#phdiary

[ghnosis]

ghesis update!

i have now submitted (first drafts of) TWO CHAPTERS OF THE PHD THESIS!!!!

back in august (the 8th to be precise) i submitted what i thought was a shitty rough draft of the introduction. and my supervisors said it was good enough to start writing another chapter!!

my director of studies (Occult Dad*) specifically said “i find myself nitpicking” which is his adorably wizardly way of saying “it’s good to go”

and now today i have submitted the first rough poopy first draft to my supervisors!!!! so now we know it takes me (roughly) three months including recuperation time to write a chapter!!

do i know how many chapters there will be yet? no! did my supervisors also ask about the total number of chapters? yes! idfk jiggle a magic 8 ball about it!!!! nobody knows!!!! i gotta go back into the data and that will tell me the THEMES and the THEMES will determine the chapters

so if you are a juicy nerd who likes interview snippets and meme data analysis, you are about to be eating so good!!!!!

( @staff I Am Once Again Asking You To send me official numbers on number of users posting to tags relating to Ghost (Sweden Band) so I can know the size of my sample set comparative to the fandom as a whole PLEASE)

* Jeff I sincerely hope you are not discovering I call you Occult Dad to myself right now

[ghnosis]

working on coding today while 2/3 supervisors put feedback in my methodology draft. Director of Studies said it’s “very good” and “quite lucid” and I am trying to believe him.

the previous two times I went through my data I did it in numerical order (so, starting with Nameless Ghoul 1’s interview and ending at Nameless Ghoul 99) but today I’m trying both line-by-line coding (before, I did incident-to-incident) AND working backwards (from 99-1) to try and see the same data in a new way.

working with the Bible Constructing Grounded Theory by Kathy Charmaz by my side as well as a libguide on using NVIVO from the University of South Florida.

[ghnosis]

on interview numbering

these numbers have been driving me batty and it’s kinda my fault but also kind of not

120 people signed up to interview, but 5 people didn’t show up to their interview and I had to destroy 2 people’s data (one withdrew from the study and one never signed a consent form, which I didn’t notice until coding).

so I have 113 interviews’ worth of data, but the Nameless Ghoul numbers end at 120. this makes things super complex when i’m trying to figure out where i am in the coding process. to add to this confusion, the program i’m using to code (NVIVO) lists numbers annoyingly - see screenshot. i know why it does this but like can a bitch get a break

I still need to go through my messages and see how many people responded to the call for interviews by DMing me, but that is a manual pain-in-the-ass process (i am once again vainly tagging @staff for help) and I tried to download my tumblr data to see if that would be more manageable but WHOOPS THE FILES WONT UNZIP EVERY SINGLE TIME

[ghnosis]

“Beauvoir is clear that one ‘becomes’ a woman, but always under a cultural compulsion to become one.”

- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble p. 8

I feel like this is a crux of my argument - that “tomboy,” “enby,” “goth,” “lesbian,” “slut,” or “trans guy” are all, from the perspective of a Christian cultural compulsion, effectively failed woman-states, and Ghost is a unifier for these failed women to celebrate being failed women.

what it is to be woman is too rigid, so fuck that, we’re opening up the binary.

[ghnosis]

I love the moment when an interview stops being transcribed and I light a joint and crack my knuckles and come back like "girl ok so you were talking about Satan as archetype and falling out of the Christian faith. so like, *I* stopped going to church and became a Wiccan bc there were no frigging women represented in the Holy Trinity, how am I supposed to pray to a bunch of dudes, but then the Wiccan thing didn't stick bc it's so fucking 70s gender binary oriented, like fuck"

[ghnosis]

behind the scenes ghesis

I think I actually ended up interviewing 115 people, but the numbers go up to 120 bc some people were assigned numbers before they withdrew (there's no Nameless Ghoul 63, for example).

I have finished initial coding up to NG65!

if I manage to code 2 a day, on business days only, I'll be done with initial coding Feb 7th.

religious trauma is coming up as a theme WAY more than I originally expected, which is super cool! it also means I need to read more theory loollllll that's a problem for February Rose

the plan as it stands now is to complete initial coding, go back to writing my methodology and lit review chapters, then come back to coding in the spring with "fresh" eyes and do second-round coding. writing my methodology chapter will help prep me for that, I've been reading methodology stuff sort of piecemeal as it comes up.

a few people at the christmas eve party asked me how the dissertation is going and it's so hard to give a bite-size, polite, small talk answer. "I'm coding interviews" doesn't mean anything to anyone really. all I can say is I'm doing it one bite at a time.

[ghnosis]

PhD/writing/interview update 28 March 2024

hi everyone! ^^

to date, 67 queer ghesties have submitted consent forms to be interviewed. holy shit. I had a goal of 100, so we're over halfway, this rules!!!!!

here is some info if you are interested in interviewing or know someone who might be.

I book 10 interviews a month - I have 3 spaces left for July. you have to be 18 to interview.

spaces are first come, first served - when you send me a signed consent form, I send you the link to sign up for an interview time.

interviews are text based, take one hour, and usually take place over tumblr chat, but if tumblr chat is super glitchy for you, I have also done interviews on discord.

the links to the consent form seem to break every now and again. if the link is broken, DM me!

I am going to keep accepting consent forms! the more interviews, the happier I am! I do feel bad that y'all are excited and then I'm like "cool sit on your hands until July" but I am only one person doing her best to juggle a job, hobbies, 4 pets, and a PhD.

other stuff below the cut

my comprehensive exam is in June, after which (gods willing, I pass) I will be writing the actual dissertation/thesis. I don't know how long this will take; my maximum thesis submission date is in 2029, I think, but I'm REALLY hoping to be done before then, this process is the hardest thing I've ever done by far.

I'm pretty curious about the total size of the fandom. does anyone have a guess? or a way of finding out? I'd like the final sample size to be a good slice of the fandom, but I don't know what kind of goal to set for that.

some 17 year olds DM'd me which was very kind and I appreciate their enthusiasm, however please DM me again after your 18th birthday, as I do not have ethics approval to speak to minors about sex fanfic :C

I'm in the midst of edits to a chapter on AO3 monsterfuckers that I'm pretty excited about, I have no idea when that book will be published. I have a chapter on an Undertale-inspired spell in Fictional Practices of Spirituality, Vol 1 and one on late-twentieth century vampires and feminism in The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. I have a book review of Heather Petrocelli's dope book Queer for Fear coming out in Revenant Journal, no idea when, and my first published work on Ghost fans will also be in Revenant Journal, no idea when.

if you're interested in my work and don't want to buy a whole-ass book, DM me. ;)

if you made it through all that, here is a photo of my fool dog Beans. she likes French kissing and licking noses.

[ghnosis]

COMPREHENSIVE EXAM SCHEDULED

IT IS JUNE 18th

if I pass, I get to move on to writing my actual dissertation/thesis instead of writing a bunch of documents about how I *plan to* write my dissertation/thesis