Who actually reads a PhD dissertation?

Well, howdy! This blog post is mostly just a fun adventure/experiment where I try to make it easier to read and engage with academic work, simply by altering the format.

This core idea was already the focus on my micro-paper project, where I mused: is there a place for 1-2 page micro-papers in our larger academic conversation? I am conjecturing that smaller pieces of an idea, or smaller units of information, might get broader or qualitatively different engagement than longer-form, archival, written media.

And the opening question of this blog post: “who actually reads a PhD dissertation?” is largely answered with, “nobody except the committee.”

But even so… committee members don’t often even need to read the whole dissertation itself. For mine, this document (24 pages) is really what my committee needs to focus the most on. They’ve all probably already read or are familiar with my main research projects. What they care about is how it all comes together (so basically the beginning and end parts of the document).

So if committee members aren’t reading the whole thing and basically nobody else does, then what the heck is the point of a thesis? The point, of course, is to have an archival-quality record of the work and the defense made by the PhD candidate. This is largely just a record, to show to the world that the work was done.

Yet, I reckon that many different parts of the thesis are actually valuable and interesting to folks who aren’t academics or who are but are unfamiliar with my body of work. I have been stewing on a paper by Mohammadi et al, “Who reads research articles?” and it turns out that all kinds of people do. So then I wondered… is there a way to make my thesis more-digestible for different kinds of folks?

That led me to the following: What if I could generate a bunch of smaller docs from my thesis, based on assumptions I have about different kinds of readers?

(Below is a series of sections/subsections taken from a previous blog post announcing my thesis defense. Feel free to see if any of the documents are actually interesting/useful to you, especially if you fit one of the descriptions of my assumed readership below:)

Should you read my dissertation?

I highly doubt it! But that being said, there are some pretty fun parts in it, worth a skim (depending on who you are). For the most part, my dissertation is a “stapled paper” type of thesis, where the bulk of the document is comprised of my top-papers (that are the projects I personally led and executed) inserted without editing as the main “body” chapters of the dissertation. Then, the thesis itself generally has (up front) an acknowledgements section, introduction, overview of contributions, and (at the end) some kind of summary/discussion as well as a biographical sketch.

🤓 📚➟📖 I’ve generated miniature versions of my thesis document, to make reading easier! The basic document has 142 pages of content. That’s a lot! But I wondered… would more people actually look at my thesis if the page count wasn’t so intimidating? (See below sections for these mini-docs.)

Again, here is the link to the thesis itself.

That being said, many folks may want to check out one or some of the sections in the dissertation without having to read all of it. So here are some suggested readings for folks I know who are of different kinds:

1. Anyone who attends my thesis defense

Download my “personal-only” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (6 pages)

Anyone who attends my thesis defense should probably check out my acknowledgements section. You’re probably in there! If you aren’t but think you should be, let me know!! I am terribly forgetful and would hate to leave out a friend, colleague, or supporter.

It also might be worth it to skim my biographical sketch, especially because the introduction to it pokes fun at many other bio sketches where people love to point out their origins as a genius child in high school who then ascended to harvard/MIT/etc; brilliant because of their own individual genius, of course. By contrast, I have largely been an unremarkable and unaccomplished person. I was a terrible student in high school and mostly didn’t “deserve” or earn the opportunities I had in life. And yet I did remarkable things regardless, mostly thanks to all the folks who have helped me out over the years. I hope my biography is a testament to the power of social support and that I have never really been a “main character” in my life. (Note that my own advisor joked that he wished he had paid more attention to my PhD application, because my undergraduate closed and I did poorly in high school. I probably shouldn’t have been admitted to CMU, haha. He is certainly from a “real” academic and technical pedigree; he would know!)

2. You are a technical practitioner of some kind (non-researcher)

Download my “for the toolmakers” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (10 pages)

I’d recommend that anyone technical (whether a designer or developer) checks out 1.2, 9.1, and 9.3. Pretty much everyone who works with “tools” (including AI/genAI/LLM/ML tools) should check those out (as well as my blog post on tools.)

You are specifically an accessibility practitioner

Download my “accessibility practitioner” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (59 pages)

Definitely read 1.1 of the introduction because it has a way of thinking about accessibility work that everyone doing any accessibility work should consider: is “accessible visualization” really an oxymoron?

I think that academic papers can be awkward to suggest, but I genuinely think that if you check out any main chapter, you should read the one on skeleton, since it is about making accessibility work more accessible for sighted practitioners. A lot of accessibility work is (ironically) inaccessible! We should change that. Chartability is another good read along those lines, too.

