jill/txt

I fixed the PDF of my PhD thesis and put it online!

Jill Walker. Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World. Dr. art. thesis, Dept of Humanistics, University of Bergen, 2003.

To try to convince you to read it, or, more realistically, skim bits of it, I’ll quote one of the best bits of the committee’s report on it:

She succeeds in problematising the concept of interactivity in a way that still makes it possible to use the term in a fruitful way. She also represents a pioneering effort in her analyses of various interactive websites that so far have eluded this kind of theoretical reflection. In short, her dissertation is to be recommended as a useful theoretical excursion into a quickly developing field. (..) Another strong point of the dissertation is its lucid and economical writing style, which make it a true pleasure to read.

My opponents were excellent, and I was especially thrilled that one of my academic heros was my first opponent: Marie-Laure Ryan, who has done wonderful work on fictional worlds and digital media and narrative. Bjørn Sørensen and Dag Elgesem also gave me excellent feedback, and the report was co-written by the three of them. Oh, it’s wonderful having a year and a half’s distance to this! Instead of seeing all the (plentiful) criticism, I now notice all the positive remarks that they also made! How different from my first reaction to the report. Oh, just look at this lovely explanation of my “original contribution”:

The originality of the dissertation lies in the following areas:

Data selected: Walker’s study goes much beyond the well-studied genres of digital texts, namely literary hypertext and computer games. While these genres serve as standard of comparison, together with print fictions, Walker brings into the discussion texts that have not, to our knowledge, received extensive critical attention: Web-based texts that use e-mail or other devices to collect personal information from the user; digital hoaxes; and “pseudo” computer games whose main purpose is not to provide challenging player action but to convey a political message.

Theoretical approach: The issue of whether digital interactive texts are or are not narratives has been one of the most controversial in new media studies. Walker finds an elegant alternative to the dilemma by regarding these texts as fictions as invitations to the user to become part of an imaginary world. Kendall Walton’s concept of “fiction as a game of make-believe”� and his notion of “depiction” — which has not been tested before on digital texts”provides a very efficient approach to the issue of user participation in the worlds of digital fiction and place the texts under study in an interdisciplinary perspective. In fact, Walker may have located the true home, i.e. the strongest domain of application of Walton’s theory. In its original form, this theory creates an analogy between children’s games of make-believe and artistic texts, such as standard literary fiction and the visual arts. While “game of make-believe”� describes literature and art only metaphorically, the notion applies quite literally to the interactive texts analyzed by Walker, since in these texts the user really performs actions, and since many of these texts are genuine games.

Critical analysis of interactivity: While earlier studies of digital texts have defended the view that interactivity empowers users by enabling them to participate in the creation of the fictional world, Walker takes a much more nuanced approach. She studies several cases of “fake interactivity” where the program asks the user for input, but develops its narrative in a pre-determined way, without taking this input into consideration. But this “fake”� or non-consequential interactivity is not without functionality, since it facilitates the user’s immersion in the fictional world. Walker also refines current conceptions of user participation in texts by proposing an original typology that cross-classifies two criteria into four categories: user internal vs. external to discourse; user internal vs. external to story.

And yes, know, it’s been ages since I finished the thesis and I should have put it online long ago, but you know, I didn’t have the full version of Acrobat to fix the broken PDF and, uh, well, you know, I was utterly sick of the whole project. Now I think it looks quite interesting again. There are some really good bits in it, though there are also bits that are there because it was a three year process of changing perspectives.

Maybe Google will index it in Google Scholar. I’d like that!

Hey, the university newsletter has a photo of me and my beautiful daughter sipping wine and cordial after the graduation ceremony! And here are a gazillion or so official photos.

Torill just posted an excellent photo-documentary of what actually happened during the graduation ceremony. Apart from the rector patting my shoulder, which was about all I managed to report. I look cute in my robe with buckled shoes and a handbag, don’t you agree?

The speech went great, the ceremony was impressive, the robes, the procession and the setting exactly like Hogwarts. Before the ceremony the rector smiled to me and to my surprise knew just who I was. She patted my shoulder, thanked me for agreeing to give the speech, and told me she was sure it would be great. Her smile and manner towards me was just like that of a loving aunt or a friend of my mother’s, one of those experienced women who’ve watched you grow up and take pride in your success. Her gown was of deep red velvet with ermine edgings like a queen’s, and her speech was a celebration of women’s progress in academia. 47% of the new doctores were women last semester. Rektor reminded us that it’s a hundred years since the first woman was awarded a doctoral degree in Bergen. After receiving her degree, Clara Holst contined her research abroad but on returning to Bergen, she was only given two half-year teaching contracts. She retired completely from academia when she was just forty and nothing more is known of her life.

