I’m not sure exactly when the current form of this idea hit, but I know it happened before I finished my thesis. I’d always intended on uploading my thesis to a website as part of the process for wrapping up my thesis, in fact, I’d already developed a site on my MIT web space to aid with conducting field interviews that were the basis for the research project. However, I hadn’t really delved much on how this would happen, but I just knew I would split up the long-form text into smaller sections (chapters being the general organizing unit).
Several experiences led to this idea in addition to the general goal to split a long thesis into shorter sections and copy the text into the website (versus only attaching PDFs).
Though my work with WordPress stretches back to 2006-2007 with the HipHop Archive’s The Circle blog and I’d even made great strides from 2012-2013 signing up for web hosting and setting up entire websites, I saw my ability to develop websites with WordPress significantly enhanced as a result of a WordPress-powered memorial website I created for my sister in July & August. Seeking to create a perfect website requires going further into WordPress than before, and so my curiosity and creativity joined to produced that passion project. Understanding how to express several types of communication and media into a website (pictures, blog posts, announcements, participatory processes, etc.) primed my mind to consider how i could most effectively reframe the content of my master’s thesis into a database-driven website like WordPress where I effectively make use of posts, categories, tags, post formats to create a much more accessible thesis.
For example, deploying tags allow a topic like housing finance ties together seemingly disparate content about individuals and organizations who participate in housing finance, environmental conditions that affect it, references used in my research, as well as follow-up posts that build upon my thesis. The key is both the liberal use of posts at a sufficiently fine-level of detail, and a well-thought out understanding for how to use tags. Referring to sites like WPBeginner.com (the site that directed to my wonderful web-hosting provider Bluehost) enlightened me as to the potential of a the tags function that I had previously under-utilized in WordPress.
As I concluded my thesis, I couldn’t help but consider the merits of a re-organized thesis that flowed from important topics, widely held notions to evidence versus flowing from evidence to surfacing patterns that characterized my grounded theory-influenced approach. I did not have the opportunity to consider such drastic changes, but many of these topics would be more evident in my thesis when applied to blog posts in WordPress as tags.
- There are too many voucher holders in the neighborhoods, and unaccountable landlords are bringing the neighborhood’s demise
- No retail amenities
- Lack of adequate services in the neighborhood
- Too much money being spent on affordable housing, and not other neighborhood investments
- Property values are low, that hurts investment
- Banks don’t lend
- Over-reliance cash-flow first strategy
Also, I saw two mind-altering blog posts that describe how to use Evernote for writing papers: Wandering Academic and Evernote Aturi. At first, I had just hoped that I would have seen these at the start of graduate school because the straight-forward way with which these blogs describe an organize process for research and writing a paper, but how they do it using the power of Evernote. A share Evernote blog might have been an option, but it wasn’t the type of presentation I wanted. Then, however, I realized the following:
- The leap between writing the paper and simply “producing” a written one isn’t a far leap, so the approach would still be useful. For example, giving each reference its own post could allow essentially an annotated bibliography by incorporating source notes and adding some few brief implications of source. This would result in an improvement over a traditional bibliography.
- Evernote operates off the same data-based driven concept as WordPress so any general lesson or approach could be easily borrowed. Moreover, if I could find a way to import Evernote notes into WordPress (which it seems I could) I could rely on Evernote’s easier interface for inputting content and transfer to WordPress for web development aspect.
The more I considered it, the more excited I got about how completing the project, finding efficient ways to tackle the challenges and, of course, creating an accessible academic and practical resource!