James Bond and the Land of Always Winter (or, how to structure a dissertation, thesis, or candidacy proposal) Michael L. Nelson & Michele C. Weigle Old Dominion University Web Science & Digital Libraries Research Group @WebSciDL https://phonedude.github.io/cs891-f17/ ODU CS 891 – Fall 2017 2017-11-01

There are many Bond films… #include <std_bond_disclaimer.h> http://chance.amstat.org/files/2014/04/bond_table1_lg.png

They feature various recurring motifs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7W7qJTFJ20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P7B_urjE5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUUq5mRCimo http://www.newswithviews.com/Ewart/ron141.htm http://www.picturequotes.com/my-name-is-bond-james-bond-quote-338815 http://metro.co.uk/2015/11/11/watch-this-supercut-of-nearly-every-single-bond-opening-sequence-playing-at-once-5494213/

And they all have the same structure… http://www.antipope.org/charlie/gifs/bond-toplevel.gif see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin

Opening Sequence: Immediate Action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWrecLbn4KE

“Q” Briefing: Introduces Critical Technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uZRYO8BcL4

Similarly, all dissertations, theses, and candidacy proposals have the same structure…

Examples, motivation, “why should we care?” James Bond opening sequence What basic technology do I need to understand the rest of the dissertation/thesis/proposal? Bond’s briefing with Q What have others done about this? (they provided the correct solution to some slightly different problem) Convince the reader about “The Land of Always Winter”

Starting here, you’re pretty much only talking about your work, contributions, etc. Some flexibility in presentation and granularity: preliminary work that informs your framework / model / whatever … Introduction to the framework / …, Then aspects of implementation / exploration / etc. Chapters often roughly correspond to papers you’ve published (but chapter order doesn’t have to follow chronological order of papers, and chapters are not necessarily 1-1 with pubs) TPDL 2013 D-Lib 2013 IJDL 2016

IJDL 2015 (first as JCDL 2014) iPres 2015 JCDL 2017 (first as arXiv 2016) Conclusions, by definition, are always last…

Background or Related Work? What are you citing? YMMV, but some guidelines include: Background: textbooks, protocols, RFCs, surveys, older publications, etc. Related Work: conference papers, journal articles, more recent publications

The Tao of Related Work Forward reference to where this related work about automated testing informs our work on archiving…

The Land of Always Winter http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Beyond_the_Wall

“Here Be Dragons” (ca. 1510) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt%E2%80%93Lenox_Globe

“View of the World from 9th Avenue” Saul Steinberg We could label this “Here be corn” or “The Land of Always Corn”, but the existence of just one map will invalidate that claim & you have to start over… Image from: http://eric_goldman.tripod.com/ipcourse/steinbergnyview.jpg Originally published in New Yorker, March 29 1976 see also: http://www.saulsteinbergfoundation.org/gallery_24_viewofworld.html

The “Uncharted Area” is where your Ph. D The “Uncharted Area” is where your Ph.D. is hiding (and is guarded by white walkers, dragons, and/or corn) “I googled it but couldn’t find anything on ___” good; roughly speaking, if you had found something you probably wouldn’t get a Ph.D. for that… Convince the reader you’ve exhaustively identified, understood, and mapped out all possibly related work the argument that an area is uncharted is more persuasive if you’ve thoroughly mapped the charted area no page limit* in a dissertation/thesis/proposal, so discussion is extensive Mo’ references, Mo’ better* * = ok, there’s probably some empirical limit, but we haven’t found it yet; Chuck’s dissertation probably comes close…