After the Easter break it will be time to return to Uni and prepare for the rest of the work to be handed in, along with the prep for the exhibition that I am involved with at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery (SM&AG).
Dissertation
Over the last two weeks I’ve been polishing up my dissertation, as it was needed after the feed-forward provided by my tutor after Christmas. We had an assignment to hand in our initial draft of the dissertation and whilst many of my classmates chose to hand in a bare bones, or in some cases a barely there at all version, I had gone hell for leather to get it as fully formed as possible. Most of that work is documented in the post Dissertation Drafting but there was never a follow up post of the results from the assignment.
Feed-Forward
Gavin, my tutor, had made notes on the PDF file on the canvas system and left a piece of feed-forward as he calls it on the rubric. From my submission of v10 of the dissertation, Gavin left these notes:
Your dissertation is well-researched and demonstrates strong personal engagement with the topic. Also this essay perhaps the most referenced work we have had to date, a lot of background research has gone into this. Deep dive, I hope you did not drown!
To achieve an even higher mark, 80% +, focus on critical analysis and synthesis – I think your conclusion can be expanded a little too. At times, the essay leans toward description rather than argument—but this is also you writing style which I think is honest and convincing. You could expand your theoretical depth by critically engaging with psychological frameworks rather than just summarising them. But this would result in lots of removing of content, which would also be a great loss to the overall argument. Criticism is hard if the things you read are so well argued, but perhaps focusing on the limitations of the research in an evaluation of sorts at the very end of each section and the very end of the whole essay allows for this critical voice to shine though.
Also celebrate your framework a bit more in the conclusion!
My advice is make a few small changes and focus on your practical work which is coming along nicely. Well done Bob!
From these notes I understood it to mean that I had done enough already for a pass but with some further fettling and tidying up I might be able to increase the projected mark for it. The dissertation counts for 20 marks from the total of 100 for the year. 60 marks are based on the portfolio and the other 20 are for the Reflective Journal (which you’re reading now). His notes let me know that I could work on it but not to spend too much time focussed on it when I should be out making photographs that could be included in the portfolio.
Version Growth
The last two weeks then have seen me raise the version count to v16 before I got to a finished version with slightly more critical analysis and less descriptive contents. I’ve been printing out the dissertation and then reading through it on paper and marking areas with highlighters to enable me to focus in on areas that require changing. I’ve been looking back through the books and articles used as references to see how they compose their paragraphs and structure their sections, in order to help bind the chapters together with a flowing sense of description, conversation/argument and conclusion before moving into the next area. I’ve been able to more succinctly argue that there is no real right or wrong as to whether photography helps or hinders the grief process, and this applies to whether it’s grief for the loss of people or buildings.
I took out a huge chunk about other art forms as per Gavin’s notes in the essay feedforward, as it didn’t need to be there, I am talking about photography and grief, I don’t need to discuss all other forms of art that might be used in therapeutic situations. This freed up some word count to allow me to do some more introductions and conclusions to the chapters.
Part of the critique that was presented was that it was too descriptive and less critical analysis so I have removed the descriptions of “the excellent book called blah blah blah that features info about blah blah processes” and just used the shorter form of something like “arguably, Another states that this blah blah is happening de;ending on blah blah (Another, 2026)”. This has made the essay much leaner and easier to read as I am not trying to sell the books, just the concepts that emerge from the books. if the reader wants to look further at the book, the citation in the text, will lead to the reference list and from there the details should enable the reader to find the book or article etc.
A troubling part of the work too was noticing that Harvard referencing rules for the Uni of Wolverhampton require direct quotations used to have a page number in the in text citation something like (Another, 2026, p. 56). Wouldn’t you know it, I’ve not been keeping tabs on which pages the references were from, only the books, articles, websites etc. As a result of this shortsightedness I’ve spent a good three or four days going through the documents and books that are cited for quotes to get the page numbers. To try and help with this I’ve been using find on pdfs to look for the quote and then note the page number. In some cases though, I’ve pulled a quote from a book and I’ve been mostly ok at marking with post it reminders where stuff has come from in books, but the odd one or two, and even a couple where books have been unavailable online have caused issues. I tried using MS Copilot to track down which page the quotes were on but in the two cases I tried, it failed miserably.
CoPilot Failure
One of the quotes was from a Dylan Trigg book and Copilot suggested I look on pg 45 for the quote, but it wasn’t there. I spent about three hours giving it the first five words on the page 45 then 47 and then 51, only to have copilot tell me that it must be on page blah blah, it was mistaken due to printing errors at the piublishers. It was all very frustrating and I eventually looked through the book for thw quote myself. I found it within a few minutes on page 1. All the time it was telling me to look through the different sections and it sounded convincing. I told copilot that I had found it on page 1 when it then proceeded to tell me that the book was a “mutant” copy that didn’t line up with any of the other prints that it knows about. Something tells me that this copilot was hallucinating and not owning up to not having a clue where the actual quote was. I shall not make this mistake again and I doubt that copilot will be much use in any event that looks like Judgement Day (T2 style), “Yes, I’ve killed all of the humans“, “really because there’s loads over there?”, “ah yes, they must have sprung up from nowhere or they are a new breed of humans that don’t trigger the scanners” Bullshit!!
Reference Reading
I spent some time looking through the referencing guide on Cite Them Right online and found that there were more restrictions on the formatting of the references in the reference lists, changes needed making to the illustration list etc.
The Final Count
After many hours over the last couple of weeks I am now in a position to convert to a PDF and prepare it for submission to the Canvas portal when required. I did a word count and it came out as 5250, when the word count limit is 5000 +/- 10 %, so I am well within the limit. I am happy and now it’s all converted and ready I can concentrate on preparing the Portfolio of Images and the word document full of the relevant links to the Reflective Journal.
Next Steps
With all of this in the bag, I can concentrate on the hanging of the picture printed three weeks ago at the SM&AG along with the work I’ve completed on the video that will be used in the same exhibition. Ive been asked to create a video using my drone of the building and the surroundings, featuring some angles of the forms that make this building stand out in the Shrewsbury architectural landscape for the Modernist example it is. This has been filmed, edited and exported to memory stick and Onedrive link so it can be run in the museum for the month.
Right, with the dissertation completed it is now time to get on sort out the portfolio. This is a different kettle of fish as I’m unsure as to whether to treat it as an assignment like I did previously with the Reviews or treat it like my last review which was more about the images and almost a marketing document rather than an assignment.
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