You are specifically a visualization practitioner

Download my “visualization practitioner” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (55 pages)

Absolutely read 1.1 of the introduction: is “accessible visualization” really an oxymoron? I wrote that with visualization folks in mind. There have been some tricky, even subtle ableism in our field that I wanted to clear up before outlining my work. The part where I engage misconceptions about accessibility is worth reflecting on as well as the part where I outline what visualization is actually about.

I think that academic papers can be awkward to suggest, but I genuinely think that if you check out any main chapter, you should read the one on skeleton, since it is about making accessibility work more accessible for sighted practitioners. Chances are: that’s you. I also think that softerware should be a chapter that anyone who builds or designs visualization systems and tools should think about: how do you enable end user personalization?

3. You are an HCI/HAI/visualization/accessibility/”tools” researcher of some kind

Download my “summarized for researchers” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (11 pages)

All researchers will probably benefit from at least reading chapter 3 (my overview of contributions) and my final section, who is responsible for repair? Read those in addition to any subsection below that applies to you:

You are an accessibility researcher

Download my “accessibility researchers” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (22 pages)

I think the introduction (sections 1.1 and 1.2) as well as the conclusion’s sections on what is a tool? (9.1) and applied accessibility research (9.2) are especially valuable, and hopefully provocative. I’ve done a good job if a few people from the ASSETS community are flustered about 9.2, in particular.

Download my “accessibility researchers who care about practitioners” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (112 pages)

You might want to do more practitioner-focused work (or have an interest in this), in which case I’d recommend skeleton, chartability, and softerware especially. Read data-navigator if you want to get mad that I didn’t run a user study to validate our system (challenge mode: think about whether this kind of work is valuable or not in/for accessibility research as a broader discussion).

You are a visualization researcher

Download my “summary for visualization researchers” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (22 pages)

But “visualization researcher” is a funny categorization to me. Visualization research has cognitive and perceptual scientists (our “real” science-doers), feminist and critical theorists, ethicists, interaction designers, system-builders, graphic designers, data people, and applied researchers. My thesis is mostly written from the perspective of system-building and a little bit of interaction design.

Cognitive/perception vis researchers

Download my “perception+vis” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (46 pages)

If you’re into cognitive and perceptual science, you’ll probably get little of value from this thesis (perhaps other than just to reflect on someone else’s very different methods: building systems and doing mostly qualitative work). You might enjoy cross-perception, but I have a feeling it is too technically-focused to really pique the interest of a “pure” cog/perceptual scientist.

Critical/ethics/humanities vis researchers

Download my “sexy murder poet” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (23 pages)

That being said, the slightly-more-critical parts of my dissertation (which I enjoy the most) are found in the introduction (1.1/1.2) and discussion sections (9.1-9.3). That might be good for the critical folks, theorists, ethicists, humanities-oriented researchers, and proper “sexy murder poets” of the field to check out.

Systems/tools for vis research

Download my “systems+vis” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (90 pages)

System-builders might get value from reading data navigator, skeleton, and softerware. Maybe the whole thesis, too, to be honest. I’m this kind of researcher, so it’s all generally written with myself in mind.

Data-focused vis researchers

Download my “data structures+vis” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (48 pages)

Data people might really love data navigator, specifically if you enjoy data structures and graph theory. It’s graph theory, but for an HCI/systems/UI software problem!

Interaction and input design vis researchers

Download my “interaction+vis” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (46 pages)

Interaction design researchers might really enjoy the hardware work I did in cross-perception. You folks love when electronics and hardware work sneaks in. And some of our field’s existing hardware work actually has potential for accessibility work!

Graphical design vis researchers

Download my “design+vis” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (70 pages)

Purely graphic designers should probably check out chartability, to apply to your own work. Skeleton isn’t a bad chapter either, since the whole idea is that we apply visualization to an accessibility problem.

Practitioner/applied vis researchers

Download my “practitioners+vis” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (88 pages)

And folks who work with practitioners at all (in applied contexts) will probably enjoy chartability, softerware, and skeleton, in particular.

You are a visualization and accessibility researcher

Download my “accessibility+vis (latest-only)” thesis doc! 📚 (142 pages) ➟ 📖 (73 pages)

You probably know my work from the main chapters (my 5 papers), but you can skim them if you want. There are some exciting new pieces in there too, that I have recently submitted for publication. You might find chapters 6 (skeleton) and 7 (cross-perception) the most interesting, as they are my latest pieces. You might also benefit from at least skimming my introduction section 1.1: is “accessible visualization” really an oxymoron?

I’m tempted to say you should just read the whole thesis though. You’re probably among the two dozen people in the world at our intersection and if you aren’t familiar with my work or why I do it, then it’s certainly going to be enlightening as a reflection on your own work.