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Gavan P.L. Watson

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Dissertation

York University Dissertation Template

September 20, 2010 by Gavan 4 Comments

(almost) all of the completed dissertations in Visual Studies at UC Irvine up to 2008
Creative Commons License photo credit: G A R N E T

York University’s Faculty of Graduate Studies provides students with a list of formatting guidelines1 (requirements more like it) to assist graduate students with the preparation of their dissertation or thesis.

The rules and regulations are somewhat convoluted and, in my humble opinion, if left to the last step of preparation, a pain in the ass to integrate with work completed thus far. So follow my lead and begin formatting your chapters as you write them to match the guidelines. This will save a ton of work when you finally integrate all the chapters.

Also saving you a ton of work? A template that is formatted to meet FGS’ guidelines. Surprisingly, FGS does not provide students with such a template. So I’ll provide one:

York University Faculty of Graduate Studies Dissertation / Thesis Template (MS Word Template, compatible with editions 2007+)

Some caveats:

I’ve used the formatting of the document to create my own dissertation. I’ve tried to make sure there are no errors and its completely in line with FGS’ requirements as of September 2010, but you’re using this template at your own risk, so to speak. I’ve heard stories about the thesis secretary measuring margins and throwing 900 printed pages out because the page number was printed too low on the page, so check and double check all the requirements before you print your final version and visit FGS.

And drop a comment below if it proved helpful!

  1. If you want the direct PDF link, here it is [↩]
Posted in: Dissertation Tagged: Dissertation, faculty of graduate studies, formatting, template, york university

Finding, seeing, identifying, recording, sharing

May 16, 2010 by Gavan 5 Comments
This post is the conclusion to one of my draft PhD dissertation chapters. It doesn’t represent a final thought or particular endpoint: these are ideas in progress. It also explains why the post just sort of starts without any introductory context. I’m always interested in hearing your opinion of my ideas, too.

Birding 5
Creative Commons License photo credit: Explore The Bruce

Knowing individuals is the exception and not the rule for birders’ relationships with birds, largely because the motivations behind these interactions are not mutual enjoyment. Rather, as I have described, because birding is centred on the detection and identification of individual birds to species, collecting these observations is often the underlying motivation. This notion of collection is not as simple as it sounds. Based on the acts practised by the birders I interviewed, birding at its core is an activity of watching. This watching of birds is an emotional experience – leading to all kinds of feelings – but reinforced through the emotional catharsis, I theorize, of getting to see a bird. While watching birds implicitly foregrounds the visual nature of the activity, as you are drawn into watching birds, the activity expands beyond the visual to include the auditory and even the tactile. Knowing (or wanting to know) what you are seeing, hearing or touching still hold the practices together.

If this watching birds can transition into the act of birding, then it is steeped in first-hand experience, with sightings occurring when bird and birder at found in the same place at the same time. Human sensory limitations coupled with a Euclidean understanding of time and space frame what counts as bird sightings, in turn limiting acts of birding to these experiential moments.

With a birder and a bird together, a sighting is made and the process of identification can take place. These acts of identification rely on a birder’s sensory abilities to pick out important aspects of a bird’s identity, but also take into account the larger ecological context – the relationship between the components of the bird and birder’s surroundings – of the bird sighting. In this sense, identification occurs in a larger context and is, in fact, a hybrid act. Identification blends a clinical, reductionist approach to breaking birds into a set of field markings (e.g. “has complete eye ring”) and a more holistic, even phenomenological approach leading to the gestalt of a bird (e.g. “that bird just looked like a great-blue heron”). I have personally experienced and found with some birders that the emergence of a phenomenological approach to birding is coupled to an expanded awareness of bird life around them. This sensory attunement to the presence of birds is developed through the overt act of birding. It, in turn, leads to moments outside planned birding excursions where present birds can unexpectedly enter the consciousness and draw attention. I have described these moment as the chance encounter in birding.

