1. 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
ODU CS 891 – Fall 2017

2. There are many Bond films…
#include <std_bond_disclaimer.h>

3. They feature various recurring motifs

4. And they all have the same structure…
see also:

5. Opening Sequence: Immediate Action

6. “Q” Briefing: Introduces Critical Technology

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

8. 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”

9. 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

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

11. 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

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

13. The Land of Always Winter

14. “Here Be Dragons”
(ca. 1510)

15. “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:
Originally published in New Yorker, March
see also:

16. 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…