Open Source PhD

Since my first semester in graduate school, I’ve been posting my reading lists and general themes for the month. Since my comprehensive exams in May, I have certainly been reading, though not nearly as much....

As part of a series of posts that I’ve been calling “Open Source PhD,” I’m posting some of the materials that I prepared as I was studying for my comprehensive exams....

Until this month, I tracked each book that I read and shared them here. During the spring semester, I’m reading for my comprehensive exams and so already know what I’ll be reading for the next few months....

This month marked the LAST SEMESTER OF PHD COURSEWORK for me. I completed another draft of my second year project, a revise and resubmit (accepted!), and got my comprehensive exam reading lists approved....

A deadline for a revise and resubmit meant not a lot of other reading got done. Below was reading required for classes. Abbate, J. (2000). Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press....

Welp, September is the first full month of the semester and it sure felt like it. This fall I’m in a class on Surveillance and Society with Marisa Duarte and Andrew Brown, and reading a book a week with Emma Frow....

This summer I wrote my second year project. As I gathered items, it didn’t make sense to list them all as “read” since I did a lot of skimming and extracting rather than wholesale reading....

This month, I rewrote my second-year project proposal for the third and fourth times. (First and second iterations happened in January and February). Each complete rewrite brought with it a new or expanded set of literature....

This month, I spoke at TEDxASU. Preparing for that took nearly all of the time I would have normally spent reading. Oops! In my main seminar, we were assigned a few books instead of a slew of articles, so it’s a short list....

This month I didn’t do a very good job of what I’d tried to do last month - which is focus on only a few things. I read widely for a few reasons...

This month, I’m focused on getting a few big presentations ready, and writing a three large projects. I’m trying not to get interested in anything new (which is hard, because there’s so many good and interesting things!...

i write code in public… Over the semester break, I cleaned up my filing system and archived all of the writing that I did last semester - approximately 30,000 words. As I was putting it away, and sometimes even as I was writing it, I thought - what a shame that I can’t do anything else with all of this work…...

The semester is finally over! I made it out without too many tears, and I spent the semester break doing some school reading but mostly I read junk and loved it....

November was a shorter school month, and was mostly filled with doing everything I could to get things ready for spring and wrapped up for fall. I did a lot of writing for assignments and projects, and made a conscious effort to not read more than I needed to and to instead work to integrate what I’d already read....

I spent October juggling projects (many not my own), and found that I was returning to some fundamental questions that I left unanswered (or didn’t answer satisfactorily) at the start of the semester:...

Sharing some thoughts about Robert Pielke’s The Honest Broker and whether it’s applicable to technology contexts. Often, when we talk about science and technology, we talk about them as one field: “science and technology....

I spent September struggling to stay afloat. The way work was structured, I was able to spend time thinking about fewer ideas, but exploring them more fully. This month, those ideas were:...

I spent August getting used to being back in class, and thinking about: how do engineers think about engineering ethics on a day-to-day basis (if at all)? just because we can build something, does that mean we should?...

I spent July thinking about open source community health: how do measures of open source project success interact with measures of community health? (they don’t, because no measures of community health exist) what would a “healthy” open source community look like?...

I have often thought, “I wish I knew what people in [insert name of PhD program] were reading.” because I wanted to do that same reading. Some courses had syllabi available, some had notes, but it was hard to get a sense of the themes that were being discussed....