I had a nice long meeting with my dissertation committee on Monday. (gosh if you think of the brainpower and experience in the room for that meeting ... I'm in awe that these people agreed to take this time to mentor me)

It turns out that I'm not really as close as I thought I was and there are some big changes to make. Besides adding a lot to the literature review and conceptual framework, I'll be narrowing the empirical part quite a bit. Specifically, instead of picking 3 or more technologies to do case studies on, I'm just going to do two and focus on one group of researchers.  I'll be looking at... Twitter and blogs (I know, I'm surprised about the blogs - I love to study them but I thought to do something else instead)... and in ... geosciences!

I have my work for the next 2 years cut out - hopefully I can finish in that period of time.

So if you happen to be a scientist or science communicator or society employee in some area of geosciences (geology, hydrology, atmospheric sciences, climatology, planetary sciences, seismology, oceanography....).  I hope we will get a chance to meet up and talk

Yes, it's been terribly quiet around here. Not even any prodding about the Donor's Choose (but please consider giving ).

Personal and work lives have been really busy. Lots of neat and interesting projects at work, one of which has me presenting a poster at the upcoming American Geophysical Union meeting in December in San Francisco. I registered as part of the AGU blogroll, but I'm still negotiating how much of work stuff ends up here. Typically not so much.

So everyone asks: when will you finish? I growl.  But it is a fair question as I've been a doctoral student since 2005!  Here's the status right now.

The draft title of the dissertation is: The role of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) in information and communication in science.  A conceptual framework and empirical study

The idea is that there are a lot of models of communication in science and there are attempts to update these when new ICTs are introduced. There are also lots of studies of new ICTs that do not rely on any of the communication or information science literature. Both the updates and the studies have expiration dates as new things emerge. What my dissertation does is to review this massive body of literature and to create a conceptual framework to describe the features and functions of communication in science. I will then analyze older and newer tools to show how they fit in that framework and update the framework. Finally, I'll do case studies on several new ICTs (and their science users) to learn more and further test the framework. The idea is that this framework - since it's based on the people and what they do and lots of research - will be longer lasting and will help designers and researchers better define what they're doing.

I've been quite depressed, thinking that none of this was new and wondering about its value. On the positive side, I explained it to a couple of people at ASIST and they seemed to think it would be useful.

The other bit is that I feel like I've been taking too long and my proposal is too big (it's about 15k words so far, but probably another 3k or so before its done). My advisor talked me down off the ledge with this one. He pointed out that my proposal isn't just an introduction, it's the end work, too. The analysis is part of the deliverable, in other words. I'm anxious to get on with the empirical part.  If all my ducks are in a row, I'll use my time at AGU wisely.

The time line is basically to get the proposal approved by the committee this calendar year, to do the case studies probably over 6 months or so of 2011, and then to finish writing over the year after that, I guess.  The thing is that since my proposal includes a bunch of stuff already (the first 4 chapters - would be 3 if I were normal), maybe the writing part will be quicker. The case studies will depend on IRB approval and targets of opportunity. Also how many I end up doing. I'm looking at 3-5, each with 5-15 interviews, qualitative content analysis, and participant observation.

When I joined ScienceBlogs, I was halfway done preparing for my comprehensive exams. That involved a lot of reading, re-reading, and then practice essays. I blogged that to stay honest - you could see weeks that I didn't accomplish as much as well as pretty productive weeks. I also got some great feedback from readers on some of my reactions to some of the articles.
So now I'm working on my proposal, and I have been for a while... with nothing really to show for it. I'm trying to work out a way I can blog the proposal so you all can keep me honest again (since you were so good at it last time). It's hard, though, because there aren't the same sort of stopping points. One reason it's been a little quiet around here.

Eleventy!!!!111!!!!111!, and so forth

So now I'm eligible to advance to candidacy. So I would be a PhD Candidate, if I were to put the paperwork in right away. At my advisor's suggestion, I'm going to hold off on that for a few months to not start the next clock (and my work have to pay more for tuition - now I can register for 1 credit pre-candidacy research).