It still isn’t easy for women to remain in academia: only 13% of full professors are women. That number hasn’t increased a lot in the last decade, despite the female-friendly Norweigan rules that award full professorships based on merit rather than available positions, and despite the growing numbers of women taking doctoral degrees.

After the ceremony the university newsletter journalist snapped photos of me and my daughter, as we were sitting chummily discussing how best to manoeuvre drinks and foods at a reception. I wish I’d been better able to answer her questions about how to get more female professors. Today I wrote her an email, telling her how much it meant to me that the rektor of the university patted my shoulder and smiled. Men have given me amazing support, don’t get me wrong. Without Espen’s belief in me and his steadfast pushing me into situations I didn’t realise I could master I doubt I’d have realised I could start a PhD, let alone finish one so successfully. But I think rektor’s pat on the shoulder was the very first time I’ve experienced motherly support in the university. And I really liked it.

When I have thirty years more experience than I have today, I’m going to be a motherly, encouraging professor. I’m going to encourage young women and men to succeed and I’ll smile to them when they do as though I’ve watched them grow up and share their parents pride in them.

I added a paragraph about joy to my speech and now I feel just so happy and enthusiastic - this ceremony thing’s going to be great. I’m going to concentrate on the pleasure of research and of sharing knowledge and on how unbelievably brilliant we all are to have managed to finish. Yes!

Damn. I’d been holding back, telling myself, no, no, just write your own speech, honey, that’ll be good enough, and it’ll be yours, don’t go trying to figure out what other people say on such occasions, what you’ve got to say is what they want, otherwise they’d have asked someone else to do it. And I was doing great, I really was, until one of those pauses in writing hit me, you know the kind, and my fingers idly googled “graduation speech” and of course there are gazillions and none anything like my words and all seem far more eloquent than mine could be.

Oh dear. My speech, you see, was about how much more confident and academically mature we are now, after getting our degrees. Yeah, right.

And oh my goodness. Look, this woman is coming all the way from Palestine to attend the ceremony. There’s no way my speech can do that justice.

Tomorrow’s the graduation ceremony for everyone at our university who got a PhD last semester. 50 of 70 doctores will be there. We get to borrow gowns and do an “academic procession” and we’ll be presented with our diplomas and we’ll listen to music and be served champagne (I hope) with our families and and and and everyone else gets to listen to my speech on behalf of the new doctores. It’s way cool to have been asked to give such a speech. It’s very strange to be giving it.

A brand new stipendiat (PhD research fellow) has just moved into the office next to mine. She jolted me into realising how amazingly I’ve grown and changed in the last four years. She looks impossibly young for one thing, just as every primary school kid did the day I started high school, and she seems just as confused about everything as I was when I was a brand new stipendiat. She’s also just as eager as I was. I’m sure she’ll do a wonderful job.

I think that’s what I’ll talk about. It’s to celebrate those of us who finished, after all, and good heavens, we really finished! Despite the frustrations and the anguish of being on one’s way, we finished, we did great, we learnt so much, and now, somehow the process doesn’t look that bad anymore. Also, we now know exactly where to find the department hole puncher.

Anders Fagerjord has posted his PhD defence story, with photos - and do you know, not only had his opponents read his blog, one even read from one of his first blog posts while interrogating him…

Hey! Jesper Juul is now a doctor! His colleagues gave him an x-box to celebrate the occassion :) Congratulations!

I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired in my life. I’m still tired, two days later, though I slept and slept last night. I’m exhausted. But hey! I did it!

The defence was excellent. I was calm, and it wasn’t terrible once I was there. Everyone was there: my parents, my grandfather, colleagues from my department, from literature where I did my MA, from the media deparment where I’ve taught new media, from Intermedia, from other institutions in Bergen; Torill came from Volda and Lisbeth, Jesper and my wonderful supervisor Espen came all the way from Copenhagen. I think there were about forty people there all told. The photo of the audience below was taken by my mum, but you can’t see the front rows there. Mum took all these photos, actually: thanks, Mum!

