A new brilliant adventure has begun in the Piled Higher & Deeper comic by Jorge Cham. Its called Cecilia in Thesisland: this is actually part two. The adventure begins here…

Åsa M. Larsson archeologist and blogger (Ting & Tankar) has finished her PhD thesis! She will be defending at 1 pm at Friday 18 September (Geijer auditorium, building 6, Humanities Centre, Engelska Parken, Uppsala). Her work is on osteo-archaeology about the Middle Neolithic B in the Lake Mälaren area, c. 2800-2400 cal BC. Nope, I [...]

Not all intelligent sounding advice is actually good advice and most philosophical advice is on the level of a bad sound-bite. Most of it just sounds cool but is totally useless real life applications. The latest strip from Jorge Cham of PhD comics has come online: What this means in real life thesis writing (if [...]

Tomorrow I am off to Iceland! This is really cool even though I wish I was staying there for a longer period of time. But it’s cool enough. I fly up tomorrow, have meetings on Tuesday and fly home early on Wednesday. The meetings should be very interesting since I am there to participate in [...]

Dr Danah Boyd has successfully defended her very interesting PhD Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics (PDF) and of course the text is available online (under CC license). This is from the abstract While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured [...]

The new term has begun with new lectures and repeats of some old ones. Last week I gave a repeat performance (well for me at least) of my essay writing lecture. The main point is to get students thinking about their essays in time as well as getting them to understand how to write an [...]

The public thesis defense is a strange thing. The author is defined as a PhD student (with a focus on the idea of the student) is in fact the expert on the topic being discussed. It is he or she who has the best grasp of the data and all the reasons why the finished [...]

Take a look at the Jörgen Skågeby’s recent PhD thesis “Gifting Technologies: Ethnographic Studies of End-users and Social Media Sharing” where he has studied the phenomenon of file sharing (to simplify everything a tad!) In his thesis Jörgen Skågeby has studied the classical questions posed in gift theory: why gifts are given? what gifts are [...]

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. I chose [...]