Today, I had my final seminar

 The final seminar is an opportunity for an external reader to review as much of the dissertation text as possible. I had a more or less complete manuscript, although a few of the later sections are still unfinished but at least there’s a clear direction for where they’re headed.

It turned out to be a very productive seminar. Robert Willim, who reviewed my text, was a highly insightful reader and gave me plenty of constructive feedback on how to improve it. Several other colleagues also contributed valuable comments. Overall, this final seminar was extremely helpful in guiding me toward the finishing touches of my dissertation.

I’m hoping for a defense in the spring, but for that to happen, I need to revise and write quite a bit over the next two months. I’ll have to carve out the time amidst my other responsibilities.

Although having a final seminar can be stressful, this one was very rewarding. I’m grateful to all my colleagues who attended, and to those who couldn’t make it but sent encouraging words in other ways. I truly feel I have strong support from my colleagues in getting this dissertation over the finish line.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check-in with Max

Image
 I just had a meeting with my supervisor, who had read my manuscript to this point, and it went very well. I do not know why, but I always think that meetings like that end in disaster, along the lines of "This is terrible, what the hell are you doing?" but that never happens. I got good feedback and it was great to see how well he understood my text so far. He had a few points that I really need to address. One of them is my tendency to use a lot of empty intensifiers that just need to be edited out. No problem, I know they are there, but they always seem so reasonable when I first write them, and then I see later that they do not do anything or even weaken my text. Another thing is two long paragraphs describing my game examples, which are too long and need to be closer to my arguments. This is more difficult; I wrote them because I know art historians do not play games, so I wanted to do a thorough introduction early on; but he's right and there must be a way to shor...
Read more

Talking about my work with my supervisor today

Image
 Today it was time to report to my doctoral supervisor Max. He asked me to summarize the three main parts of my text, and we talked about them and some more specific problems in some chapters, as well as writing techniques. All in all, it was a very good conversation. I wish I'd had more time to revise now, especially since I'd taken the whole Easter week off to do it, but unfortunately I was tired for a few days so I didn't really rewrite much. But I did have time to read my text and think about its structure and how to get a better flow in the argument. And this check-in was a continuation of that, so I'm hoping to get back on track with rewriting. We're also planning the date and opponent for my final seminar in the fall, so the goal is getting a little closer. I'm pretty sure I'll have to spend a lot of the summer rewriting, but that's to be expected.
Read more

What am I writing about?

Image
 There is a pleasure in being in a game world, an escapist pleasure of being somewhere else, in a more interesting world where you have more agency and more capabilities. This pleasure is not new, nor specific to games, on the contrary most art has this potential for escapism; paintings, novels, theatre, opera and cinema have all been mediaforms where other worlds have been crafted. Games have one more thing than the predecessors; games are interactive and can at times provide a very open structure for how to perceive oneself to be inside these other worlds. A painted world is static but lets the viewer wander over it's surface. A narrative story is linear and we must walk through it on the path given by it's creator. Games can be very open and allow for many different paths through a world, and the gamer has agency in it.  So I will look at the effect of being in the game world with a phenomenological eye and comparing it to ways of being in worlds made through painting, scen...
Read more