This site serves as a clearing-house for online information related to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in the humanities. The site's most important feature is a directory of most (maybe not quite all) of the ETDs that are currently in progress in the various disciplines that comprise the academic humanities. Among its other uses, I hope the material available here will be of aid to graduate students who are faced with securing approval and support for an ETD of their own. Audiences also include faculty who want to make informed decisions about supervising an ETD, as well as librarians, administrators, and academic publishers.Note that the projects collected here represent a broad range of methodologies and subject matter (at least half are devoted to non-"cyber" topics). There is also much diversity in authors' choices of platform, delivery media, and their adoption of proprietary vs. open data standards. This plurality has occasionally drawn criticism from those who are (wisely) concerned with issues of preservation and access. But this site is not intended to put forth any one particular hardware or software implementation or application as an ETD standard -- rather, it is offered as a reference and resource for those interested in tracking the emergence of a new mode of scholarly writing.
| About ETDs | ETD Initiatives | What's New Here |
This site (online since early 1996) was developed and is maintained by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum as a form of work-avoidance toward his own electronic dissertation. The current design and interface is version 3.0. Please address all correspondence to mgk3k@virginia.edu.Special thanks to the University of Virginia Library's Electronic Text Center for providing server space, and to Peter-john Byrnes for his help with the scripting.
