My PhD thesis, which describes my practice through seven built projects, their theoretical backgrounds, and methodologies, is now available in even more of an open access format – it’s a fully-searchable website at phd.olliepalmer.com.
It’s taken some time to convert and optimise for the web, but hopefully this means it’s easier to share any of the research with anyone, anywhere in the world.
The PDF is already available to download as open-access from UCL Explore, but now the whole thesis is indexable by search engines and readable on any device – which means it should be easier for someone, say, who wants to know about the rules I used to create the film Network / Intersect, or the method for creating a 24-hour film from 86,400 Google Images, or learn about the process to create Scriptych at the Opera Garnier de Paris (or even look through the words embedded in its three-dimensional database), to do exactly that.
And even better, I have embedded supplementary materials, which can’t be seen in the PDF version,, so that it’s easy to jump between a projects’ written and filmic documentation. Chapter 3, for example, has excerpts from the two films it describes, as well as photos of the projects in situ and their methodologies.
You might notice that there’s a new tab on this website which takes you straight to my thesis site.
If you’re interested in what’s going on under the hood of the website (or would like to implement something similar yourself), the thesis is written in MarkDown and hosted on GitHub pages (so the source is also open source). It uses MkDocs with the Material theme.
More open access materials I’ve made:
- Scripted Design, an open-access, podcast-led course about designing and using creative constraints (directly built on top of Chapter 4 of my thesis)
- Parallel Worlds, an open-access, podcast-led course about world-building in artistic practice