A Phone Call
Written on Friday, December 20, 2013 by Unknown
Today I spoke with my thesis advisor via the telephone. She's also my regular advisor. And maybe also my irregular advisor? Hmm...
We spoke about how we need to find a way to approach the transmedia aspect of my thesis. And guess what! We got nowhere. Surprise, surprise. All we discovered is that we need to figure it out. Which is something we both already knew. So maybe the phone call was a tad redundant? But still, it was necessary.
Here are some thoughts so far...
1. Blog
I've already preemptively started that part just in case. This may end up being totally useless, or a very important aspect of my thesis. Who knows. Her thoughts were "Well you don't want to blog about how you're sitting in the library writing and annotated bibliography and then linking it in." But actually, if I can manage to do that in an interesting manner, then I don't see why not? Although, I see her point. That's not really a help to my (currently lacking) argument.
2. Video Essay
This one is both too easy and too difficult. Yes, I can do what a friend of mine did and make my history chapter into a video essay or something, but that's too easy. And also too hard, because it is incredibly time consuming. And would it really help me or just add some possibly unnecessary flashiness? That is yet to be seen.
3. Web Show
Even more difficult. Because I need so many things. 1. An idea for the show; 2. Possible cast and crew because I can't do it all by myself; 3. Lots of time to write, direct, edit, etc.; 4. Actual skill and preferably some experience too; 5. A way for it to tie into the thesis in a this-supports-my-argument kind of way rather than a this-was-really-cool-and-also-useless-but-I-did-it-because-I-like-web-series kind of way.
4. Game
Haha, no.
5. Something Else?
Like what? Help me out here! I have no ideas.
And then after I make a decision on what to do, we need to set a schedule. This needs to be done by this time and so on. I'm not very good about doing tons of homework in general, so if I divide it up into small pieces and then meet with my advisor every week for her to check on it then I'll actually do it and do it well. Yes, I know I'm in college but sometimes you need to be treated like a 5th grader in order to get things done properly. It will help, is all I'm saying.
After the phone call I also looked into some other thesis online. They look very long (as mine will also be) so that will take some time to go though. I also found a blog by another person who did a transmedia-esque thesis so that was promising. I'll go through it and see what kinds of things they did that might work for me too. Don't worry, I won't steal their ideas. And I'll cite them if I need to.
Finally we discussed the almighty transmedia god Henry Jenkins. He is a fantastic writer and professor (well I've never had him, but it would be cool if I did!) who is well-known in the world of academia and on le interwebs as the ultimate transmedia guru. Ok, he's probably not as fabulous as I'm making him out to be, but he will be SUPER useful for my thesis so I'm going to exaggerate a bit. I have one of his books and am about to order another, I've perused his blog a bit, and most importantly he published his class syllabus in an academic journal which was very, very useful to me. He discussed some assignments that he had his students do that look very promising. More on that later. Or you can just look it up yourself (maybe? it is in a journal and I needed to use my magical school website to get access to it. but he tends to put a lot of this stuff on his blog "Confessions of an Aca-Fan" too.).
Time to go, but I once again accept any and all suggestions from the world. Reading suggestions too. I have a handful of books and articles already but I can always use more.
Oh, side-note, one of my main artifacts (if I chose to go this route) will likely be my favorite webseries The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. It is a prime example of transmedia in action. I highly recommend it to everyone.
-Danny
