This is the religious holiday period in Israel where it seems that we work one day, have two days off, work another day, have more days off, etc. Being an office worker means that officially I don't work on the mornings prior to a festival (Jewish festivals start in the evening: tonight is the first night of 'The festival of booths', so today is very similar to a Friday. Officially I don't work in the morning, although I did connect for an hour and a half), meaning that I have several stretches of no work. I have been using that time diligently.
Last week I interviewed our external consultant; our talk lasted about 35 minutes. Obviously there is no way that I am going to transcribe this, so I sent the recording off to the company that transcribes my interviews. After I sent it, I noticed that I had received the transcript of the first interview. Armed with an abundance of time and two interviews, along with my own self-interview, I started work again on the thesis.
The first thing that I did - that took a few days, an hour or two at a time - was to reread the thesis from the beginning. Here and there I added sentences or changed the phrasing. I was specifically looking for sentences that referred to the previous examined version of the thesis that was multi-company; such sentences had to be either emended or removed. Once I had done that, I applied the advice from my supervisor from six months ago: he said that I was mixing up the data from the case studies with the discussion of those studies.
I had been thinking about this as well, so a big change structually was to chop chapter 7 - the case studies - into two. Remaining in chapter 7 is the presentation of each case study followed by what might be termed the meta-data, namely the time-line of the enhancement being studied and data about the interviews. This is part and parcel of the Action Reseach paradigm. The new chapter 8 will eventually consist of four or five sections: a miniscule introduction, one section each for the three case studies and possibly one concluding section (this might possibly become a chapter in its own right). Each case study section will then again consist of three sections: data, discussion and conclusions (is there a synonym for 'conclusions' that begins with the letter 'd'? 'Deduction' isn't right, and 'denouement' is too fancy, although it's possible).
Once I did this, I then considered how to display the data for the case studies; after all, I'm discussing the data but the data hasn't been shown. I thought of a tabular display, where each row displays a question and in each column appears the interviewees' remarks. After working on this for a bit, I realised that it was not practical as in most cases, the answers were more or less the same. So I converted this table into a new one; each row is still one question, but there is only one 'responses' column, where the text is prefaced by either [All], showing that everyone said the same, or [NN] (or whatever) when one person had a specific point to make that wasn't covered in the general remarks. This caused me to move some material from the discussion section into the data section.
I was working towards the concluding questions when I wanted to include a quote or two from the first, transcribed, interview. I couldn't find the appropriate questions and answers, so I played the recording, hoping to find the answers there. Nothing. The recording 'said' that it was 26 minutes long, but there is nothing recorded after 16 minutes - very annoying, very strange. I noted this fact in the meta-data section.
I then wrote a letter to the transcribing company, pointing out that the price I was quoted was based on a 26 minute long interview, but in fact it only lasted 16 minutes and so I should have been charged less. Also there were words missing in the transcript (there are a few examples where it is written 'the - ', so the transcriber was aware that words were missing); to make things worse, the transcription was referenced with line numbers (e.g. the 10th line of an answer) which is totally useless for my purposes. I need time stamps, when a question begins and when the corresponding answer begins. This way I can easily check the recording when the transcript seems unclear. I don't know when I'll get a reply to this letter - probably only in a week or so.
I sent this version off to my supervisor, asking whether this format of data was suitable. I had intended to take some time off from the thesis, but after taking the dog for a long walk, I was back at work, created the conclusions section for the first case study. This is the really important section: it's where I present my analysis of the process followed in developing and deploying the enhancement, along with any improvements that I or the interviewees think is necessary. This is going to form the process or model for the successful development and deployment of enhancements in Priority, which aside from being a mouthful, is also the central issue of my thesis.
Four years ago I had a seven stage framework for the successful d&d; this was something that I had dreamed up and I wanted to see how real-world d&d matched this framework. One major criticism of the first examined version of the thesis was that I had things backwards: instead of proposing the framework then seeing how this worked in practice, I should have examined real-life examples then derived from them the process.
This is what I have done now: the process that I 'extracted' from the case study has 14 (!) different stages and it might be that another one or two are required. One can be stated as 'enlist user support' (or 'create perceived user value'); I don't want to check this at the moment, because (a) I'm writing this blog and don't want to get side-tracked, (b) I think that tactically it would be better if this stage came from the discussion of the third case study, which was an example of failure, specifically for this reason (there was no user enlistment, but plenty of user resistance). I should also apply these stages to the pilot study.
I'm not going to continue working on the thesis until I receive my supervisor's feedback, but I am trying my hardest to conduct two more interviews that I badly need/want for the first case study.
When I am not working on the thesis, I am reading a fascinating book called "The code breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race" by Walter Isaacson. To quote part of the blurb, "The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a "compelling" (The Washington Post) account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies". By chance, today I discovered that Doudna and her main colleague won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry two years ago for this work - I haven't got that far in the book yet. I have the impression that there will be a chapter or two about working with Covid-19, but I don't want to get ahead of myself yet.
I find the book fascinating, but there's one thing that niggles slightly. In this book and others similar to it, it often reads as if one waves a magic wand and achieves a doctorate. The following snippet is an example: "[Barrangou] enrolled at North Carolina State in Raleigh and got his master’s degree in the science of pickle and sauerkraut fermentation. He went on to get his doctorate there, married a food scientist he met in class ...". There doesn't seem to be a hint of the struggle that I've had. On the other hand, all these doctorates have been achieved by people working full-time in a university laboratory, normally with defined experiments to carry out. I'm not sure about early doctorates in computer science: I get the impression that once it was enough to pick a topic and write a program about that topic. I used to have a copy of someone's doctoral dissertation about writing a Prolog interpreter in C. I doubt very much that I still have this, as it would make interesting reading. When I found it - probably at the end of the 1980s - I knew much less about Prolog and doctorates than I do now.
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