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#alt-academy: Alternative Academic Careers
Grad Training
What is a Dissertation? New Models, Methods, Media
Amanda Licastro
Cathy N. Davidson
Jade E. Davis
UNC Chapel Hill
Gregory T. Donovan
Nick Sousanis
An Introduction to #Remixthediss
by Cathy N. Davidson
2000 Followers, 31,000 Readers, 190 Countries: Digital Practice as Scholarship
by Jade E. Davis
Making the Dissertation a More Public Medium for Critical Scholarship
by Gregory T. Donovan
Excavating Eportfolios: Digging into a Decade of Student-Driven Data
by Amanda Licastro
Reconsidering Scholarship Through a Dissertation in Comics Form
by Nick Sousanis
Twitter: @cathyndavidson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l16GLRhyck
It is a great honor and delight to preface this multimedia volume that derives from an event held on October 10, 2014, in the Lounge of the English Department of The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
More accurately, that was the physical epicenter of the event but there were many other virtual and physical centers for what was the beginning of a fresh, vigorous, and expansive conversation that asked the question "What Is a Dissertation?" and answered by focusing on new methods, models, and media. The event was jointly sponsored by the Futures Initiative at The Graduate Center and by the open, online network Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory or HASTAC (hastac.org). HASTAC's primary hubs are Duke University, situated in the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, and now, as of July 1, 2014, in the Graduate Center's Futures Initiative. In addition to this joint sponsorship, the event had other hubs and partners all over the world, from the University of Victoria in British Columbia Canada to CLAEH University in Montevideo, Uruguay, and points in between, and East and West.
This distributed sponsorship and planning signals the heart of the matter for what came to be known, and tweeted some 1200 times, as #remixthediss (see visualization below and a curated Storify of the tweets here). For a brief and shining moment, we were even "trending" on Twitter due to the incredible participation and saturation of tweets, favorites, retweets, and HTs (Hat Tips). Quantity is not quality to be sure--but the energy of this global community certainly suggests there is interest in remixing the forms and content and media of the dissertation. Text alone, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, is not alone--we need visual, auditory, sensory, and interactive multimedia to express the complexity of scholarly ideas, insights, and interactions of the contemporary dissertation. "What Is a Dissertation?" is by no means the first offering in this area but the energy it inspired also ensures that it will be far from the last. Indeed, we hope it is not just a moment but a movement for expanding the parameters of what counts as scholarship for those pursuing the PhD.
TAGS Explorer Visualization of #remixthediss
You can read biographies of our five extraordinary contributors to this collection in this blog post. They have each addressed not only their own work but an institutional process by which their work was approved. We have also begun an interactive document to which they and others have contributed the details of their own success stories. If this is indeed a movement, it is not so much a movement to "abolish" the currently traditional form of the dissertation but, rather, one that aims to expand definitions throughout the humanities, social sciences, and natural and biological sciences to other forms and formats. Our contributors have presented their research in a way that can serve as models for others to build upon. We have built a website with many supporting documents and links and have also linked to work being done with the Graduate Center's Digital Fellows who have created a fine resource on this topic as well as with HASTAC's Digital Dissertation group. We welcome additions. In peer-to-peer collaborative praxis, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.
The point of focusing on changing the dissertation in form, style, substance, method, and media is that you cannot change a process unless you change the final product. You cannot change a product, unless you change the process. Institutional change must be systemic and continuous. That said, change is always uneven. So to make institutional change, you celebrate victories where you find them. You celebrate the success of any and every institutional transformation, and you use those models for further institutional reflection, introspection, and success.
The original panel would not have been possible without many people and organizations. Materially, it could not have happened without support from HASTAC@Duke University. We extend our thanks to Duke University's PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge for making the collaboration possible. We cannot thank everyone who has supported today's event by name, but certainly we extend our thanks to Executive Officer of the English Department Professor Mario di Gangi for hosting us physically and Nancy Silverman of the Department of English for making all of the arrangements necessary for the event. The Futures Initiative Fellows all worked very hard to make this event possible. To that end, our thanks to: Michael Dorsch, Lisa Tagliaferri, Danica Savonick, and Kalle Westerling. Lauren Melendez, Administrative Specialist for the Futures Initiative, and Katina Rogers, FI's Deputy Director, made invaluable contributions before, during, and after the panel and in the production of this volume. Amanda Licastro, one of the panelists, was responsible for the opportunity that turned a panel and a website into this multimedia publication. An amazing collaborative effort. Thank you all.
This multimedia volume represents some of the boldest, most imaginative, most brilliant, most creative, most courageous scholarship you will find anywhere, in any discipline. These authors will share their work with you so that you can see, not only what brave scholarship looks like, but how it is just wrong to assume that "brave" is the same as "risky." These are all junior scholars, recently defended or in the process of completing their work. They are pushing their disciplines, pushing their profession, pushing their institution--and they are being celebrated and rewarded with book contracts, doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships, and tenure track jobs. We too often believe that we must be timid to survive in challenging times. It is my experience that, by censoring oneself, one does oneself the most harm--physically and intellectually and, almost inevitably, professionally as well. That does not mean that "risk" guarantees "success." Nothing does. That does not mean the bold flourish in every instance. That is also not true. It means that by being true to your ambitions, your talents, and your dreams, you nurture your best self and, in challenging times, your best, boldest, and most optimistic self is the greatest asset you can have to get you through and, sometimes, if the gods are smiling, to help you flourish. With admiration for these bold scholars and hopes that their work will be an inspiration to others, I now turn this extraordinary multimedia extravaganza over to them.