If a species of birds holds one or a combination of perceived characteristics (beauty, rarity or transience) they then are ascribed more power by birders. These birds are subsequently sought out or attracted in more often than birds that do not hold these characteristics. Birders also work to predict when and where these kinds of birds can be seen. This act of prediction expands beyond sought-after species and expands into the whole practice: birders work to improve their ability to predict the highest concentration of birds and species. In order to increase their success birding, and in part a reaction to the unpredictable nature of birds, birders share their sightings with others. Sightings are perishable objects and birders work to share the information before the sightings start to decay. They also work to accrue or reinforce the reputation of a birder – being the first to see a valued bird is something valued in the birding world.

Posted in: Dissertation Tagged: Birding, finding, identifying, recording, seeing, sharing

Birding Rondeau Provincial Park, April 28-May 7, 2008

February 23, 2010 by Gavan Leave a Comment

While in the field conducting interviews at Rondeau Provincial Park over two weeks in spring 2008, I collected ten consecutive days worth of travels on my trusty GPS. The data consisted of two things: a track (a continuous line where I had travelled) and ‘exact’ points, recorded every 30 seconds, of my location. Now, I’m no GIS master, but I am using this data in my analysis for my dissertation. Here’s one map that I generated today:

Rondeau Tracks—April 28-May 7, 2008

(Update 09/13/10: Download and explore the Google Earth .kmz file I created from this data)

Posted in: Dissertation Tagged: Birding, dissertation research, gps, map, rondeau

Mapping the locations mentioned by Ontario birders

February 9, 2010 by Gavan 1 Comment
This post includes ruminations and ideas emerging as I analyze the data collected for my PhD dissertation focusing on the act of birding. It doesn’t represent a final thought or particular endpoint: these are ideas in progress. I would be interested in hearing your opinion of my ideas, too.

During my analysis, I kept track of all the places mentioned by birders during interviews. With the exception of ‘sewage lagoons’1 I’ve mapped the locations and the results are interesting2. Immediately apparent: with two exceptions (The highlighted locations of Fisherville and the Carden Alvar) all these places are on or within short distance of a Great Lake.

So what does this tell us of the practice of birding in Ontario? Well, it tells us that birds are found where there is habitat as most of these locations are marshes, woodlots or other (relatively) undisturbed or protected natural areas and birders go to look for them in these places. That’s to be expected, isn’t it? It falls within conventional wisdom, certainly.


View Locations mentioned by Ontario birders in a larger map

There are, however, protected habitats that birds could be found throughout the province. So why such a focus on these near-lake habitats? Clearly, the Great Lakes are playing a role in the kind of birding that takes place in Ontario: they act as a concentrator. In the spring, migratory songbirds “fallout” in these remnant habitats (Point Pelee as a spring hotspot for songbirds, Beamer Point for raptor migration) and the lakes act as a barrier against which birds fly during fall migration (Cranberry Marsh, High Park, Hawk Cliff).

Interestingly, it really emphasizes that conventional birding practice focuses on migratory birds. And more specifically for Ontario, migratory birds as they move to and from the shore of a Great Lake, in part, because these places are most reliable for finding birds.

Two notable outliers: First, Fisherville. This region has hosted a winter population of Long-eared Owls. And people love Owls. Second, Carden Alvar. A unique habitat, with many rare or unusual bird species that cannot be found elsewhere in Ontario found here (the Loggerhead Shrike, for example). So this points out two allied practices: birders travel to find unusual birds (hence, the Carden Alvar’s emergence as a location) and birding practice changes in the winter (thus appears Fisherville).

Some thoughts about that. In winter, time is more diffuse and the birds are less predictable–irruptions occur in a (sort-of) pattern over years rather than in a regular seasonal pattern like spring and fall migration. Birds that appear in the winter are here primarily looking for food rather than being on the move to nesting / wintering grounds. In my experience, you know that Snowy Owls will be, say, near Arthur, but they’re diffuse enough that they can be hard to find.

