User interface design is fascinating to me because of what it reveals about what the designer thinks of the user and the kind of work they should do. Good design makes use of our natural abilities to free us from unnecessary mental work (Siracusa, 2003, crucial nuance added by Feldman, 2005). Bad design thrusts decisions onto the user without giving them a context to understand them. For example, one way of implementing a good computer file system is to allow you to interact with virtual objects using spatial memory. I put an object down. I expect it to be where I put it.

Apple Macintosh computers used to be very good at this and now they are, if not very bad, getting noticeably worse. Vital interface elements appear and disappear depending on what you are doing. Objects do not occupy coherent places in virtual space. It is as if a postmodernist philosopher showed up in the Apple offices and offered to design a deconstructed operating system which would continually cause the user to question ontological certainty and object permanence. The system forces its mental model onto the user who has to keep remember, oh yes, if I move the mouse over there, only then does the folder path appear.

In that same sense we can ask how the way we do intellectual work ends up costing us vast cognitive effort by depositing the mental model of the PhD in various places at once, or just letting it exist in our head. The discussion of the Macintosh interface by Siracusa can be summed up as: does it force the user to be aware of complex constructs like file system hierarchies or does it hide unnecessary complexity behind easily graspable, familiar metaphors. Likewise do our software tools allow us to grasp and work on the stuff of our research. Or do they force us to constantly think in abstractions unconnected to the reality described by the data. Just as a caveat: humans are perfectly good at dealing with abstractions but there are better and worse ways to abstract. One worse way is to break the relationship between the abstraction and the object.

Two things:

Does the software you use allow you not to have to think too much about where you put bits of the PhD, and does it allow you to very easily rearrange it or bring in new parts as simply as you would if you were assembling a real world document. Does it do the complex work of remembering where you put stuff. Can you switch bits around, dump currently unused stuff in an easily accessible pile, without having to think very much about how you are doing it. In short, is it Word or is it Scrivener?

One a more reflective point, does the way you write your work do this to the you and the reader. Can you and the reader pick up the mental structure of the argument from what you write? Consider how writing such as that of Judith Butler forces the reader to constantly look elsewhere to understand what she is actually saying. This prevents the reader grasping the essence of what she says. Like the MacOs Finder, the essence constantly changes when you try to pin it down. You can tell this when it comes to how her work is taught. It is instructive that nobody recommends you start understanding Butler by reading Butler. Instead you have to start by reading what someone else wrote about her.

With a writer of the elegance of Erving Goffman you begin with the text. Nobody – and I mean nobody – needs a further explanation to grasp what The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life means. It is immediately graspable. Nor why Asylums is a vital, searing book. I say that not to say you should write like Goffman. But that you should make things easy for yourself by looking at your text as a series of graspable statements about the thing you are examining. Like a file interface, it becomes a lot easier when you can intuitively know where everything is, without necessarily having to explain why they all go in particular places.

Feldman, D (2005) About the Spatial Debate, https://dfeldman.medium.com/about-the-spatial-debate-4ccb8064f1df

Siracusa, J (2003) ‘The Spatial Finder’, Arstechnica, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/3/

Mar 8, 2021

‘Use the weapon’ (‘Arrival’, Villeneuve 2016)

What is a PhD? PhDs are defined by their original contribution to knowledge. In order to be awarded a PhD the University of Edinburgh degree regulations state:

‘47. The student must demonstrate by the presentation of a thesis and/or portfolio, and by performance at an oral examination:

• capability of pursuing original research making a significant contribution to knowledge or understanding in the field of study;
• adequate knowledge of the field of study and relevant literature;
• exercise of critical judgement with regard to both the student’s work and that of other scholars in the same general field, relating particular research projects to the general body of knowledge in the field; and
•  the ability to present the results of the research in a critical and scholarly way.
  The thesis must:
•  represent a coherent body of work; and
•  contain a significant amount of material worthy of publication or public presentation.’

http://www.drps.ed.ac.uk/20-21/regulations/PGDRPS2020-21.pdf#page17

So you probably should have something to say there huh?

These are attributes of the candidate and what you do, and of the thesis as a document. Notably the major ones are about what the candidate will do, not what the thesis does. The two requirements specific to the thesis as a document say nothing about originality. They say the thesis must be coherent and publishable or presentable. That tells you that the whole original contribution to knowledge thing is not what you think and won’t be found where you might expect. It’s not only plucking the tastiest bits of your findings and shoving in the examiners’ faces. That is because the entire PhD is already original. It is a unique assembly of literature, theory and typically data as well. The contribution is to knowledge and it is not necessarily to be found in the PhD thesis at all, which is why many PhD students find it tricky to identify.

The contribution is in where you plan to take it and how you relate it to what is already known.  It is in whether your findings mean we have to change our approach to some activity, or rethink some concept everyone is happily using without really thinking about it in the way you will demand they do.

For example, with my great colleagues I am planning a paper on altruistic drug supply. It shows a specific altruistic and ideologically driven form of drug supply that makes its appearance in a community of psychedelic drug users. That’s the paper’s finding. The contribution to knowledge is not that. It is that we’ve previously decided that drug supply is either social supply or commercial distribution. Here is an instance that does not fit either. It means we have to have another look at the social and the commercial in each category. The contribution to knowledge is a demand that scholars rethink their focus and retool their classification. We have to revise the distinction we make between social and commercial supply and question what that means. There are implications for considering distribution as a rational action category. Rationality may turn out to not very easily explain a range of activity that it appears to. Essentially: what is the significance of this research paper to people who do not care about that specific study. Like your mum for instance.

Therefore the originality of the thesis should be creative and outward looking. It means you identify tensions within your work and frictions between your work and the theories of others’. It lies in how you use the tool you have crafted. In the words of the aliens in ‘Arrival’, use the weapon. In their case, language. In your case, your PhD. The question of originality is how you can use it to make sense of some aspect of the social world beyond the specific instances in your findings.

Like most good things in life I owe this blog post to a conversation with my lovely student and colleague.

Mar 7, 2021