Assessment reports

Thesis, Antarctic Animation:
expanding perceptions
with gesture and line
(book with data CD)

Last month I received the third and final assessor’s report. Today I finished attending to all the recommendations in each. It was a wonderful feeling to finally post the completed thesis (.pdf on CD) to my supervisor in Melbourne.

This last stage of the thesis writing process has been an unexpected pleasure. My understanding of the value of my thesis, that animation can be used to combine scientific data with subjective responses to Antarctica, has been deepened.

How is this so?

All three assessors (each of whose views I deeply respect) recommended that I be awarded the PhD. Two assessors recommended ways that I could improve the thesis. I found that by acting only on recommendations that accorded with my argument, I added greater depths of meaning to the argument. I was pleased to find myself able to distinguish between recommendations that accorded with my understandings and those that did not.

I can now more clearly see that my contribution to Antarctic arts and sciences is a view that combines scientific and aesthetic ways of knowing. By constructing a thesis with words and gestural forms I found ways of combining logical argument and primal depths of meaning.

As Simon said, I have been ‘stretched’. Writing the thesis was painful at first, when it took so long to see my way through it, but now enormous pleasure.

Learning how to write a thesis has been a great journey. I am grateful to all the people who helped to make this work possible. I also thank my three assessors and look forward to actually meeting them.

My immediate tasks are to update the current online version of the thesis and to make an animated (comic book style) version.

I was always attracted to the Rupert Bear books that I read as a child because they offer choices in how deeply you can enter into the story. I find the official Rupert Bear website and recognise that this is not the kind of interface I have in mind.

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Posted on Saturday, September 11th, 2010