Around Australia, honours degrees are under threat from academic administrators who see them as resource-intensive and fee-sparse. Often terrific work is done in honours theses. But this work often doesn’t get publicised, and we need that kind of publicity to show just why honours degrees are worth doing, and worth fighting for. So it’s great when students get around to depositing their theses in electronic archives, such as the e-Scholarship repository at the University of Sydney – it takes a lot of prodding to overcome post-thesis-parting blues. So, prod away!
You can browse the Sydney list – which is discoverable on the web, thanks to its software, the open source DSpace. A recent addition is Janet Watts’ Conversational Analysis thesis, Children’s Silences in Mareeba Aboriginal English. This list is incomplete of course, since our prodding isn’t always successful. Oh, and ignore the awful handling of the authors’ name – a weirdness induced by a mix of submitter and a rare DSpace glitch. Otherwise – a wonderful thing.
Follow1 thought on “Honours theses”
Here at Endangered Languages and Cultures, we fully welcome your opinion, questions and comments on any post, and all posts will have an active comments form. However if you have never commented before, your comment may take some time before it is approved. Subsequent comments from you should appear immediately.
We will not edit any comments unless asked to, or unless there have been html coding errors, broken links, or formatting errors. We still reserve the right to censor any comment that the administrators deem to be unnecessarily derogatory or offensive, libellous or unhelpful, and we have an active spam filter that may reject your comment if it contains too many links or otherwise fits the description of spam. If this happens erroneously, email the author of the post and let them know. And note that given the huge amount of spam that all WordPress blogs receive on a daily basis (hundreds) it is not possible to sift through them all and find the ham.
In addition to the above, we ask that you please observe the Gricean maxims:*Be relevant: That is, stay reasonably on topic.
*Be truthful: This goes without saying; don’t give us any nonsense.
*Be concise: Say as much as you need to without being unnecessarily long-winded.
*Be perspicuous: This last one needs no explanation.
We permit comments and trackbacks on our articles. Anyone may comment. Comments are subject to moderation, filtering, spell checking, editing, and removal without cause or justification.
All comments are reviewed by comment spamming software and by the site administrators and may be removed without cause at any time. All information provided is volunteered by you. Any website address provided in the URL will be linked to from your name, if you wish to include such information. We do not collect and save information provided when commenting such as email address and will not use this information except where indicated. This site and its representatives will not be held responsible for errors in any comment submissions.
Again, we repeat: We reserve all rights of refusal and deletion of any and all comments and trackbacks.
Great idea to get the honours theses online. They are very difficult to get a hold of. In some cases they are the main source of information on a language – for example Rebecca Green’s description of Burarra. It is possible to put honours theses online through Melbourne Uni eprints but there doesn’t seem to be any facility for doing it at La Trobe yet.