Twitter: @jadedid
Project Link: http://vintageblackbeauty.tumblr.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HXcCbCp8yA
"My design was not so much to contribute new facts as to shape the narrative in such a way as to emphasize relations of cause and effect that are often buried in the mass of details."
― John Fiske, The American Revolution vol. I
My adivsor was on leave my first year. My first year was full of lots of little rejections too. Digital humanities were taking off, but my project is not exactly a digital humanities project. It also isn't a traditional academic project. It exists in a liminal space of being a digitally born humanities project about social media structures with various digital components. I am a Media and Technology Scholar. I am a Critical Performance Studies scholar. I conceptualize the digital spaces where my dissertation lives as micro-performance that is what author and artist Mark Amerika calls "auto-affective".
Figure 1: My Grandmother, with her Brother, grandmother (top left) and a travel companion.
Historical glitch: Understanding digital media through the photographic lens, explores the intersecting media ecologies of social media, digital heritage content, and culture. Specifically, this project focuses closely on what a digital project that takes advantages of the formal changes inherent in the shift from analog to digital media looks like. The project highlights how social media can be used as platforms for change and also looks at their limits and potentials for knowledge and culture when such media are used to construct alternate historical narratives. The case study for this project, Vintage Black Beauty (on the web at http://vintageblackbeauty.tumblr.com), which was digitally born on the social networking site Tumblr, puts digital tools into practice by disseminating historical photographs of black women in their everyday lives from across the black diaspora. The effects of this experiment are theoretically understood through the works of Frantz Fanon, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marshall McLuhan. Additionally, a digital performance piece that analyzes the effects of this practice, informed by Dada art practices, puts the theoretical implications into motion by placing the digitized photographs gathered on Vintage Black Beauty in conversation with media from the same time periods (this part is still under construction). By exploring this ecology, I posit that we can gain a better understanding of some of the differences between digital and analog media, their different potentials for change, as well as the inherent limits they pose. While digital media do allow for greater access and dissemination, they are still tied to a screened experience and held to ethical standards determined by various stakeholders who are often ephemeral or evolving and in contradiction with how we have been trained to conceive of knowledge production.
This has a heightened sense of urgency when we think of some of the current debates happening right now around ownership, information, and what is public, private or in an odd inbetween space. These Tweets are Called My Back brings an important voice to social and digital media users who often find themselves lost in the digital noise, even as they are producing meaningful knowledge and sparking online digital activism. For me, this means as academics who want to engage in social spaces, we need to come up with new practices that are rigorous and ethical. It is for this reason I started my project myself on Tumblr in 2011. To have my academic work be at the cost of someone elses unpaid labor seemed unethical. At the same time, I wanted my project to be digitally "real", meaning the first audience it was designed for was not academic, but every day users of Tumblr. This meant that the thought labor that went into the project is mostly invisible for someone who encounters it organically. However, if I am presenting the project as part of my work, I am easily able to show and explain how it is a project that attempts to take theory and turn it into digital movement.
The other part of the project, that I think is different than many projects, is that the primary digital part is taking place on a commercial platform. The part of me that thinks like a media ecologist couldn't imagine this happening in any other way. In addition to the wonderful theoretical journeys this project has taken me on, there is a secondary research narrative that looks at the role of business in digital and social media. This has been a short longitudinal study (but long in our new digital time when we consider the lifespan of many digital platforms). Over the course of four active years, Tumblr has changed as well in ways that are meaningful and important. The purchase by Yahoo! and the failure to monetize it thus far despite the $1.1 Billion sticker price means that there is a risk that it might at some point disappear. One of the drives we have from traditional knowledge production is to create things that can be preserved. This is something I understand too, but not the space I personally want to work in and theorize. When we look at larger social practices in the age of deletions, fake deletions, screencaps, and the right to be forgotten, both the permanence and non-permanence of the digital become a really interesting place to play in our current historical moment. We do not have a solution yet to make sure digital things can be preserved for all of time, but the permanence of information still affects people and projects. And, as I said during the talk, while the permanence of digital projects is still an issue, it isn't necessarily a bad one, and it isn't one that is much different from the book. Those deteriorate too.
Figure 2: Partial view of site analytics collected via Google Analytics
In terms of how I measure the permanence of my project, I made it the title of my talk. 2000 Followers, 31,000 Readers, 190 Countries. These numbers are all real numbers that represent the people who somehow managed to visit Vintage Black Beauty. I do not know who they are, but I know they were there. This is beyond meaningful to me. If I had created another book to put in a library or an article that was behind a paywalled journal, many of these people might have never seen the work I am doing. Instead, over 31,000 people became part of my dissertation journey, learning and seeing my work along the way. This is really all that I could hope for. The number one reason I started this project is because the photos of black women in history are often not seen. I would go so far as to say, especially in popular culture and scholarship that, it seems as though they never existed. But in digital and social media they can, and do. To take a very brief theoretical turn, to analyze what this project is doing, a phenomenon I am calling "micro-explosive digital movement." I am defining micro-explosive digital movement as moments where interactions with digital media in social media spaces create multiple chains of signification. These chains of signification are different than previous forms of media because they create a dialectic of both the old and new interpretations, and the new interpretations come from the visible interactions of other social media users as well as the primary viewer. However, these significations are incapable of reaching synthesis. Instead, the dialectic breaks, leaving the viewer to either allow only the past signification to have meaning or to accept the multitude of new significations. This is different than the normal polysemic interpretations of traditional media inasmuch as the viewer in social media consumes user reactions and commentary on media as part of the media object itself. For the photographs in this project this potential is especially apparent because historical photographs (the digital media object) inherently have an orientation towards the past. However, we see the user interactions on Tumblr (the social media space) pull the photos from the past into multiple presents.
