I recently defended my prospectus!

I’ve spent the last few years of my PhD focused on different problems around value-sensitive design for journalism and science communication. Mostly I’ve engaged in artefact design to support tasks like newsgathering and sensemaking that science journalists engage in on a daily basis. When put together, I believe my work makes interesting contributions to how journalists generate the newsworthiness of the stories they ultimately tell the public. Not only is this a creative task, but it also involves the balancing of many different stakeholder values (what does the journalist care about? what is ethical to cover? what do editors want?). My dissertation will describe how we can design sociotechnical systems to support journalists engaged in this creative, generative, value-laden work!

Our department puts a specific emphasis on this exercise: a prospectus defense entails planning out the arc of your dissertation, and outlining the theoretical contribution of your larger Project in grad school. Your committee helps you figure out how to best frame this arc and plan the remainder of your work so as to accomplish the goals of the PhD. I ended my defense by proposing a study I felt supported the culmination of the work I’ve done so far, a piece that could complete a larger puzzle. Except the puzzle is science, and is ergo infinite and dynamic, which means tht the picture the pieces of my work put together should inform future research meaningfully, even if the material conditions and constraints that my work addresses change (which they will).

These expectations made the prospectus a difficult but incredibly rewarding exercise in scoping. My scholarship has fairly diversified in its scope over the past few years, in no small part due to the wonderful people I’ve had an opportunity to collaborate with. This includes recent work on LLM-infused science writing tools, benchmarking LLMs for domain-specific tasks, auditing LLMs for gendered storytelling, auditing the use of LLMs in local news, AI literacy for journalists, and more.

I found it difficult to resist the urge to tie a lot (or more accurately: all) of my work into my dissertation. It has been an exciting few years chasing all these intertwined research directions, and I really wanted to fold these broader ideas about writing, literacy, evaluation, bias, and mass culture into my dissertation. But the process of writing my prospectus and getting feedback from my committee really solidified the idea for me that my work does not have to do everything. In fact, in trying to position all my work into some sort of giant Rube Goldberg-esque machine of arguments, entailments, and propositions that all follow from each other, I would be doing this work a vast disservice.

I have learnt that the goal of the dissertation (or, of any unit of academic writing, at least empirical work) is to put forth some kind of argument or story about the world we live in. And I’ve always found it very easy to lose sight of that goal. I would say that my method of doing analysis is diving deep into the data, and surfacing back up in a very begrudging manner; trying to nuance and pull together all the different (and frequently tangential) dimensions of a study. Sometimes this is called being very detail-oriented, other times it is framed as missing the forest for the trees. I think it is ultimately a lack of balancing priorities, a lack of stopping to breathe and then ask, “What is the point of this?” Without such restraint, the result is a mish-mash of different ideas: it can be interesting in so far that it collects cool observations, but it does not necessarily contribute to theory-building, or easily inform others how to build on it.

Well, I’ve learning how to get better at this scoping and breathing stuff throughout grad school. Writing and editing the prospectus was a great exercise in learning to really prioritize that. No new findings to report, or data to analyze. Just a process of writing, thinking, iterating. I hope to carry the lessons I’ve learnt into my writing in the future too. It strikes me that all my work would benefits from such intentional restraint in the editing of its ideas. It also strikes me that future-me will be grateful if I always leave some ideas in the back pocket to work on more thoughtfully and with greater focus. The puzzle of science remains infinite and dynamic; it would be nice to sustain the opportunities, the motivation, and the energy to keep chipping away at it!