Right now I do feel a bit lost with my dissertation. But I’m sure that’s how it has to be right now. I had a meeting with my supervisor last week that was very giving in terms on how to go forwards. The most important take-away was, that I should speak to all my disciplines. That already gives a lot of structure.
If I’d follow such an approach I’d roughly have a paper in each of the following areas.
- Digital humanities: Research through digital humanities methods
- Video games studies: Maybe concentrating on case studies
- Design research: For now going in the direction of design rhetorics
- Software development: Because I can use my experience and background here
This is what I’m currently working on:
- Building the image and metadata corpus
- Thinking through emulators as semiological infrastructure
- Investigating the intersection of image and technology in video games
- Ball Raider case study: doing semiological research as well as discourse analysis
What I’m missing of course in all of this is an ark that brings everything together. I guess I have to talk about that with my supervisors once. But for now I should work more through the material and also play a bit more. The topic on emulators came through the research practise and I once promised myself to do more practical research.
I could also imagine doing interdisciplinary works, but I don’t know if that would be a problem for publishing. I guess less so in video games studies, as they are used to pull and draw from many disciplines.