Nick Soussanis swung by to talk about his dissertation about 2 weeks ago. If you don't know who Nick Soussanis is, he's an awesome guy who literally made a graphic novel for his dissertation. Nick was a PhD student at Columbia University who had this awesome idea of writing a comic book for his thesis.
The graphic novel is called Unflattening: A Visual-Verbal Inquiry into Learning in Many Dimension. I have not got around to finishing the book yet, but it covers topics like perceiving things from different points of view, or possibly challenging the way things are typically perceived. I think this in itself ties in extremely well with the fact that the book itself is a very atypical dissertation. The graphic novel sort of challenges the traditional form of a doctoral thesis.
Nick gave a brief overview of the project, his motivation for making the book, his background interest in comic books, his goals, and his struggles. What I found really interesting about his talk was how his dissertation had to still fit within certain specifications. For example, Nick said that any text had to be in a certain font and size with double spacing. He still had to abide by these rules, so what little textual paragraphs there are in the novel, they are all formatted strictly. Also, I thought it was kind of funny when Nick mentioned that all images had to be referenced in a specific way in a part of the book, and so he literally had to format these references for every single page, because every page of the novel was technically an image.
Nick talked a bit about how he changed the novel around when he pushed it to production. The thesis version of the book was longer in some respects because of the specific formatting, and there were changes he still wanted to make before releasing the product out to the public.
The talk was super interesting and relevant especially to my BizLegFoss class because Nick talked a lot about changing the traditional form of academia to suit creativity, innovation, and more modern trends. I think our FOSS classes share a lot of these topics in that we do things very differently than a traditional class and we dare to be very open and allow students to innovate, contribute, and develop rather than turn them into machines that just process information. That idea is also actually referenced to in the novel :)
Check the dissertation out, its really pretty amazing:
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