If you've noticed that posting's been even lighter than usual in the past two months, I have a great addition to the list of why-I-haven't-blogged excuses: I've finally been writing the my thesis to complete my M.A. in English Literature.

And to make up for lost time, you can read my thesis!

A Proprietary Protocol: How Search Defines Authority Online*

For those of you balking, I have to protest that my topic is pretty darn cool—the paper's about how search engines construct authoritativeness online (as you might gather from the title), both by lending authority to other sites and by acting as authoritative sources themselves. Because of this amazingly rockin' topic my citations range from everyone's favorite internet theorist Alexander Galloway to Kant to John Battelle and a few folks who made search engines to boing boing, waxy, and valleywag. Yup, I cited boing boing in an academic paper.

A good number of people I've talked to about this in casual conversation seem to find it interesting, so hopefully some of my intrepid visitors will as well. I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out, but of course it is an M.A. thesis and not the holy grail of web theory, so there's always more that could be said. I would've particularly liked to go into the authoritativeness of wikipedia (since its authority is mutually reinforcing with search engines') and the categorical power of tagging (since categorization is a means to authority). But at ~15,000 words this is already one long M.A. thesis by departmental guidelines.

In addition to "wow, that's cool," I've gotten a lot of comments along the lines of "that's a paper for an English degree???" I was extremely lucky to find an (awesome!) adviser, Cliff Siskin, who was interested in technology, but it should also be pointed out that literature departments—especially the English department at NYU, where I've been working on this degree—are interdisciplinary by nature and have been so for a very long time, if not forever. Note the section listing from the literary theory anthology I used my first semester in grad school:

• Formalisms
• Structuralism and Linguistics
• Psychoanalysis
• Marxism
• Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Post-Modernism
• Feminism
• Gender Studies, Gay/Lesbian Studies, Queer Theory
• Historicisms
• Ethnic Studies, Post-Coloniality, and International Studies
• Cultural Studies

In other words, literary studies quite often concerns itself with far more than literature. Technological studies as concern the evolution of print media are widely acknowledged as legitimate in the literary world, though perhaps not totally mainstream. As digital technology changes our relationship with text and information, I'd argue that literature departments will have to concern themselves with it to survive.

On a lighter note though, I'm super-excited to have finally finished this degree. Oddly enough I've worked on my M.A. over a longer period of time than I worked on my B.A.—but in my own defense I've been up to a lot in the meantime, work-wise and otherwise.

*I'm not sure of the copyright restrictions NYU puts on M.A. theses, but I have a feeling that the university you complete a thesis at has some stake in it. I've put in an email to NYU's copyright people but haven't heard back yet. For now, I'd consider this as copyright (instead of CC licensed as the rest of my site) by me and probably NYU. But you are more than welcome to quote it or reference it in any way with proper citation. (In fact, I would be totally ecstatic if you did so.)

And, for the OCD citers among us, I'll point out that this pdf has been reformatted since I turned it into the English department, and the pagination is not the same as the department's copy. The changes are partially to save paper for those who might want to print it and partially because Asim shamed me into changing the font after I admitted to having handed it in in 12 pt Times New Roman. However, in my interpretation of MLA citation, you'll be fine using this pagination to cite as long as you provide the url of the pdf. I've included a sample citation on the document itself. Enjoy!