So, the places that concentrate these winter birds (Fisherville, Amhurst Island) emerge as birding locations.

  1. Because I collected them as a generic category and don’t have location information [↩]
  2. Oh and the yellow thumbtacks indicate where I conducted the majority of interviews [↩]
Posted in: Birding research, Dissertation Tagged: birders, Birding, locations, map, ontario, practice, seasonal change

The Technology & Ethics of Reporting Bird Sightings

August 26, 2009 by Gavan 4 Comments
The following post includes ruminations and ideas emerging as I analyze the data collected for my PhD dissertation focusing on the act of birding. It doesn’t represent a final thought or particular endpoint: these are ideas in progress. I would be interested in hearing your opinion of my ideas, too.

SOMETHING I'VE ALWAYS LOVED TO DO
Creative Commons License photo credit: Peppysis

Sharing sightings

Birders, according my research, have embraced the Internet for information about birds. This includes general information about birds (websites such as Cornell’s All About Birds were mentioned by birders) but it would seem that the Internet is seen most importantly as a conduit of bird sightings. I conducted my research in Ontario, speaking with Ontario birders. When I would ask how birders decided where to go on a particular day, birders would often cite the Ontario Field Ornithologist’s (or OFO, for short) ONTBIRDS listserv as a source of information (often the primary source) for sightings.

Sharing bird sightings isn’t a new practise in birding. When I was a child visiting my grandparents, I remember the phone ringing, my grandparents answering and getting the latest news that species X had been seen at location Y. As members of the local field naturalist club, they were part of a telephone tree that spread news about rare bird sightings. After they collected the information, they would then call the two people “below” them in the tree. I imagine that in short order, the information about the birds was disseminated.

So the practise hasn’t changed. But the technology has. Before I talk about the implications of this, I want to bring in another thread into this conversation.

Posted in: Dissertation Tagged: Birding, ethics, listservs, owls, sightings, Technology

Collapsing space and freezing time in birding

March 18, 2009 by Gavan Leave a Comment
The following post includes ruminations and ideas emerging as I analyze the data collected for my PhD dissertation focusing on the act of birding. It doesn’t represent a final thought or particular endpoint: these are ideas in progress. I would be interested in hearing your opinion of my ideas, too.

Birders

Many birding technologies appear to serve the function of augmenting the process of  identification of observed birds. These ID technologies seem to serve two broad functions to augment limitations birders face: the first is the the distance between themselves and observed birds and the second is the ability to identify a bird during the (unpredictable) length of time they have watching it. Putting the second another way, it’s the speed with which a birder can make an identification that they think is correct.

Birders attempt to correct the first by using technologies that collapse space  and seem to correct the second by using technologies that change the nature of time. Let me expand a bit because while I think collapsing space is easy to understand if you’ve birded, freezing time might be a bit more oblique.

Posted in: Dissertation Tagged: binoculars, bird blinds, bird books, Birding, collapsing space, Dissertation, freezing time, research, space, Technology, Thinking, time

A way to say thanks

September 28, 2008 by Gavan Leave a Comment

I’m writing this in the car in between two interviews that I’m conducting this sunny Sunday morning. What I’ve been struck with as I’ve been busy with interviews this Spring and Fall is just how generous people have been with their time and personal space–I’m visiting people in their homes as a part of my work right now. What is difficult is that I’m not going to get a way to individually thank all my participants in my dissertation (that would break the rules of anonymous research). So while I do thank people effusivley at the end of an interview, I feel like I need to figure out some way of thanking these people again.

Posted in: Dissertation, Research Tagged: appreciation, research

About me

Gavan Watson headshot Work life? Director, Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning & Associate Vice President, Teaching and Learning at Memorial University with a Ph.D. in environmental education. Home life? Father, naturalist, photographer, husband, philosopher, & member of a hybrid human-dog pack.

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