We should be experimenting, playing, trying something different, and rethinking what scholarship is in the age of information calculators (smartphones) and Google machines (computers). I've gone on record saying it before, but I will say it again, we cannot continue to use the book as the prism for understanding what is and is not scholarship. That's not to say that there isn't a place for books, there is. Nor is it to say that I am unimpressed and non-pulsed by people's book projects. I just, on a fundamental level, believe there is a space for more, and part of that more, if we have a goal of equity, is bringing our wonderful thoughts, ideas, and discoveries to people outside of the academy. And it isn't that we don't have literacy in this type of knowledge production. We are literate in reading art, social media, photographs, etc. as things that have meaning in and of themselves while at the same time often containing deeper meanings that we might or might not be privy too. Despite this, we still tend to think of scholarship as answers or guided tours through thoughts rather than something that can exist, independently out in the world.
I have a fundamental belief that what scholarship looks like is changing. It has to. The world of information has changed. The secret key to the success I've had in my scholarship at large, but especially with the dissertation is that I found people who see how things are changing, and are excited about the possibilities. In terms of media theory, I tend to be bit boring. I'm really into McLuhan. I think he was on to something when he said the media works us over. It does. While we will not completely achieve the global village, I think we've reached a fork in the road when it comes to linear (Hu)man, the (Hu)man who was formed by the direction of ABCD → in the west and the structure of the sentence as the smallest unit of linguistic meaning making. The internet doesn't have to operate that way, even if more often than not that is what we make it do.
Endless Questions: Scalar Experiments with Ethnography
Dwayne Dixon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEc1_USQM00
Twitter: @gdonovan
Project Link: http://mydigitalfootprint.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8sUanY8t1A
Having recently completed my doctoral studies, this essay looks back at how digital media and participatory methods helped make my dissertation a more public medium for critical scholarship. My dissertation, MyDigitalFootprint.ORG: Young People and the Proprietary Ecology of Everyday Data, involved digital media from its inception. The project's primary matter of concern was the relationship between proprietary media and youth development. Its participatory methodology involved young people as co-researchers and co-designers in the development of an open source social network. The project's defense was live-streamed and live-tweeted. Finally, the resulting research products, including the monograph and a defense recording, were archived online under the project's title: mydigitalfootprint.org. In the context of 'remixing the diss'—and within the space-time I have here—I offer this brief epilogue on the media and methods that helped remix both my dissertation process as well as its research products and their scholarly communication.
Before getting into the media and methods that inspired and helped carry-out my digital dissertation, I wish to first note the importance of the transdisciplinary academic space in which it took place. Having conducted my doctoral studies in Environmental Psychology I was primed for problem-oriented research that had little disciplinary dogma. When conceptualizing my dissertation I was expected to draw on theories and methods from the discursive domains of academia that would be most useful in understanding and addressing my matters of concern. This also meant that when assembling my dissertation committee I was encouraged to find a diverse set of scholars who could assist a transdisciplinary project's development and evaluate its results. With four members of my program's faculty and two external readers, my committee represented scholars of feminist geography, critical psychology, cultural psychology, computer science, communication studies, and information studies. Further, the day-to-day challenge of doing research and media work across disciplines was aided through constant collaboration with a scholarly community loosely represented by the OpenCUNY Academic Medium, CUNY Internet Research Team, Public Science Project, Center for Place, Culture and Politics, as well as the GC Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and Macaulay ITF Programs. It was the creativity and security fostered by this academic space that emboldened me to take chances with my dissertation and re-imagine the boundaries of my scholarship through new methods, models, and media.
THE MEDIUM IS THE METHOD
Although I first adopted the project title and registered the mydigitalfootprint.org domain in 2008, the notion of a 'digital footprint' came into sharper focus in 2011 when a visualization tool played a brief but notable role in expanding the public's environmental consciousness (see Slide 1). Two researchers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, discovered that the iPhone was locally storing a consildated.db file containing data on all the places the device—and thus presumably its owner—had been. Allen and Warden then designed the iPhone Tracker App to allow iPhone owners to access their locative data from this file and visualize it over time using OpenStreetMaps. Latour's notion of the black box was partially and briefly opened thru this creative act of research and design. The app exposed and challenged a private method of knowledge production by allowing everyday people to visualize a consolidated database of their own digital footprints across space and over time. With little effort, people could start to make sense of personal information that up until that point had been reserved mainly for corporate and/or governmental interests. To quell the public concerns over privacy that erupted as a result of the app, Apple quickly deleted the local copy of consildated.db in an update to the iPhone's operating system. The surveillance practice was not curtailed; the exposed practice was simply black boxed again by designing-away the ability of iPhone users to easily visualize the very personal data their own iPhone continued to communicate to others, elsewhere.
