before I start: I’m glad to see this board has finally come alive. Generally it’s great to see that “some” type of communication is happening! - We still can’t really say that about mimerdesk: I posted a question there several days ago in regards to the material of the courses from INHOLLAND which I could not find…I hope that since we’re supposed to look for info on that platform as well this blog will infect mimerdesk with life sooner or later (or else kill it ).

Anyway, as the title of my post suggests, I have started to look into composing my Master Thesis and in doing so realized that there are still a lot of questions that - maybe just in my case - keep me going in circles and therefore paralyzed. I thought I’d share these questions with those who are (or soon will be) going through the same process, or better yet: those who have any clue as to how it could be done.

My first question is concerning the kind of “paper” we’re supposed to be writing: In my first draft I followed pretty much the regular procedure of scientific writing in that I created a linear written outline. Once I started thinking about the digital concept though and the fact that I could include a lot of multimedia-material (photos, movie-clips, audio files etc.) and make use of the nonlinear concept of hyperlinks I was wondering whether that would still be the right kind of approach? When I addressed this question to Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, he sent me an email containing information on the structure of an MA-thesis (which I later found on the web in form of a quite detailed PDF file.) However, that did not really answer my question to understand the concept, the way it could be more or less text portioned into different amounts of required or optional reading etc.

The second question pretty much ties into the first: So far I’ve only come across one example where the concept of a digital MA-thesis (in this case a dissertation) has been realized. Can anyone point me to other good examples that maybe also include more multi-media features (as was suggested by Mr. Sonvilla in Helsinki) and that are on the subject of humanities? It seems very similar to what we have been discussing in terms of the LO and how that could (or could not) be defined…and from what I remember we have not found a general answer yet but individual solutions at this point.

Last but not least, I guess it depends on the topic: My topic - “The Experience of (Non-) Closure in Digital Work”- turns out to be a topic that is not too “factual” - compared to a science topic where a simple step1-step2-step3 model could be followed (as seen in the product presentation of “learning software” in Helsinki) …so maybe that is why conceptualizing it is even more difficult? I can imagine that some of you read this and just shake their heads in amusement because they don’t see what the problem is. So if you have figured something out, can you enlighten me please?

Thank you