As a Geographer I am very proud to say that today I will be representing PhD2Published at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference. I have been asked to be on the panel for the Postgraduate Forum Annual Conference Training Symposium (PGF-ACTS). The purpose of the postgraduate forum is outlined below: Read more
This week’s guest post comes from Liz Gloyn, who has just completed her PhD in classics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She blogs on her research, teaching and classical receptions in popular culture. You can follow her on Twitter here. In this post, Liz talks about turning a section of your Ph.D. into a talk.
At some stage in your academic career, you are likely to need to turn a thesis chapter into a talk. You may be speaking at an academic conference in order to put your research into a wider public arena, or you may have been asked to prepare a presentation on your dissertation for a job interview. Putting aside the general issues of constructing an oral presentation, like keeping to the time limit, changing a chapter into a talk poses a number of special challenges. PhD2Published normally talks about how to take things the other way, how to get research into a publishable form from a conference paper, but there are a number of reasons you might decide to road-test an idea from your thesis in a public forum before preparing it for publication. You might want to check out how a particular argument fares in front of a jury of your peers before committing yourself to standing behind it in print. You might want to get some general feedback about your work, especially if you’re revising your thesis for publication and want some ideas about how you might broaden its appeal. Whatever you reason for talking about your thesis research, here are some things to bear in mind as you prepare your talk. Read more
Sarah Caro, author of How to Publish Your PhD has kindly offered us this six-part guide on revising a thesis for publication as a book. Over the coming weeks she’ll be explaining how to understand what type of book you can produce as well as discover ways of shaping it up into a more book-like body of material.
As final summary of how to revise your thesis into a publishable book:
Weekly Wisdom #46 Meet everyone you can in your field, and make an effort to understand their research before assuming yours is relevant!
Sarah Caro, author of How to Publish Your PhD has kindly offered us this six-part guide on revising a thesis for publication as a book. Over the coming weeks she’ll be explaining how to understand what type of book you can produce as well as discover ways of shaping it up into a more book-like body of material.
How you decide to restructure your thesis will depend in part on the subject matter and discipline within which you are working but there are some more general points regarding style that are relevant whatever your topic and disciplinary background.
One of the most common problems is a too heavy reliance on the opinions of others – in other words too many direct quotes from other critics/theoreticians/scholars. While it is perfectly understandable that you will wish to position your own work in relation to those who have gone before you and show how your own work builds upon theirs, excessive direct quotation can distract from and weaken your own argument and even be quite confusing out of context. It can also become quite tedious if you are constantly referencing the same people and may give the impression that you are less well read than is actually the case (not a desirable outcome!). To avoid this pitfall read through your manuscript looking for opportunities to reduce the amount of direct quotation. Paraphrase or summarize arguments instead of reproducing them verbatim and perhaps cut them out altogether if they are not strictly necessary. Do make sure, however, that you still scrupulously reference any idea that is not your own – the last thing you want is to make yourself vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism. Read more
Sarah Caro, author of How to Publish Your PhD has kindly offered us this six-part guide on revising a thesis for publication as a book. Over the coming weeks she’ll be explaining how to understand what type of book you can produce as well as discover ways of shaping it up into a more book-like body of material.
Returning to the example thesis from last week, let’s look at content. Here’s the thesis outline:
Chapter 1: Definitions, Empirical Puzzle and choice of case studies
Chapter 2: Literature Review
Chapter 3: Timing, size and composition of X
Chapter 4: Social and political factors affecting X in the Netherlands 1975-1990
Chapter 5: Social and political factors affecting X in Austria 1975-1990
Chapter 6: Some additional factors affecting X in the Netherlands and Austria
Chapter 7: The impact of X in the Netherlands and Austria: a comparative perspective
Chapter 8: Consolidating X in the Netherlands and Austria References Appendix 1 a
Sarah Caro, author of How to Publish Your PhD has kindly offered us this six-part guide on revising a thesis for publication as a book. Over the coming weeks she’ll be explaining how to understand what type of book you can produce as well as discover ways of shaping it up into a more book-like body of material.
Transforming your thesis into a format suitable for publication as an academic monograph may or may not involve much cutting down of length. In fact it may require the inclusion of some additional material or expansion of existing sections (as we shall see below). What is certain, however, is that unless you are exceptionally gifted, lucky, or have been guided by a supervisor who has early-on spotted the publication potential of your work, it will need substantial reworking and restructuring if it is to escape its roots and become a convincing monograph.
As discussed before the average monograph does not follow the thesis-methods-results-analysis paradigm unless it has started life as a PhD and it is usually screamingly obvious when this is the case and the author has not revised it. Recently I received a proposal with the following table of contents (some details have been changed to avoid the person and project being identified): Read more
Today we present the next part of Dr Inger Mewburn’s series on ‘seven steps to creating a journal article’ (you can recap on the last part here). This post focuses on how to write your abstract.
This is the next post in my series on how to write a journal article. Previously I have talked about the importance of developing a publishing strategy and deciding what paper genre you wish to use. The next step is to craft an abstract for your unwritten paper. An abstract compresses the purpose, findings and implications of your paper into a paragraph. Developing skills in abstract writing are necessary for any budding academic as you will be often asked to do them for conferences, seminars and so on. A good abstract ‘sells’ the idea of the paper to the committees for such events – or even to yourself. Writing abstracts is an easy skill to learn, but is often not explicitly taught with many of us just picking it up by osmosis as we go on with other academic work.
InterFace is a new international forum to learn, share and network between the fields of Humanities and Technology.Below is an outline for the conference and the call for participants the conference will be held at University College London between 27th – 29th July 2011:
The symposium aims to foster collaboration and shared understanding between scholars in the humanities and in computer science, especially where their efforts converge on exchange of subject matter and method. With a focus on the interests and concerns of Ph.D students and early career researchers, the programme will include networking activities, opportunities for research exposition, and various training and workshop activities. Read more