It was the way research and design—method and medium—worked hand-in-hand to create, expose, and obscure this kind of mediated research relationship that got me thinking: under informational capitalism, the proprietary medium is not only the message (as McLuhan might argue) but also an increasingly dominant method by which knowing and becoming are made possible. Our daily engagements with proprietary media—like the iPhone, Facebook, or Amazon—enroll us in a set of ongoing relationships with various interests that are often obfuscated by design. These digital relationships, and the information they communicate, now constitute an expanding space of capital accumulation, social reproduction, identify configuration, and even creative resistance and empowerment. Yet, because of the opaque design and distributed geography of proprietary media, these research relationships are both intimately experienced on a daily basis and barely noticed—particularly among young people.
Consent, too, is often designed in this proprietary media ecology. Long jargon-laden and frequently changing Terms of Service policies are crafted to get people to waive their rights within a medium, rather than actually understand them. In the context of qualitative academic inquiry, Wendy Luttrell (2012, 160) argues that "negotiating and representing research relationships—what and how we learn with and about others and ourselves—is the heart of the research journey." In the context of informationalism, I considered what laid at the heart of society's proprietary journey. What sort of journey relies on mystified and lopsided research relationships that design consent as a default option? And, how might more participatory negotiations and critical representations of these relationships put society on a more egalitarian and public journey?
(RE)DESIGNING RESEARCH RELATIONSHIPS
The iPhone Tracker serves as a metaphor-of-sorts for my dissertation. I wanted the project to function as both a medium and a method for exposing, understanding, and re-designing research relationships in everyday media ecologies. It was important that I not just study how proprietary media shapes youth development, but actually engage youth in turning these research relationships on their head—and to open up the process of the dissertation from the project's design, to the IRB, to the final research products. The MyDigitalFootprint.ORG Project was thus initiated to unpack and engage young people's engagements with/in proprietary ecologies through the design and development of an open source social network. For details on the project's participatory action design research (PADR) methodology, the youth co-researchers (a.k.a. The Youth Design and Research Collective, or YDRC), and our findings, I direct everyone to the project website, the Project Timeline, and/or Chapter 3: The Medium is the Method from my dissertation (Donovan, 2013). Here, I want to briefly highlight two examples of how involving young people in digital design and social research altered the terrain of my dissertation project.
The first example, deals specifically with the YDRC and the design of our open source social network. I had installed a Wordpress Network with Buddypress on a leased Virtual Private Server (VPS) that provided us with a generic but highly customizable out-of-the-box social network site. Part of my work with the YDRC was to configure this network and design both its user interface as well as the various research relationships we would establish with online participants through interactive features such as social profiles and research pods. Since Buddypress allowed for modifications to its interface's language file we began the collective work of interrogating the language used in our own interface and modifying it where necessary to more clearly reflect the research taking place. During one of our Research and Planning Workshops, I accessed the network's .po file (see Slide 4) on my laptop and then connected my laptop to a projector. Via my laptop and a projection on the wall, we edited the file together using the aptly titled program Poedit. When we encountered language referring to instant messaging features as "Private Messaging" the YDRC were well aware that as administrators of the social network they could gain access to these 'private' messages. The language was thus changed to "Public Messaging" and the instant messaging possibilities were reconfigured within the Wordpress/Buddypress platform to confine direct messaging to public posts on a participant's profile.
This first example is one of many that allowed members of the YDRC to transition from social network consumers to social network producers. In doing so, they gained first hand experience on the kinds of personal information that could be obtained through a social media interface. They also confronted and considered the ways interface design could obscure, misrepresent, or more accurately represent and visualize the method by which personal information was obtained. In my second example, I turn to the process of my dissertation's IRB application and the YDRC's involvement as youth co-researchers.
The research project was submitted to my university's Institutional Review Board (IRB) in a series of stages. I began with the most traditional aspect: I wanted to recruit and interview 15 young people ages 14-19 about their daily digital engagements. This required consent forms for those over 18, and assent forms for those under 18 with corresponding consent forms for their parent or guardian. At this stage, the mydigitalfootprint.org site was first established for participant recruitment. I then filed an amendment to my application to add five of the interviewees as youth co-researchers to the project. This officially involved them as both 'research subjects' and 'research personnel' in the project, thus requiring they both sign new consent (or assent/consent) forms and receive CITI Certification for conducting research with human subjects. It was during this stage that the project site transitioned to a private collaborative space for the research group.
The final amendment was filed with the youth co-researchers and involved building the social network that would collect anonymized information from online participants. During this final stage, the project site was re-launched as a publicly-accessible social network with open account registration. Registering an account and filling out a social profile required participants to consent to an IRB approved assent form much as completing and online survey would. This assent form, among other requirements, had to be short, concise, and clearly inform a participant—potentially as young as 14—what the risks and benefits of participating in our research project were.
From the initial proposal to the approval of the final amendment, this turned out to be a year long negotiation with the IRB and a surprisingly valuable object of analysis. Involving the YDRC as institutionally-recognized research personnel created time and space within the project to reflect critically on our own modes of knowledge production within the project. Further, designing our own social network's Terms, or assent form, afforded the YDRC with a meaningful comparison to other research relationships they were/n't consenting to through their routine social media use. The process of crafting our online assent form (a.k.a our Terms of Participation) began by questing how we could best inform our participants of their rights and role within our research while also meeting IRB standards. Then, once we had created an online assent form that was approved by our IRB, they began to ask 'why can't Facebook do this?' In this way the IRB became less of an institutional obstacle and more a valuable object of reflexive and comparative analysis within the project (see Slide 5).
