3MT

Well, I used the hibernation excuse for a prolonged period with no posts already. But I am using it again since I think it’s so clever. Much like a female polar bear, I have emerged from my final year of graduate study accompanied by a fledgling dissertation after long months—years, actually—of nurturing. With my degree in hand, I can confidently return to the process of accumulating and digesting material for my next cub—I mean research project. 

Anyway, you are probably wondering why this post is titled 3MT. I am using this opportunity not only to brag about finishing grad school but also to brag about winning the University of Iowa’s inaugural 3MT^® Competition. What is it? According to Iowa’s website for the competition, 3MT is “an academic competition developed by The University of Queensland, Australia. In this competition students share their dissertation research to a general audience in an oral presentation lasting at most … three minutes. Begun in 2008, the competition has grown to include more than 125 universities worldwide, including 45 in the United States.” Distilling a dissertation down to three minutes is challenging but doable—and valuable. The emphasis is on clarity and concision, cornerstones of those ever-important communication skills, and so it helps students in any discipline, primarily because they can practice explaining an involved and arcane research project to an audience that is not in the field. But even those “in the field” are not experts on the particular topic of each and every dissertation. Mine was about surveillance and reading, and few researchers of early modern English literature are experts on Renaissance surveillance practices. So this activity can help with, say, a thesis defense, in addition to the more conventional “elevator pitch,” research explanation in an interview, and the annual justification for studying English to curious/inquisitorial relatives at Thanksgiving.

I even think that, if students start planning to do it early enough, it can help them hone their argument even in the prospectus stage. 3MT asks students to explain the background of their research, what new findings they had, and why it matters in three minutes. Prospectuses should also aim to situate the work in a larger conversation, explain what the research will add, and show why it is important. This may be extreme, but I think the 3MT model would help in the creation of a prospectus. It also can make the research more competitive for scholarships, fellowships, and grants since it encourages students to think about how to appeal to a broader audience—something that really should be done early on, even though it is often not done until much later in the writing process. I feel that 3MT can make the thesis better, if started early enough. Or, in my case, it can make the explanation of the thesis better—in a variety of contexts. Check out my three-minute presentation, which garnered me a first-place prize and a People’s Choice award—not the People’s Choice^{©, ®,} ™^{, etc.} award, but an award nonetheless. Also, if the competition takes place at an amazing place like the University of Iowa, you can get a short, user-friendly video about your research that you can just put on the “About” page of your blog (see “About” page of this blog). If any reader is interested in Iowa's 3MT competition, contact Dr. Alex Schott at the University of Iowa. He put Iowa’s together and made it a phenomenal experience.    

For more information on the 3-minute Thesis, see http://threeminutethesis.org/ and http://www.grad.uiowa.edu/three-minute-thesis-competition-at-the-university-of-iowa

I am also putting up the video here in case clicking on the “About” page doesn’t suit your fancy:

Canon Confidential: here is another installment of canon confidential, where I compile a list of author-spies, or notable literary figures who used their skills in reading, in plotting, in cultivating ambiguity, and in withholding information until the right moment as writers and as spies. This is very much in the spirit of Charles Nicholl, who long ago noted the “frequent intersection of the literary world and the intelligence fraternity” (see Nicholl’s The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, page 171—I am not endorsing Nicholl’s argument that Marlowe was the victim of a conspiracy, just his widely accepted side note that spies and authors share the same skill set). So, without further ado, here is the clue:

This man, who is responsible for one of the oldest libraries in Europe and perhaps the most valuable library in the English-speaking world, used his position as Elizabeth’s  agent abroad in the Netherlands to acquire books for his impressive personal collection. Gabriel Harvey infamously called him a “curious intelligencer,” which predictably caused Thomas Nashe to take great offense.  

You can also view the clue here, as well as other clues and a link to the answer. 

Mind Blown

I thought I would emerge from my application hibernation to write about something everyone who reads my blog has to check out. One of my sources (a very kind colleague) has informed me of a new exhibit at the Folger. Bill Sherman, a curator at the Folger Shakespeare Library, has put together an exhibit called Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers. Awesome. Or, as Sherman says here of William Friedman’s encoded drawing of a flower, it is “mind-blowingly clever, and fun.” This exhibit is a testament to not only the widespread use of cryptography in the Renaissance but also to our own age’s increased awareness of and fascination with the world of the clandestine services. Of particular interest to me is the unusually firm connection between Renaissance methods of encoding and our own. While Sherman is surprised by the fact that “Renaissance principles of cryptography are still its guiding principles in the 20^th century,” I have been finding this in my research for a few years now. Even in the shift to dataveillance, the underlying assumptions and modus operandi remain the same: attaining total knowledge through covert methods of acquisition. Although they are backing off this claim now, the NSA and GCHQ asserted that they sought to “own” and “master” the internet in the years following 2001. After all, humans are still needed to parse and interpret the intelligence provided by machines. Rather than rendering humans obsolete, dataveillance only intensifies their work and shines a new light on age-old questions about the epistemological underpinnings of surveillance.

I even learned from another source, who shall remain nameless (actually a renowned scholar in the field of Renaissance literature), that a former student of hers (or his) was a retired government operative who chose to do a paper on surveillance in the worlds of Hamlet, Shakespeare, and modern America. With firsthand knowledge of contemporary practices in counterespionage, this student was well-suited to compare Walsingham’s tactics with those of this age, and the conclusion was that almost nothing had changed. The tactics and overarching strategies that this student experienced as a secret agent were actually quite similar to those narrated in the biographies on Walsingham—which are flourishing now, by the way. Even though the life of Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster always makes for a good, marketable book, biographies of the father of English counterintelligence have mushroomed since 2001. This is in addition to the fictional “Kit Marlowe” and “Ursula Blanchard” mysteries and the “Spymaster Chronicles.” Since 2005 there have been five different biographies on Walsingham in English and more in other languages. It is a sign of the times—and now it has come to the Folger. This stuff is really important because we as a nation are trying to process what all this spy stuff means, and we can learn quite a bit about it from the past, especially since that past is not all that different from the present.