it would have been nice if there was more time to talk about the social aspects. A small discussion did happen but I think TBL was wrong *shock* in thinking that just letting people create more than one persona would solve the issues of people having more than one 'life'. The discussion among aca/fen and fen in general on fan-life and real-life will tell you that (eg. discussion of naming of fans in newspaper article etc) and I would have liked to dicsuss it more. 2. why wasn't I on the panel? Okay I might have got a pass for being busy with the defending the thesis thing but a discussion on the social aspects of the internet/semantic web & web 2.0... why are people not beating and path to my desk? How is this not my thing? Jim is even quoting my thesis to journalists as this is 'web science'. In some ways I agree and in some ways I disagree - I'm 'begining to understand it' only because that is how it is being defined, in every other sense I am way ahead of the computer scientist who are just thinking 'hey, maybe we should play social scientists at the same time'. (That came out way more arogant than I intended but if web science really is about the people then you need to look at it from a soc sci rather than comp sci way and for that you need to at least look at, if not care about, the soc sci perspective).
To start with what is 'Web Science'. Disregarding some of the more cynical views going around the department and pretending it is actually something 'real' it is something to do with the social side of the Internet or how society and the Internet work together. I think. It seems a bit vague from the people I have talked to. Personally I think the Web Science is a bad name - it is more Web Social Science but that just has bad connotations, like why are is this computer science and not anthro/soc sci/etc? Or come to that how is Web Science different from the transmedia/convergent cultures research? For example that being done at MIT's C3. I think part of the answer is just that Web Science is growing out of Computer Science and Convergent Culture grew out of Media Studies. And just for the hell of it lets stick the Institute of Creative Technologies into the mix as well. Again a bit different because they are looking at the whole internet/user/community thing from an Arts/Lit perspective but with an Access Grid. All creeping into the same area of concern but from very different directions and barely talking to each other.
And just to bring this around full circle, I'm sure the Translitracy/New Media guys are talking to the Fan(Fiction) Studies people but there seems to be so much re-inventing of the wheel going on. The IoCT has courses on online writing and new media, they have a blog on Writing and the Digital Life. But they are talking about literature and 'proper' writing not that funny fan fiction stuff, never mind that it has been a significant part of writing in people's digital lives when new media was but a twinkling electron in the Internet's eye. De Montfort's been the host of a one day workshop on Slash for a few years now - where were the digital writing people? Maybe it is just the standard issues with bringing fanfic (legality, appropriateness, 'legitimacy' etc etc) to the fore which is keeping it quiet - I know I have difficulty wading into a conversation on the WDL mailing list and saying 'actually have you concidered the evidence from fan fic here' but then it isn't supposed to be my area of research.
Talk to each other people! (And then employ me)
Getting back to where this all started: the above points on usage also relate to one of the aspects of the discussion that was occuring in the review of Media in Transition 5 that sparked off a lot of this. There are a number of things of interest in this piece. My little compsci persona was intregued by all the side comments about the comparisons between LJ and Blogger. Helloooo HCI peoples lookie over here. Trackbacks vs Threading. And possibly linking to the LJ vs BB comfort divide which I quickly pondered on ages ago while considering social networks. I mean the whole question of whether LJ is better for discussions/usability/gender issue is just needing to be looked at (or someone pointing me to the study that has already been done on this).
HCI aside, the whole discussion makes me wonder even more what I am going to do next. My thesis had so much fan/media studies stuff it that I did occasionally wonder if I was submitting it under the wrong discipline. I'd love to play more in the media/fan studies side of things but from a compsci perspective I was pushing it as it was. Why was I looking at gender? Because it never occured to me that it wouldn't be deeply important and relevent. I still think it is but I need re-write things a bit so it is clear that 'here is important and cool stuff but not necessarily interesting if you are here for the geekery'. It would probably have been more relevent if I had had time to include the HCI aspects.
In some ways reading about these issues makes me want to wade in and make my name. I'm looking at fandom from a compsci perspective - how much more percieved 'male' can you get. However then I read the discussion going on in the fan/media studies communtiy and realise just how unprepared I would be in that discipline. It all comes down to where your examinors are from. Mine, rightly, pulled the ontology/semantic side of my thesis to tiny pieces for me to rearrange back into a more perfect whole but the more soc sci/communties section pretty much got a pass. I'm sure if someone from fan/media studies looked at the first half of my thesis they would find lots of stuff that was wrong/missed and would probably give me a pass on the second and more techie half. It is a matter of where your eyes glaze over.
I still have problems explaining to people why I don't get the contribution my research is making. I think the multidiscipline thing is part of the reason. Pretty much every discipline I am involved in at the moment I am looking at shallowly through the lens of another discipline. This in itself is not necessarily a bad thing except when I think depth is needed so my work can stand paragraph to paragraph against the current research in that field and be counted, in all of them. I feel guilty because I know that the stuff for the other disciplines would probably not be up to the right level in those disciplines but noone is noticing because it is 'other'. When the hell did I become such a perfectionist - I really didn't used to be.
So I look at the discussion on MiT5 and I can't help wondering if that is me in ten years time. I would love to stay in research but damn it living in a different city to kludge for most of our marriage is getting really crap and I want to stop now. I have so many theories and ideas and potential research swimming around in my head but where am I going to do it unless I can ferret out my own funding. Does that put me on a path to being an independent researcher... not a path I really want to go down. Maybe it is academic snobbery, maybe it is just the hard work of trying to do the research and get money from somewhere else... the one thing I really liked about having a 9-5 job was not having homework to do afterwards. It just is sad to think I may walk away from it all (and people wonder why I had a hard time finishing my thesis) because there is no where to put me. If I can't make the people up the tree pay attention to my work in a place where I am known (and I think liked) then what chance have I of selling my work to strangers.
Time to learn how to sell my work to the masses and have the courage to push my work into people's aegis until they can't ignore it. The question is, is that a battle I want to fight for the next thirty years or should I just find a normal job somewhere and, like my writing, keep it about love rather than money?
I'm going to stop now and go get a drink. I'll leave the rant on the rise of the fanboy writers/directors and the possibility of the rise of the fangirl writers/directors until another time when I am having a 'my life would be different if I hadn't had to drop drama when I changed schools' day.