REMIXING THE SPATIAL-TEMPORALITY OF DEFENDING AND DEPOSITING
Engaging young people in both media and knowledge production provided fertile grounds for remixing research relationships with/in media ecologies. Similarly, involving digital media as both an object of analysis and a research method in my project challenged my own modes of production and afforded more reflexive and comparative scholarship. As my work with the YDRC came to a close, our IRB application expired, and I finished writing-up 'The Dissertation,' I looked for ways to continue pushing the boundaries of the project in its new phase. I wanted to make my dissertation and its defense more of a public medium and less of a formal academic exercise hidden in a windowless room.
Preparing for my defense caused no shortage of stress, yet it was still something I eagerly looked forward to. Here were six brilliant scholars whom I deeply respected that were going to take time to read my dissertation and then engage me in a two hour discussion about it. The defense was a final test on my path to a Ph.D. and it was also the culmination and celebration of years of work—work I really enjoyed doing. As such, I wanted to record and stream my defense to expand who could attend, from where, and when. While the norms of a defense tend to vary by institution and program, within Environmental Psychology it was custom to hold an open defense and (at least) announce it on the program's internal listserv. So proposing that my defense be live-streamed and recorded was not only inline with the ideals of my research project but also my program's 'open' philosophy regarding defenses. Yet, at that point in time, only a hand-full of groups had used the GC's new live-streaming services and none for the purposes of a dissertation defense. With the critical institutional support of my committee—special thanks here to Cindi Katz and Michelle Fine—I worked with IT to set up cameras and microphones in the room where the defense was to take place so that the presentation and discussion would be both live-streamed and properly archived for future streaming.
The public defense at the CUNY Graduate Center ended up having about 40 people in attendance and 20 via live-stream. Colleagues in attendance from the academic community I reference in my introduction (namely Desiree Fields, Maggie Galvan, Jen Jack Gieseking, Kiersten Greene, Amanda Licastro, and Collette Sosnowy) adopted the #gtddiss hashtag and began live-tweeting the defense—leading to over 100 #gtddiss tweets. The archived audio of the defense, made available through Soundcloud, has since accrued over 60 listens while a Storify of #gtddiss tweets (graciously and spontaneously created by Amanda Licastro) has received over 90 views.
After the defense it came time to copyright and deposit my dissertation. Following the lead of media scholars such as danah boyd and Alice Marwick, and with the help of GC librarians, I choose to copyright my dissertation with a Creative Commons license so as to make sharing it online an explicitly condoned practice. Both the full license and its "human-readable" version were included in the dissertation's appendix for easy reference. My university required that my dissertation not only be deposited with the library but also uploaded to ProQuest's database. I choose not to pay to embargo access and I also choose not to pay $90 to make my dissertation freely available through ProQuest. Thus, if someone found my defense in the ProQuest database, they would have to pay to access it. Or, they would hopefully see that the dissertation's official title begins with the "mydigitalfootprint.org" URL and follow that link to a freely available copy (see Slide 6). Including the project's name and URL in the dissertation title and adding a Creative Commons license served as a simple but effective way of hacking any proprietary databases that might restrict access to the document itself.
Finally, a PDF of the dissertation, a methodological timeline (using Timeline JS), info on the YDRC, the defense recording, and my list of references (using ZotPress) among other materials were archived online at the project's title and made publicly available the day I deposited with my university's library (see Slide 7). The PDF and corresponding site were both subsequently archived in the GC's open Institutional Repository this Fall. The MyDigitalfootprint.ORG Project site has, at the time of this panel, accrued over 5,000 unique views while the dissertation PDF has been downloaded over 700 times through the same site and another 28 times since added to the GC's repository. I do not offer these rough statistics, or those above regarding my defense, as a metric of success. I offer them to highlight how institutional and community support--along with digital media--greatly expand the traditional time, space, and audience of a dissertation.
Instead of studying digital media and youth from a distance, I sought to critically involve both in my process of research and scholarly communication. This left me with a dissertation model I was/am proud of but that I could not have envisioned from the project's start. In hindsight, I believe this suggests that we in academia should put less emphasis on developing 'air-tight' dissertation proposals, and put more effort into building academic spaces and media that better support the unpredictable epistemological and ontological turns a critical dissertation is likely to make once in process. In sum, successfully remixing the diss requires rethinking the time, space, tools, and community necessary for meaningful scholarship in an information age.
Donovan, G.T. (2013). The medium is the method. In MyDigitalFootprint.ORG: Young people and the proprietary ecology of everyday data. City University of New York: 78-105.
Luttrell, W. (2010). Interactive and reflexive models of qualitative research design. In W. Luttrell (Ed.), Qualitative educational research: Readings in reflexive methodology and transformative practice. New York: Routledge. 159-164.
