Happy Thursday to everyone – the week is coming to an end & I am absolutely buzzing because I have a friend fly over on the weekend and we’ll go cycle around Scotland a little (photos to follow in the next blog post) + it’s well sunny in Edinburgh today so I have decided to make use of this and write my article outside – fuelling up on sunshine while getting work done and sorting my newest thoughts on my masters project!

News? Yes – indeed. Unfortunately, there is no travel grant available so I cannot conduct research abroad as I intended (aka in Latin America) {PS: I did just proceed to google how much flights are aka whether I could pay for it myself and NOPES} – but hey ho life is about staying flexible and I’m sure I’ll still find an interesting approach to my masters project. There are two vital questions I have been asking myself and which I need to confront and reflect upon a little more.

1. Do I want to be a little more flexible to visit my family at home and thus try and go for a more theoretically/traditional dissertation? The advantage could certainly be that I can start as soon as I want, work whenever and I do not need to arrange for travel, meetings etc.
2. I am super excited for my PhD in Active Travel. However, sometimes I do think “aww I won’t be able to to keep working on all these super interesting technomoral areas, interlinking society and AI” – so maybe I should use this as my chance to focus on that before I dive into Active Travel?

I am well aware that I slowly but surely running out of time and just need to choose something since I will probably happy enough with many different options (its all about being flexible), but I do want to take this coming week (and the cycling) to just reflect (or try to reflect and then think of nothing when I cycle, but that is sometimes needed) and then I will schedule another supervisor meeting for just after my last deadline so I can tell my supervisor where I am at. Here is what is currently zooming around in my head:

1. Shall I stick to Bitcoin and focus on what initiatives there are in the UK?
2. Do I want to look at offline & online discussions (aka the public perception) on future human-robot interactions?
3. Shall I look at the environmental impact of AI and try and visualise that with artefacts?
4. Should I focus on sustainable/active travel in rural Scotland and communicate my findings with photography?
5. I really did think I have even more ideas – but hey this is quite concise!

Then maybe I should reflect on what I most enjoyed (I did like all my modules so this will be hard) in the last 2 semesters – now that all my intensives are over. Maybe I can learn from that/try and incorporate what I learned into my masters dissertation.

1. I really enjoyed my core modules and the SEM2 module on inclusive society since the core discussions are super important and I know they will certainly feature in my future work. How do we create inclusive projects is such a vital question and luckily more and more discussion about this arises. However, what is the answer? Is there one answer? This is probably why I wanted to incorporate a study on inclusive projects in my dissertation.
2. I did struggle with the coding initially, but I enjoyed data analysis much more this semester and I LOVED my module on evidence & persuasion in a digital age. For the assignment I extracted and analysed comments online and really loved that. So maybe analysing online discussions could feature as one element on my dissertation. I certainly would be keen to learn how to do knowledge graphs etc. I almost felt like I didn’t have enough time to explore everything this module touched upon.
3. I also throughly enjoyed talking about ethics and accountability of AI as in “Datafication, Accountability and Democracy” and “Ethical Data Futures”.

Now I just need to reread all this to find out whether there is a path or something that links all these things together. And maybe reflect exactly on WHY I am interesting in each one of my ideas. What is it I am most interesting in? What is most feasible? What will challenge me, but also help me learn lots of new things? To a certain extend I just want to choose and get started, but I know that probably taking next week and then sitting back down (all refreshed hopefully) might be a good move. Plus, it gives me the chance to reflect, then finish up my assignment and then start with my masters project 🙂 The motivation is already here at least. Ok – I shall be back soon with some more concrete plans. I’m gonna finish with “trust the process”!

fuelling up on sunshine / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0