Ok, now the summer break in Swedish academia is over and a new term begins.
A good opportunity to recap my ongoing and recent struggles with producing new knowledge through the epic project of doing a PhD.

First things first: next week I go to the fabulous hackademia week in Luneburg, yay, with a bunch of academics and hackers who deal with, well, hackers. Can’t wait!

Other than that, the passed spring term turned out to be the most productive so far: 5 new papers written, 5 coming out this fall, and some more next year, on various topics such as:

1. My methods of research (multi-sited ethnography and shadowing)
2. How artists hire&motivate developers to code functions in Blender and Synfig, why, and what is it all actually about.
3. How artists end up choosing free software for animation production and when 4. How sharing things online is not just about doing good, but also about moving capital, power and creating hierarchies through obligation and self-regulation
5. How the data industry uses animation rendering to heat homes, and creates a new commodity on the digital economy market – computation traffic.

So, what’s left in the pipeline?

I am working now on finishing an article on Russian computer cultures and hacking. I write about how do creators of digital animation create infrastructures in order to overcome digital scarcity. I use Morevna project as a case in point, and the long history of Russian hacking.

Then, if I am lucky, I will have 1.5 years from now until I need to be done with the dissertation. After brainstorming with friends what is best to do in this time, I got the following list of ideas:

1. Write a book, extending an article into a huger thing (on the side of the dissertation). Strangely enough, the same day I got contacted by a good publisher to invite me to submit a book proposal. Too big a thing to do?

2. Write a teaching portfolio for the precarious time after the PhD.

3. Write a post-doc project (for the same reasons as 2.)

4. Ahm, take it easy and enjoy just going to conferences

5. Write the dissertation.

Not an easy choice to make!