Twitter: @amandalicastro
Project Link: http://prezi.com/skvk1o59_1hk/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyF_17_OhbM
I began searching for a Phd program in 2009 after completing a traditional masters program in English Literature and teaching as an adjunct for two years. These experiences gave me a clear sense of what I wanted to accomplish through doctoral study. As a "freeway flyer" I had come to rely on educational technology in order to facilitate teaching six courses a semester across three different campuses. Each institution supported different course management systems, and as I learned to navigate these systems I began to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of each tool and wanted to research these issues further. However, during my search for a doctoral program I found that very few institutions had invested in the digital humanities, and, as many critics have noted, digital humanities programs were not particularly interested in pedagogy. I came to the Graduate Center because of the innovative work of individuals working within CUNY – projects that were being supported and given recognition. For example, Matthew K. Gold presented "Looking for Whitman," his collaborative, cross-campus teaching experiment run on WordPress, at the Modern Language Association conference that year, and at the same time an alumnus I was working with pointed me toward the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate program. What I did not know was that there were groundbreaking projects formulating throughout the 24 campus CUNY system, and that these projects would lay the foundation for my future.
In my four years at the Graduate Center the digital humanities program has grown from budding to burgeoning, with several institutional initiatives in place to support digital work. This trajectory has been built on years of inventive approaches to humanities research, such as those collected through the crowdsourced #remixthediss Google Spreadsheet, which includes examples of non-traditional approaches to the dissertation across the disciplines. In my experience, the support for unconventional scholarship extends beyond the dissertation stage; which represents an essential systemic shift. Through my coursework at the Graduate Center I was encouraged to experiment with digital methods: I TEI[1] encoded an Emily Dickinson poem, I did a distant reading[2] of prefaces in 18th century novels, and I developed an online academic genealogy project with my classmates. In fact, the latter collaborative experiment evolved into full-scale digital project: the Writing Studies Tree (WST). Through the work of Ben Miller, Jill Belli, and myself, along with our faculty advisors Sondra Perl and Matthew K Gold and student consultants,[3] the WST was just awarded its third Provost's Digital Innovation Grant.[4] At the same time, my coursework and oral exams exposed me to the new media and composition theory I needed to argue for the relevance of this work. This combination of theory and practice not only gave me the tools to formulate my dissertation project, it also helped me secure an Instructional Technology Fellowship at Macaulay Honors College, which was a key turning point in my academic career.
As an Instructional Technology Fellow I work to help professors across the disciplines integrate technology into their courses in pedagogically sound ways. For over a decade, this program has maintained a multiuser Wordpress install to support the creation of course sites and student-run blogs. I am using the archive of over 3000 Macaulay eportfolio sites as my data for my dissertation in order to investigate student writing in online open spaces. This case study challenges the assertions about both the benefits and drawbacks of this practice through a mixed methods approach including surveys and interviews with the students, as well as a distant reading of all 3000 sites, and a close reading of six student-run sites.
Much like Gregory Donovan's dissertation project, a primary goal of my project is to investigate what Jill Walker Rettberg terms "dataism," or the collection and use of data by corporations through the mining of personal devices. Course management systems and other educational technology platforms collect student data for a variety of uses, including product development, marketing, and advertising purposes.[5] My objective is to subvert this agenda by mining student data for pedagogical purposes. The driving line of inquiry concerns what we can learn by looking at a large quantity of student writing altogether in a way that was not possible before computational analysis techniques such as the methods I will now describe. Additionally, since these methods are so new, and my intention is to produce a meta-awareness of process in a pedagogical context, I describe in depth the methodology employed in this project step-by-step on my own blog.
In order to embark on this large data project ethically, I first had to strip out any sites or posts that were marked private from the data and I had to create simple consent forms for my surveys and interviews. Again, pointing back toward Gregory Donovan's influential project, I needed to ensure these consent forms were understandable to a young adult, in comparison to the terms of agreements we regularly encounter through social media sites, but rarely see when adopting education technology. Also, since this is not a typical dissertation project in the humanities, my IRB process was extremely complicated, and took over four months to complete. Although the sites are public, it is important to remember that the data I am using does reveal identifying information about the students. Projects that utilize data generated in online spaces demands the researcher grapple with the many difficult ethical questions that using "public" materials raises. In fact in my discussions with other writing studies scholars engaging with these sensitive questions resulted in a conference panel at CCCC in Indianapolis. Fortunately, the Graduate Center Internet Research Team (IRT) was established by students and faculty dealing with these same issues, and they were a wonderful resource for me as I worked through these questions.
In fact, the IRT led me to use Opinio, which is secure survey software licensed by CUNY. I used this program to conduct my surveys of incoming freshman. This is one of the many ways in which collaborating and consulting with researchers outside my discipline has strengthened my scholarship, and also why it is so important for our institutions to provide access to these digital tools. Rather than relying on a third party provider (such as the popular SurveyMonkey), I relied on a sophisticated program that not only provided a multitude of formats to structure my questions, but also gave me options in graphically displaying the results. Through these surveys I found that only about 30% of Macaulay freshman had composed on a blog before entering college, and those who did blog often did so in an educational setting, specifically through an English course or school newspaper. Very few students maintained a personal site before entering college, and within that subset even fewer purchases their own domain name and hosted their site on their own servers. It is also important to note that almost all of the students are on more than one social networking site, and therefore are actively writing in online, open spaces. The use of WordPress sites in the Macaulay Honors program is new to the vast majority of freshman, but writing in public spaces online is not.
