I'm writing a blogpost. This is quite clearly not redoing the analysis that I had already done on paper but can't find now. But sometimes you just need to write about something and put your head in order.

Thesiswhisperer asked on twitter recently for comebacks when people question the point of doing a PhD (and subsequently blogged about it). My mind was a little fuzzy and could only think of lengthy and thus un-tweetable responses until finally I replied:

"Until space travel is viable, a PhD is how we explore strange new worlds and boldly go where no one has gone before"

When you're doing a PhD it doesn't hurt to tap into geek culture once in a while.

However one thing I am very thankful for is that people don't often question the validity of my research. I used to get nervous that performance-focussed jazz musicians would find it completely pointless, but every student I've spoken to is aware of the difficulty they face in writing. Even more broadly, students of other faculties and disciplines also understand the challenge of writing, that writing is important at university and so can respect my decision to research it. How they respond to my findings may be another thing; I had trouble once when a non-linguist audience was very content-focussed and felt I was missing aspects which I felt were unimportant for me as musicians are well able to recognise vocabulary differences between jazz and classical music without me pointing them out.

The question I find more difficult, partly because I'm still not confident of the answer myself, is what I will do after the PhD, and therefore what is the point in ME doing a PhD. Not having ever planned to do a research degree before I found myself accepted to one can lead to a few insecurities. Sometimes the question is "what does it get you", suggesting an almost materialistic view of education - only valued if you "get" some qualification or license to label yourself a profession, ignoring the skills and perspectives you gain. My dad is fond of saying that no education is ever wasted, though admittedly once in a while someone really puts that to the test. Once I found myself arguing more strongly than usual after being dismissed by an older, much distant relative (who I'd never met before) as an eternal student, as if it was merely an enthusiastic yet irrelevant interest to be good-humouredly indulged and which, to my disbelieving indignation, required a rich husband to support. Clearly I have to be earning lots of money before I'm considered independent. And even then...

Anyway, that was a forgotten, yet clearly bottled-up, detour.

There are many possibilities of what I theoretically could do after my PhD. I'm hoping and praying (while usually trying to avoid thinking about it) that an appropriate opportunity pops up at a suitable time and doesn't leave me penniless for too long after my scholarship runs out. I am resassured that my friend recently got a job which will hopefully give her the opportunity to apply her research. I wonder sometimes if my topic is too niche and doubt my abilities to be able to move beyond my little corner, but then smart people say nice things about me and I let myself relax a little.

But next time someone socially asks me what I'm going to do after my PhD I might respond with "join Starfleet", because it seems if nothing else, I must be qualified to "explore new worlds, seek out new life forms and new civilisations, to boldly go where no one has gone before"!

And in the meantime I'm going to make badges with "ASK ME IN JUNE". I'll make a whole range of them with every month to choose from then sell them to PhD, Masters students and pregnant women.

Research at Adelaide

In honour of Research Week at the University of Adelaide, I thought I would blog about the research happening in the Discipline of Linguistics. Without the strong research focus here, I would never have ended up doing a PhD or discovered how fascinating and exciting it can be, so in a way this is my tribute to those that have inspired me.

Dr Celine Chu's recent thesis is fascinating for combining multimodal analysis of children's picture books with classroom discourse analysis of an ESL classroom. She identified issues in the meanings constructed multimodally in the picture books which lead to confusion in the children's reading. She then looked at how the teacher talk scaffolds an understanding of these meanings. I really hope she gets the opportunity to introduce this information to pre-service teachers.

Dr Hiromi Teramoto examined classroom discourse in a New Arrivals Program classroom, and how the identity of a 'new arrival' is constructed.


Johanna Motteram is looking at IELTS - International English Language Testing System. Specifically she is focussing on what "appropriate tone" means in the high band descriptors for the writing task, as there doesn't seem to be any clear definition. Assessment is a very important area of research and IELTS is a very high status manifestation of this - a good score in IELTS changes lives through admission to universities as well as Australian citizenship. Identifying exactly what are the qualities of these valued texts are will help not only with helping people to pass the test and write better, but will inform how language acquisition is measured and assessed.


Dr John Walsh and Nayia Cominos are working on an ARC linkage grant sponsored project looking at the language of handover in the mental health system. Having worked in health care, and particularly having been involved in administrative tasks of creating more or less detailed handover sheets to facilitate fast but comprehensive handover between nursing staff at an aged care facility, I find this research fascinating and immensely important.

Margareta Rebelos is completing her thesis on raising her daughter bilingually in Slovak and English, continuing the proud tradition of linguists conducting research on their children.

