One of the requirements of the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo is the Comprehensive-II (Depth) requirement, which consists of a written research proposal and an accompanying oral presentation.
I have decided to write my research proposal live and online. Besides being a way to test out theories about electronic publishing as well as an excuse to experiment with the relevant technologies, I have a more personal reason for doing this.
Over the years, I have acquired a number of absolutely horrendous academic habits due to the necessity of hiding my studies from my parents, such as keeping a low profile and limiting my publishing. I would usually not even begin a project unless I believed that there was a chance I could complete it without being discovered, and would reveal it only after it was already a fait accompli which my parents could do nothing about. Often I would destroy my own work. These are of course habits which are impossible to maintain at the postgraduate level, and I have to break them.
The task of writing online immediately raises a number of questions. For example, what about copyright and other legal issues? Which tools would I need or should I use?
I have set up a wiki for the purpose of writing the proposal, with the goal of using it for future academic writings also. The MediaWiki software (the wiki engine originally created for Wikipedia) keeps a history of edits, which dissuades me from continually deleting the contents of the document and restarting from scratch. The jsMath extension allows me to render LaTeX formulas in the wiki. I have also been keeping a bibliography using WIKINDX, from which I can insert citations into the wiki. I haven’t yet figured out what to use for figures and diagrams, but most of the major tools necessary for writing a scientific paper seem to be covered.
I don’t want to dwell on the legal issues, except that the proposal should have the same legal status as if I had written it using more traditional means and submitted it on paper. I have put the entire wiki under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license.
The research proposal is here. It’s far from complete, but that’s exactly the point.
– davinci
That is awesome! I hope you get lots of meaningful feedback, make some new contacts in your field and serve as an example for other students. At our institution students usually dread the experience of writing these proposals and I think a big part of it is the isolation of the process with only periodic feedback from their committee members.
Hi, Jean-Claude. Sorry for the late reply, and thank you very much for your encouragement. I’m stalled on the research proposal right now because I’m preoccupied with something else. But once I get the project really going, it should be an interesting experiment/experience.