The second phase of research is a distant reading of the 3000 public sites. The process of dealing with this data is new to me, but my ability to deal with these challenging tasks comes from both experience working on my other digital projects, but also largely from the help of my peers, especially Micki Kaufman and Evan Missula who work as Digital Fellows at the Graduate Center. The data from the eportfolio sites is in MySQL maintained in a database system that runs on my server. I process it through a series of sampling, similar to an experiment in the hard sciences. This is perhaps why we call digital humanities centers "labs," because we form hypotheses, test data, analyze results, and try to replicate those results. First, I select small segments of data as test cases. For example, I can start with the raw data from one "Arts in New York City" seminar, which in its original form is very messy, and requires human intervention to prepare (see figure 1). The first step is to extract the content categories that contain relevant information for my purposes, and transfer it to a text editor in order to strip out unwanted characters - such as leftover HTML code that will distort my results. After that I pair down the data again to create relationship tables in Excel.
In the example below, I use topic modeling to see what words students use in proximity to the word "art". I have also used this same data set to look at other metrics, such as how often students posted on the site and the average length of their posts, and used this data to compare the relationship between length and frequency of post by students. These experiments usually start with sketchpad and pencil to work through the information before messing with the data itself. This is both fun - I am playing with my data - and frustrating. I end up with dozens of spreadsheets and sample visualizations for each small subset of the data I am testing.
But the results can be pretty beautiful (see Figure 2). I have taken this grammatically incorrect caption from a popular sub-reddit of people who play with data, but in this visualization you see the result of my topic modeling experiment. This cloud contains words that appear in proximity to the word "art" in the student's posts. This visualization was done in Gephi; the nodes are colored by words that also appear in proximity to each other, the size of the word is how many times it appears, and the thickness of the line denotes how strong the connection is to the central word. There are always unexpected errors despite the tedious cleaning process (as seen here in the "äù"), which is the result of human error in combination with machine reading properties. And typically these visualizations do not provide answers, but rather more questions. In this case, I can see that students are writing experientially about their encounters with art (note the size and proximity of the words experience, walking, public, place, meet, and watched) and that they are interacting with a wide variety of art (see the words performance, gallery, photography, recitals, shows, dance, and opera), but I am also wondering the significance of words like "identity" and "strong" in this visualization. This is one way to see writing in a new way.
The next phase of my dissertation will be to interview the winners of Macaulay's Eportfolio Expo, a self-nominated competition for the "best" student-produced site judged by educational technology specialists and instructors affiliated with CUNY (see figure 3). I will conduct these interviews and perform close reading their winning submissions in order to identify areas of learning transfer between the faculty-led course sites and the student-directed sites. This is all a learning process, which takes trial and error. I never know what the results will be when I start working on a new data set, but so far, the journey has been as fruitful as the preliminary results.
All three stages of my research include various types of media - videos, data visualizations, infographics, screenshots, and links to live sites. This work is hard to represent on paper. Therefore I am constantly re-imagining what form my final product will take. From the beginning, I have been blogging my way through this process in order to provide an example for other scholars who want to engage in these methods, but also to promote an open, transparent approach to academic work. My philosophy is to - as Kathleen Fitzpatrick famously wrote - "do the risky thing" (Chronicle of Higher Education). Actually, one of my prospectus reviews wrote that he had never seen a dissertation like this before. But thanks to the endless support of my committee, Matthew K. Gold, Sondra Perl, David Greetham, and now Cathy Davidson, I am pursuing the project I dreamed of doing back in 2009. And I see this ethos of risk-taking catching on here at GC as is evident by the amazing work of my fellow grant winners, and especially the dissertations of English students Jesse Merandy, who is working on a Walt Whitman video game; Ben Miller, who is doing a distant reading of dissertations, and Jeff Binder, whose pre-dissertation project the Distance Machine is truly groundbreaking. And this is happening in humanities departments worldwide. I believe if, as Jesse Stommel suggests in the online journal Hybrid Pedagogy, we can view the dissertation as a learning opportunity, it will make room for these experimental approaches. Hopefully these experiments will create useful products, rather that just the dusty bound manuscripts that sit on shelves, or worse, behind paywalls.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "Do 'the Risky Thing' in Digital Humanities." The Chronicle of Higher Education 25 Sept. 2011. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Web. 20 Dec. 2014.
[1] TEI stands for Textual Coding Initiative, which has become the standard mark-up language for digital humanities projects. Read more at www.tei-c.org/
[2] Distant reading, a term coined by Franco Moretti, refers to the process of employing computational textual analysis to a large body or texts, such as concordance or topic modeling, in order to identify patterns and outliers in a body of work. See: Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. 1 edition. London ; New York: Verso, 2013.
[3] A complete list of our team members can be found at http://writingstudiestree.org/live/about/team
[4] For a description of this grant and details of the other winning projects visit http://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/category/provosts-digital-innovation-gra...
[5] Many articles have been written recently announcing that specific educational technology companies are working towards making this process more transparent – including several that have adopted policies to restrict the use of this data and dispose of it after the student graduates.
Twitter: @nsousanis
Project link: www.spinweaveandcut.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZW10ZcwebM
In setting out to do this work, the question I started with was not why do it in comics form, but why not do it in comics? Before returning to graduate school, I was doing complex and accessible works in comics, and there were a slew of powerful examples out in the world like Art Spiegelman's Maus (1997) and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1993). It seemed to me like the argument was over – case closed. But, academia tends to move slow and as we know can be rather narrow in its thinking. So as I became immersed in that environment again, I recognized the political ramifications of doing this work. This meant that the dissertation needed to be directly about itself and metaphorically about the context it was created in.