Kateryna Katsman will be documenting Barossa German - the variety of German spoken by descendants of German settlers in the Barossa Valley in South Australia, a region well known for its wine production.

Naptsinee Vichaidit will be looking at the language spoken between Thai police officers and tourists in resort areas in Thailand.

I am less familiar with the research of Dr Rob Amery, Professor Peter Muhlhausler and Professor Gh'ilad Zuckerman who are focussed on endangered languages, language reclamation and aboriginal languages, but their work is tremendously important in preserving and restoring these languages. Prof Zuckerman can be seen here and here talking to Stephen Fry about modern Hebrew, or Israeli.

Other interesting research occurs in the Masters of Applied Linguistics coursework program. Some of my favourite topics include:
Meng Sun's work on Martian Language in China - a net-speak version of Chinese with alternative uses of characters used by youth and online communities to exclude outside understanding;
Napatsinee Vichaidit's examination of Thai subtitles of The Simpsons;
Tomoko Ikeda's explorations of the genre of ReadMes for video game mods;
Toshikazu Okawa's study of an international student learning the academic literacies associated with nursing during their studies;
Kumari Revindran's analysis of the representation of the population 'crisis' in Singapore;
Vanessa Tan's critical discourse analysis of National Day songs in Singapore.

There are far more people who have done interesting, thorough and fascinating research than I could include in a blogpost, but I wanted to mention just a few that I know about. If you would like to know more about any of these topics, let me know and I can put you in touch.

How a PhD is like Alice in Wonderland (slideshow)

How a PhD is like Alice in Wonderland

View more presentations from Jodie Martin

What's in a thesis?

80 000 words

= 80 days x 1000 words

= 11.5 weeks x 7000 words

= 3 months x 27 000 words

= 16 weeks x 5000 words

= 4 months x 20 000 words

= 8 ((2 weeks x 5000 words) + (1 week editing/review)) = 6 months
 This is my plan, anyway.

Jazz Research?

I have spent the last hour* or more looking for an academic article on jazz improvisation. My intension is to find an "expert" text I can compare my student texts to, but I'm struggling to find anything appropriate and so let me vent a little.

It seems that writing about jazz improvisation creates one of five text types:

1. Reviews - Reviews of live performance, reviews of recordings, but reviews nonetheless.
2. Biographies and Player profiles - whether old and established, or young and up-and-coming, there are stories recounting who the player is, how they were influenced and why they are amazing.
3. Philosophical treatises - I say philosophical but they may also be psychological, neuropsychological, behavioural or influenced by a plethora of disciplines. To be completely honest, none of them really interest me. The level of technicality is high and the specificity is narrow. 
4. Applications - whether it be using improvisation to interest low socio-economic highschool students in literature, or in treatment of attention deficit disorders, or pedagogies for teaching jazz improvisation, it's all interesting and worthwhile, but not what I'm looking for, not analysing improvisation itself.
5. Poems - I don't know why. I ticked "peer-reviewed publications only", I selected "not newspapers" and still I ended up with poems.

The missing number 6 is what I'm looking for - somebody sitting down with some music, and analysing it for interesting characteristics, innovative techniques and various structures. That research may be based on a single musician - as in the corpus I'm looking at - or it may focus on a particular characteristics across a number of musicians. But as yet, I can't find it.

This, I'm sure, will have a knock-on effect in my research. I can see it now - several pages dedicated to this issue in the context, or maybe in justifying my research. All of which will basically say: actually it's amazing these students can write as they do given there are no expert texts.

The caveat to that is, of course, that there are model texts - but model texts from other students. Where is the expert text? If academic writing merges into journalism, what effect does this have? It may explain some of the characteristics of the students texts. It certainly explains their not-so-academic references. But why should they try to write academically if it will not be useful?

I understand the purpose of the research project for the students. I understand that they build on previous assignments and previous analyses to create something larger. I understand that one ambition of the curriculum designers is to add to the body of research on jazz out there.

But then, is journalism the academia of music, with a larger, more popular and less specialised readership?

UPDATE: I found an article. Just one, but an article nonetheless. Maybe one day someone out there should do a corpus analysis of the type of documents that appear in response to a search of "jazz improvisation". 

*I wrote this a month or two ago and am only now publishing it.

