Speaker: Greg Crane
The dissertation has played a minor role in most areas of the humanities. Emerging scholars leave their dissertations in relatively inaccessible archives and preserve their ideas for later publication as books and articles. To some extent, this reflects the reality that later publications are more polished but the essential role of university presses and conventional journals in dissemination has also played a major role: dissertations lacked distribution mechanisms and thus provided poor exposure and exerted limited impact.
In an age of networked information, publication within institutional repositories can reach a far wider audience than any subscription mechanism and provide access to publication far longer than traditional publication runs. More importantly, in knowledge intensive areas of scholarship, dissertations can include the structured data on which our emerging cyberinfrastructures will depend. Graduate students can now imagine very different projects and much greater and more immediate impact than has ever been possible before.