Project Update – Alex Galarza

Published on Jan 18, 2009 by Ethan Watrall

A few months back I introduced my two projects for the year. I have made more progress on my prototype for an online dissertation chapter than redesigning the front-end of the footballscholars.org site, so I will focus on the Ciudad Deportiva chapter prototype.

Kora and the Ciudad Deportiva

KORA is serving as the digital repository for the Ciudad Deportiva chapter. As a reminder, the chapter deals with the curious case of the Ciudad Deportiva, a mix between a stadium complex and amusement park. It was built over seven artificial islands on sixty hectares of land filled in the Rio de la Plata. Besides an enormous 140,000-seat stadium and various athletic facilities, the project was to include an aquarium, mini-golf, mechanical rides for children, and a drive-in movie theatre for 500 cars. This project combined public and private funds, embodying a new vision of middle-class consumption that fit into city planner’s designs for a modern city with ample leisure space. Yet, a combination of poor engineering, financial mismanagement, and political disputes ensured that the ambitious plans started in 1965 would be largely abandoned by the 1978 World Cup deadline.

I have set up the repository and will begin uploading my sources this week. I have been fortunate enough to receive a Fulbright IIE award to conduct my dissertation research, so I now know that this prototype will be developing into a working component of my project when I leave for Buenos Aires in the fall. After I finish uploading and sorting my sources, I will be working with a developer here at MATRIX to produce a front-end for the repository. Another KORA project, David Robinson’s Failed Islamic States, and MATRIX-hosted soviethistory.org are serving as useful models for front-ends that invite users to engage with the materials in their repositories. The central issue in my design thinking is how to engage the user in a long-form historical argument without confronting them with a wall of text. How can I use images, short descriptions, and media like oral interviews and videos to engage people with my wider arguments about the role of soccer in Argentine society?

This brings in the question of audience and public history. My project aims to engage fans of soccer and members of the communities I study in Argentina as well as historians and anthropologists interested in questions of culture and politics. Such a wide audience presents challenges a website’s ability to capture varied interests, but it also presents an opportunity to develop a model of popular and public history that can preserve a long-form argument closer to a monograph or dissertation in an online platform.

I am working with a number of Argentine scholars at the Centro de Estudio del Deporte at the Universidad de San Martín to gather sources and insights on my own project, but working with a digital repository like KORA presents the opportunity to work with them in the long term towards developing an NEH Digital Preservation and Access grant. Many of us take an annual report required of soccer clubs called Memorias y Balances as a base sources in our projects. The reports contain a general account of the year’s events, membership statistics, and team results and they are in the public domain. These are valuable public documents that could form the spine of an excellent repository with data that could be linked to ask very interesting questions. The Argentine football association, or Associación del Fútbol Argentino has already taken an interest in digitizing their own memorias y balances and has a few decades worth online already.

Digital Dissertations – not only for the Humanities

Published on Jan 18, 2009 by Ethan Watrall

Image from Flickr user ginnerobot

For a while now, I’ve been listening in on discussion in Digital Humanities about the pros and cons of digital dissertations. From Seventeen Moments in Soviet History to a master’s thesis on composer Henry Cowell, my colleagues have promoted the digitization of dissertations in the humanities.

The discussion of the benefits of open-access (in concert with the “security dangers” of the same) has played a big role in departmental, institutional, and online discussions among scholars. For a review of this issue, see GradHacker’s recent post on access to dissertations. But that’s not the topic of this post. My question is:

What about the social and natural sciences?

If the discussion to move into the digital age with theses and dissertations is happening in the sciences, maybe it’s just not happening online. As you can see from UMass Amherst’s list of open access dissertations, a variety of departments are represented, including Polymer Science and Engineering. But this site merely allows the download of pdf dissertations, a soft copy just like the hard copy no one’s reading in the library.

I’m interested in creating a complex digital dissertation that includes my collected data as a searchable database. But there are a myriad of questions that follow, aside from plenty of formatting issues. Can I offer my references as a Zotero public collection? Are there institutional copyright laws on data collected from materials they own – in my case, a skeletal collection? How will such a digital dissertation be forward migrated when its platform is outmoded in 5, 10, 20 years? Possibly most critically:

If I’m going to put in the energy to create a better dissertation by making it digital – and still include all relevant data, tables, and text – should I still have to produce a brick-like manuscript?

These are topics that I’ll try to hash out over time and report back on as I find answers (or make decisions if there’s no precedent!) Unfortunately, I think the answer at the university and the department level to the last question will be, “Yes, you still have to write a ‘real’ dissertation even if you make a better one in the Series of Tubes.”

However, one answer to the forward migration question, which also entails where a digital dissertation is hosted, might be found in the previously mentioned music master’s thesis is that you can click through to the website OR download the dissertation in html form. Unfortunately, Michigan State trails behind other large American universities and lacks an institutional repository for even pdfs of theses and dissertations.

Perhaps the archaeologists in the audience will be able to help out with this discussion and exploration. As a social science with plenty of hard, quantitative data, how are your peers tackling the dissertation?

Do you think this can be an individual battle with a dissertation committee? What are the benefits of bringing the fight to a bigger audience to forge a path for ‘alternative’ dissertations?