I submitted my thesis to the Department of Graduate Studies at Emerson College this afternoon. It’s entitled “Community Media in Transition: Public Access Television in the Age of YouTube.”

I appreciated the feedback I received from my committee during my defense. They recommended that I spend a bit more time on the paper before making it public. I agreed.

My plan now is to spend the next two months revising the paper. I hope to create a more clear and direct version of my thesis statement with the revision. My hope is that in doing so it will provide a much more detailed road map of policy recommendations that I’ve only begun to layout in the paper thus far. I also hope that a revised version will be more accessible to the general public.

While I’m eager to share the ideas presented in the paper, it’s more important to me that I spend the time making it all it can and should be. That’s the work ahead.

Well, I just dropped off my thesis to the printer. I’m REALLY hoping that it comes back in one piece. I have to submit it to grad studies in the afternoon, following my defense, and after tracking down all the relevant signatures I need.

I will be providing an open access version of my thesis later in the week here on this site. It would be really great if Emerson College had an open access policy on Master’s theses. I’m secretly hoping that Emerson’s libraries, professors, and students as well might lobby for open access to student, and faculty, research in the future. The staff at Boston College libraries seems to take a similar position:

“BC’s dissertations are not yet Open Access (OA). However, it is hoped that this lack of Open Access will change and that BC’s dissertations will in the future be available to anyone with internet access.”

In any case, I look forward to sharing my thesis here on this blog and hearing from folks in access and beyond about the ideas presented in it.