Marina Milosheva’s draft PhD thesis

I have been a little quiet on this blog over the past five months or so. The main reason for this is that I have taken on a further role in addition to that of Emeritus Professor. I am now the primary carer for my frail octogenarian mother. She has been staying in the ‘guest wing’ of my flat in Edinburgh since October 2023. Her presence here means that I now have less time to myself. As a result, my work activities have been focused on only the most essential tasks. One of the casualties of this has been blogging.

The lack of posts here does not mean that I have been idle over the winter. Despite my additional domestic duties, I have dedicated quite a lot of time to work, helping with one-off tasks such as updating Edinburgh Napier University’s Social Informatics Group flyer (accessible from the group’s ‘About’ page), writing job references, providing input to a couple of training events on campus, and giving feedback on grant proposals.

More regularly, I have participated in supervision meetings – some face-to-face on campus, and others online – for two PhD students: Marina Milosheva and Katherine Stephen. In Marina‘s case, I devoted a lot of time over the autumn and winter to reviewing early versions of her thesis chapters, and then the full draft of the whole thesis that she submitted on 31st December 2023. The latter task was achieved over five days in January. I marked up the hard copy of Marina‘s work and also provided her with just over eight pages of densely typed feedback in a Word file. Marina was able to use this feedback, along with that of my co-supervisors Dr Peter Cruickshank and Professor Pete Robertson, to develop the final version of the thesis that she submitted on 13th February 2024. The great news is that at the conclusion of Marina‘s viva examination on 25th March, the examiners recommended that she be awarded an unconditional pass (i.e. with no corrections). This is a very rare outcome for a PhD submitted to a UK university and a huge achievement.

I have completed one major piece of work related to my own research in the past few months. Between 9th November 2023 and 29th March 2024, I managed to find time on about 30 days to lead the writing-up and submission of a journal article manuscript on the empirical work completed for the Platform to platform project (as was promised in my blog post of 4th August last year). Dr Bruce Ryan, Marianne Wilson, Dr Iain McGregor and I are now anxiously awaiting the peer reviewers’ assessment of our work on audience engagement with archives presented in two different digitised formats.

I am lucky to continue to participate in social events with my Napier Social Informatics colleagues. For example, I led a games night on campus on 15th November 2023, and joined the staff Christmas party a month later on 13th December 2023. I also met with international colleagues for dinner on 25th October 2023, the night before an Information Science summit hosted by Napier: for more information about this please see Dr Bruce Ryan’s report on the Social Informatics blog.

This is not all my news: I’m saving the rest for individual blogs posts to follow this one. Watch this space!