After I’d given a short, twenty minute presentation of my thesis, Marie-Laure Ryan, the first opponent, spent an hour discussing it with me. She’s an expert on the theories I’ve chosen as my main approaches to interactivity - possible worlds theory that discusses how readers (users) relate to the fictional worlds projected by representational works - so I’d been both dreading and looking forward to hearing her thoughts on how I’d used these theories. It was an interesting conversation, though I wish I could remember the details more. I remember talking about the differences between fictional and other worlds, and Marie-Laure had some insights I’ll certainly be using as I continue working on this. The photo below shows me thanking her after she’d finished grilling me! While the actual opposition was happening, I was over at the other side of the stage.

Even lunch was pleasant. It was a formal lunch of elegant open prawn sandwiches in a hotel, with the prodekanus, the committee members, my supervisor and me. It’s not the terrifying setting I’d imagined, it’s a pleasant way of simply chatting without pressure, and there is quite obviously a strong plan here of inculturating the candidate in an academic world. You’re being accepted into the tribe.

After lunch, it was the turn of the second opponent, Bjørn Sørenssen. He’s a media scholar, who started working on interactive video in the early 80s, and he offered a whole new approach to my topic: documentary theory. I’ve heard bits of this before, but since my background’s in literature, I’ve been more likely to compare Online Caroline or Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse to Dostojevski’s or Nabokov’s introducing a novel by saying that he found these papers in someone’s attic or something, rather than to Peter Jackon’s mockumentary about Colin McKenzie, the (fictional) forgotten New Zealand film maker. Bjørn showed an excerpt from the McKenzie film, and suggested several very interesting concepts from documentary - and mockumentary - theory that I could have used to think about the spams, hoaxes and fictions-pretending-to-be-real that I’ve written about. Bjørn also asked about ontology, which I use in Pavel’s sense, as being about worlds, and he suggested that Heidegger and phenomenology would have been useful. I read Heidegger before I started thinking about fictional worlds and crossing boundaries; perhaps if I’d read it again, now, I’d find it more immediately useful than I did then.

All in all I found the defence a wonderful, if somewhat anxious, learning experience. I have a lot of new leads for continuing my research, and I’ve had help in clarifying some concepts. It’s a wonderful privilege having two experts read your work that thoroughly.

Once finished, people started congratulating me and I just smiled and smiled and smiled. I think one of the most touching things was my students giving me flowers! I hadn’t expected that at all, and they were just so lovely! The students I mean, the flowers too, very lovely, but oh, what gorgeous students I have!

By this time, the chef (mum’s present to me, a totally brilliant present!) and his assistant had already filled the villa I’d rented for the party with delicious smells.

We stopped by for a quick checkup - mum and my girlfriends had set the tables the night before and everything looked wonderful, so after a couple of minutes, I went home and picked up my daughter from school and did the standard afternoon things: stirfried a meal, helped her with her homework, watched some TV - and both she and I got all totally dressed up. She in her princess dress (white lace, pink sash) and me in my fishtail skirt and mermaid corset. Taxi to the villa, last minute preparations with girlfriends and parents, and suddenly the house was full of people and champagne and presents and congratulations and it was amazing. My daughter left with her dad at nine, when food was served (just as she broke down in exhaustion; I lasted a little longer) and oh, the food was so good! Below is Thomas (and a bit of Jon) giving me a brilliant book of photographs. Next to that you can see Bjørn, my second opponent, with Gro, head of my party committee and a good friend ever since my comp. lit. days.

The dinner may be stressful to prepare on top of preparing the defence itself and the trial lecture, but in retrospect I realise that it, along with the lunch with the professors, is crucial: social networking is absolutely necessary in academia and it’s a skill that’s not often formally recognised as part of the job. Often seeds of important ideas and collaborations are sown in these less formal settings, and getting to know one’s colleagues socially allows much more fruitful collaboration later.

And of course it’s a wonderful high after the horror of the defence (or at least the horror of dreading it) to hear generous, appreciative speeches about yourself! The prodekanus’s research field is religion, which turned out to be rather interesting since I spoke about avatars and fictional, sacred and actual worlds. She spoke about the defence as a rite of passage in her speech. Dag, the head of our department said lovely things too, one of the nicest being that they think I’m an excellent teacher! That made me happy. Espen said wonderful, generous things about me, and so did my mother, of course. Mum, who did her PhD at Cambridge in the late sixties, said that getting a PhD mightn’t make much difference in what I actually do, but that it’s more like getting an upgrade to business class. You’ll be treated with more respect, and you might get to slip more easily through the lines and red tape. That, along with my rather exuberant thank you speech, concluded the mandatory list of speeches, but Lisbeth slipped in a few words too, and oh, she was lovely. Everybody was lovely, really, I have wonderful friends and family and colleagues!