Why I made a twitter account for my thesis

I made a twitter account for my thesis. I can now have conversations with it, hurl abuse at it or coax it along. Those of you who aren't on twitter probably think I'm mad and have probably stopped reading already. But for those of you still following (no twitter-pun intended), here's the basic justification:

WHATEVER GETS ME THROUGH

Some people treat their thesis like a job - they go to their office 9-5, they depersonalise the work as if they're on a contract. I've heard some people compare their thesis to a pregnancy - starting at the point where they're metaphorically rubbing their tummy and sighing and drawing attention to it, til they're heavy with knowledge and ready to burst. Some treat it like five (or three or seven) articles rather than one large text. I've heard the thesis compared to a bad relationship, to a constant companion, to many things... so, whatever gets me through. It's a little dissociative, giving the thesis its own personality so I can tweet it, but it makes me laugh. And I think it will help to conceptualise it, to externalise it, to insult it and from time to time say, "Today, thesis, you are going down!" Melodrama is a vastly underestimated coping mechanism. And nobody need know about me talking to my thesis... except I'm telling you about it now. But I had to share.

And anyway, it's fun.
Some of the most entertaining twitter accounts are spoofs (The Queen, Emma Thompson), pop culture mashups (Hipster Dalek, GRAMMARHULK) or various fictional characters (the entire cast of West Wing). So creating a twitter account for my thesis was entertaining. It's not just the concept, but the details. What avatar should it have? What bio? Who would it follow? As I currently envisage my thesis as somewhat evil and megalomaniac, it follows Darth Vader, Voldemort and Death Star PR. As it is sarcastic, it follows Speculative Grammarian. As it is linguistic it follows linguistics publishers. As it is academic, it follows the university, the library and QIkipedia. As it is a little geeky, it follows Thinkgeek. As it is still a little juvenile, it follows DontSayNoSayYes. As it loves data and infographics, it follows Information is Beautiful. And of course it follows ThesisWhisperer because what sort of ThesisWhisperer would ThesisWhisperer be if my thesis did not follow her. And lastly it's following UrDissertation because someone else had this idea before me.

The Indefinite Article

I have just submitted my first article for publication. (yay! woo! cue fireworks!)

As I am therefore absolutely useless for doing any real work for the next couple of hours due to the adrenaline rush, I thought I should blog about it.

At some point during your PhD, you should try to publish an article. Ideally, the best time to do this is somwhere around the start of your third year as you presumably know enough to publish on it, but you're not yet in panic-stations-thesis-writing-mode. If you want to continue in academia at all, publishing is one of the most important things you'll do so it's good to develop those skills while someone's willing to read over and correct your work. The problem is getting to the point where you feel confident enough to a) start writing and b) submit.

I have friends who, for one reason or another, didn't publish during their PhD and instead planned to write up articles from their dissertations in the months following. It hasn't happened yet, as far as I know - it seems it takes at least a month to recover from the PhD process and be willing to even glance at your work again. And if you launch into a job straight away then that takes priority. But sometimes you get to the point where you can't worry about anything except your thesis and you just have to concentrate on that, no matter how good a journal publication would look on your résumé.

The trick (and the tricky bit) is to know which of the following pieces of advice to follow:
1. Do what you gotta do to finish your PhD.
2. Get as much experience teaching and publishing as you can because that's what you'll spend most of your time doing if you get a job as an academic.

Both these pieces of advice were given to friends by experienced academics and although somewhat contradictory, are both equally true.

Back to me:
I started writing my article after presenting at 5ICOM (5th International Conference on Multimodality) in December last year. My plan was to finish it by the end of January and I quite enjoyed the initial write, churning out 1000 words a day for a while there. When it reached an immense length, with absolutely everything I could think of on the topic in it, I submitted it to my supervisor for shaping and direction. So it went on the back burner for a while and in the mean time I submitted abstracts for conferences (most of which I've had to withdraw from), as well as the usual cycle of reading literature and doing analysis. The feedback, when it arrived, was to turn it into two articles.

So I did. And I've been sitting on them for a few months for one reason or another: getting feedback from my music supervisor (checking I haven't made any ridiculous musical gaffes); finalising those bits I couldn't quite get right. One of the best moments was when I sent the second article to an external expert. When he gave me good feedback, I started to believe it might be true. I sat on it further as I tried to wrestle it into adherence to the journal style guide and boggled at how to treat music notation: As a picture? Labelled figure or example? What about in a table? What about text and music together in an example from a student text? How do I handle copyright? It was like banging my head against a brick wall at times.

In the end I cut all the music notation out of one article, and limited the other to one music example which should be acceptable for copyright. It kinda sucks to talk about multimodality monomodally, but you do what you gotta do. I'll leave the second article on the backburner a while longer - at least until I have something else I want to procrastinate by working on it. It needs to be wrestled into adherence with the style guide and all my pretty colour-coded analysis needs to be turned monochrome.

What next for the one I did submit? I don't know. Probably a lengthy wait from what I hear. Either which way, I'll let you know.