Welcome to the Dissertating Digitally project home page, a research study being conducted by Dr. Carrie A. Lamanna of Colorado State University and Dr. Katherine E. Gossett of Old Dominion University.

Project Description

This study builds upon the survey and interview work conducted in rhetoric and composition over the past 20 years, especially Scott L. Miller, et al's study of graduate student satisfaction with their rhetoric and composition programs (Miller, et al 1997) and Carol P. Hartzog's 1986 study of composition programs and their relationship to English departments. We especially draw on Daniel Anderson, et al's recent survey of multimodal composition curricula (Anderson, et al 2006). The Anderson survey focuses primarily on the training of and support for faculty and graduate students who teach multimodal composition at the undergraduate level. Our study adds to this data with an analysis of the training graduate students are receiving not in pedagogy but in conducting digital, multimodal scholarship outside the classroom. We will explore the new digital composing work being done by graduate students with a specific focus on the research opportunities and challenges they face when composing new media theses and dissertations. We hypothesize that the digital nature of new media forms make visible the ways in which the traditional print-based form, the standard for humanities theses and dissertations, constrain the research and arguments graduate student scholars can make. The survey and interviews are designed to answer the following questions:

  • What textual forms are current graduate students permitted to use for their theses and dissertations, what units regulate these textual forms, and how do format restrictions constrain the types of research graduate students can undertake?
  • What theoretical and practical training is necessary for graduate students to be able to make rhetorically sound decisions about using new media forms in their theses and dissertations?
  • How can the print-based model that encloses graduate research be altered in order for graduate student scholars to fully participate in the critical new media work being done in the field?

Project Participation

You are invited to participate in the first phase of this research project: an online survey. If you are interested in participating in further phases of this project, please provide your email address on the informed consent form prior to taking the survey.

Click here to begin the survey.

Thank you for your participation!

Carrie and Kathie