I’d forgotten to charge the batteries in my camera (ah well, I remembered a lot of other things) so I don’t have as many photos as I’d like. If you were there and took photos, do send me copies, please! Below is a cross section from before dinner was served: this is Jesper, Frank, Lisbeth, Carsten, Magne and Jon.

The Norwegian defence actually sets up a complete range of traditional, academic ways of exchanging knowledge. You’re given written response to your thesis, as reviewers do to papers you submit to (good) journals and conferences. You’re asked to prepare a lecture on a tight deadline. You go through an intensive question and answer session in the old tradition of academic debate. You eat lunch with the dean and professors in your field. You host a dinner for colleagues, family and friends, and again, you sit at the same table as your opponents, the dean, the head of your department, your supervisor and your parents. I continued my academic discussions with my opponents during dinner, but in a much more pleasant and cheerful manner.

The best, yes, the very best part of the day was after midnight, after the cakes and coffee and after quite a few people had left. I put on the music from Fame and we all, and I mean all, danced to it.

The last guests left at six. And yes, I did manage to get to Marie-Laure’s talk at noon, and I finished tidying and gave back the keys, and I picked up my daughter from school - and collapsed. We just watched videos all afternoon, eating leftovers from the party. I went to sleep right after she did.

Defences are usually on Fridays. That is a very sensible idea. You need a weekend or two after an ordeal like that.

YAY!

I can’t decide whether to spend the next two hours frantically revising or deliberately relaxing. Whatever I do the whole PhD defence will be over soon. By my next blog post, actually.

Survived part one: I officially passed my trial lecture. There were no questions, just a strange sort of end, but Marie-Laure said afterwards that she liked the golems :) I even had a nice dinner with Lisbeth, Torill, Jesper and Marie-Laure, before shooting off home to work while they, the lucky things, have another drink or two. My wonderful mother and friends have been setting the table and so on in preparation for tomorrow’s dinner. And now I’m going to have a cup of tea, some chocolate, and I’m going to sit down and make quite sure I know how to respond to the critical points in the committee’s report.

Oh, what the trial lecture turned out to be about? Well, I talked about the Hindu and digital origins of the word avatar, and argued that avatars, as projections of the user into another world, are useful concepts in thinking about represented worlds that have clear boundaries from our own, actual world. I showed how the user mirrors the characters in Magic-tree.com, and how those characters aren’t really avatars; how I don’t even really identify with the characters whose movements I’m enacting. Then I described the myth of the golem (not a projection into another world but an animated non-human in this world) and read a bit from Fuentes’s Aura (search for “ritual” inside the book, that’s the page I read), and proposed that when there are less clear boundaries between actual and represented world it might be more useful to think about the relationship between user and fictional characters as similar to that between a golem and its creator.

I am dying to get my hands on Norbert Wiener’s God and Golem, Inc. The weirdest thing about writing a paper on a set topic in only two weeks is that you get all these good ideas that don’t quite have time to unfold. And you discover potentially fascinating connections and literature the day before your deadline.

Tomorrow: the defence itself. The disputas. Tomorrow evening: the party. Then it’ll be over.

Therapy for the anxious young woman about to defend her PhD: Put on all the music that’s ever made you crazy happy, the older the better, the more memories of dancing with girlfriends the better, the more buoyant the words the better. Fame! I’m going to live for ever! I’m going to learn how to fly! Baby remember my name! will do nicely, as will I’m a racing car passing by, like Lady Godiva! I’m going to go, go, go, there’s no stopping me!Don’t stop me now! I’m having a good time, I’m having a ball… or even It’s raining men! or win a fortune in a game my life will never be the same. Is there a version of Survive that’s about PhD dissertations instead of men? I’d like that!

Today’s my trial lecture. At 4.30 pm. Tomorrow’s the actual defence. From 10.15 am till about 2 or 3 pm. Anyone who’s interested is welcome to come and listen; it’s in Auditorium B at Sydneshaugen. In Bergen. In Norway. But you’re not allowed to ask nasty questions ex auditorio. The press release explains when and where things are happening.

This afternoon, before my trial lecture, Torill’s giving a talk titled “Kontroll, innflytelse, utfordring og fryd: Flerbrukerspill som brukerstyrt medium”, and on Wednesday, Marie-Laure Ryan, my first opponent and a wonderful scholar, is giving a talk titled “Cyberspace, cybertexts, cybermaps”. Those lectures are open to the public as well.