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This online edition of my PhD these has been a long time coming. The work was originally submitted in December 2003 and was viva-ed in March 2004. Since then there has been a lot of procrastinating about approaching a conventional print publisher, and looked at one way I just didn't ever get around to it. Looked at from a different point of view, I was never totally comfortable letting someone else take control over the work.
Since I work with online media on a daily basis, it seemed logical to me to produce an online edition of my thesis, however, this idea did take a few years to perculate before I started looking at it seriously. Once I had made the decision to go ahead, there were two main choices. 1) To pass the thesis across to Google Books and allow them to publish on my behalf. 2) To do the whole thing myself.
There are many advantages, as I see it, to being able to take full control over one's own publication and to do so online. Copies don't need to be sold in order to make money and students, academics and those with a casual interest don't need to pay for access. Multiple copies don't need to be sold in order to justify future print runs and trees don't get pulped in order that it can be read. This way, moreover, the work has the potential to reach many more people than a hard copy ever would, and with some search engine marketing to give the work a little boost, I envisage that it will pick up a good following not too far down the line.
There has always been a certain stigma attached to self publication, owing to the lack of peer review that any work must go through before it is accepted. However, in this instance, especially since the work is presented as a viva-ed PhD rather than a discrete monograph, it seemed the best way to go.
The website itself took about a month's work to createand presented quite a few technical challenges; the biggest of which was how to create the pages quickly and preserve the style, layout and presentation of the original bound thesis. The eventual solution used was fairly successful. The original word document was printed as a pdf using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 and then all the individual pages were then exported from there as HTML/CSS. A template was created and the code from the extractedHTML pages inserted into the template.
The biggest two issues from here on in were coping with creating links and navigation between the pages manually, and also cleaning up the mountains of extraneous HTML code produced by exporting from Adobe Acrobat. Most of the really laborious work involved in creating this edition was owing to these two tasks.
To get the edition completed within the minimum of time and without a budget several compromises have had to be made. Navigation would have preferably been more comprehensive and special characters would have been dealt with more thoroughly to help with cross browser compatibility to name but two. Perhaps most significantly, the backend code is plain and simple HTML. It would have been preferable to mark up the text in XML and work to TEI guidelines in order to future-proof the work and ensure its longevity. Times and budget would by no means allow for this.
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