My PhD - What is it?

Good question, that.

Three months ago, when I started, I would have given you an answer. Right now...it's kind of in flux. This is something I've been assured is a natural part of the process. I write an outline, my supervisors read the outline, critique takes place, I repeat the process. 

I know the problem I want to address. Copyright law, especially when applied in the area of what's known as "secondary creativity" - new works built on the foundation of existing works - is a spectacular mess. It's such a mess that nobody really knows where the border is between an acceptable use of someone else's work as a source of inspiration and an impermissible unlicensed use of the work. And when I say nobody, I mean nobody. Not the people creating secondary works, not the owners of the originals, not lawyers, not judges, not policymakers. Nobody.

The problem with this problem is that it's too big. It's not something that can be addressed within the scope of a single PhD thesis. So the search for how, exactly, to narrow the scope continues. I've made good progress on that, and will have more on it later.

For now, I'll say this:
I'm going to be looking at fan creativity, and at the question of why we've been having such a hard time answering the questions that arise around it.

This is officially not another reboot post.

Because every damn time I publish one of those, I turn around and immediately fail to blog for many months thereafter. So this isn't a reboot post.

It's a reset post. Because that's different, right?


Anyway...

I'm now one academic term into my PhD, or I would be if academic terms were an actual thing for PhD student. As it turns out, they really aren't. Doing a PhD means you just work, and work until you're done.

And it's definitely a lot of work. This somehow came as a surprise to me, despite everything everyone said about PhDs being a lot of work, which just goes to show that my ego and reality weren't - again - on speaking terms. My bad. Even reading things like Tiphaine Rivière's outstandingly good graphic novel "Notes on a Thesis" was only enough to make me think that the whole PhD thing might be a painful experience for some people - other people - but not for me.

Or at least that was my thinking in September, which was approximately 3850 years ago. Now, pages like this have taken on a new, painful resonance:

All of which is by way of saying that I'm taking the new year as a new opportunity to start blogging again. But if I stop and you want to find me to get me to start again, you might want to start your search in the library.

Happy New Year, y'all.