For the purposes of this conversation, I'll skip over examining how comics work and offer a general overview of my broader idea of "Unflattening" (the title of the work). By "flatness", I want to suggest a narrowing of our sight, a contraction of possibilities. Herbert Marcuse (1991) describes "conforming to a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior," and I in turn likened this to Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novel critiquing Victorian society, Flatland. Flatlanders – the geometric inhabitants of this two-dimensional world – are able to move East, West, South, and North, but they have no concept of "upwards." They don't know what it is to move off the plane they reside in. It's simple to see when we look at this abstracted situation, but not so easy in terms of ourselves – what are the dimensions we can't access? How can we even know such dimensions exist that we can't put our minds around? I see the BOXES that we place our learning in as contributing to a kind of flatness. Boxes of time – period, space – a classoom, subject of study, etc. We learn in boxes and then we tend to draw boxes within ourselves. Limit the things we can't see. So a big part of what I'm after is "what are we missing when we see through only narrow channels, and what might we make visible when we introduce other ways of seeing. (For examples of pages directly referencing Flatland see here.)
This brings me to my dog – and a dog's sense of smell as a way of seeing. A dog's sense of smell isn't simply more powerful than yours or mine, it's vastly more nuanced. That is it can sort of different layers of time – in terms of, say, what visited this tree an hour ago, five hours ago, yesterday, a week ago. The smells reveal dimensions of experience – "upwards" – that we don't have access to.
As we move beyond the cycloptic and begin to incorporate multiple modes of seeing, of working, we can get past looking at things head on, and see that they have sides, dimension, that we can move around them, turn them over. And in this way, I believe it gives us the means to step out of the flatness of thought we may find ourselves in, and begin to gain perspective and a glimpse at the boundaries that limit us – boundaries that we often construct.
On that note, I wanted to bring up an instance of how institutional rules had an effect on the work. This page [briefly described - it has typical scholarly writing formatting, double-spaced text, 12-point font, regular margins, with an illustration set apart in it] is the only page out of 130 or so drawn comics pages that looks somewhat like a dissertation is supposed to look. It's got the right font, font size, proper spacing, etc. It's a discussion of Plato and Descartes and their denial of the senses, and specifically Plato's calling images "shadows of shadows." It's the place I turn to the reader, break the fourth wall sort of, and say, this is what I've been doing and why I've been doing it. This is what I'm taking on. And so one turns the completed dissertation into the office of doctoral studies and they return it with corrections – citations, margins and such. So of the 130-some pages – I got feedback on exactly one – this one! They pointed out that I had a figure on this page (I do, it's labeled Fig 1, to look how a figure would look inserted in traditional scholarly texts), and said that I needed to have a list of figures at the beginning of the dissertation and list this figure in it. I'd like to think they were joking. I'm fairly certain they weren't. But the ridiculousness of having a list of figures for the single page with the least amount of images ended up emphasizing my point here in a way I wouldn't have thought of. It was brilliant really. (The page in question can be found here.)
So to close here, I want to talk about the things made possible in working this way that I wouldn't have achieved working solely in text. In some sense this is to set about reversing the mind-body split that Descartes put in motion. When we draw – we take an idea, a movement, out of our heads, and in putting it on a surface, allow our visual system – which is constantly processing enormous amounts of information without our awareness – to go to work on it. It allows for a conversation to be had between drawing and drawer, and make connections, see possibilities not available solely in our heads. I see my drawings as collaborators in generating ideas – a partner that in working with I think my comics are smarter than I am. One specific example – a page about the transformative power of stories in a chapter on imagination. I had in mind a theme of playing on Scheherazade's stories within stories, and have the page unfold as a backward S of separate images that each connected to the one prior – as in Zoom or the Powers of 10 film. In the midst of this, I wanted to say that by stories, I didn't just mean the fanciful, but things like science as well – and had I been working in text, I would've been done – I just said it. But here, I needed to have something that didn't just tell, but showed – embodied the idea, and worked with the visual composition I was orchestrating. So I searched the time period and place the 1,001 Nights were collected, and ended up coming across the work of astronomers working in the Arab Golden Age whose works were picked up by Copernicus and (uncredited) were significant in his momentous shift in our view of the solar system. I'd done a page on Copernicus earlier – so this was really feeling just right! On that page, I'd tackled the idea that nothing had changed except our perspective – which changed everything. I studied the mathematics of the "Tusi Couple" and worked on the composition for about three weeks to make sense of it enough for this very small sequence within a single page of the week. (You can see the finished page here)
On the outside kind of a crazy amount of time for something that is really outside of the work itself. But at the same time, this is kind of the point of bringing in multiple ways of working – it opened spaces for me to search, to make discoveries. Discoveries I would've been unable to do otherwise. My dissertation and research in general has thus become a journey – it's a lot of fun even in its arduousness. I had a blast doing the dissertation because it was my work, and because it took me places I didn't expect. And I think that's what our work should be.
Abbott, Edwin Abbott. (1884, 1952). Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions. London: Seeley. Reprint, New York: Dover.
Marcuse, Herbert. (1991). One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press.
McCloud, Scott. (1993). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, MA: Tundra.
Spiegelman, Art. (1997). Maus: A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon Books.
We would like to extend our sincere thanks to Cathy N. Davidson for inviting each of us to be a part of the original presentation, and for offering her excellent introduction to both the live and written results. We would also like to thank the co-sponsors of this event The Futures Initiative, HASTAC, CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, the English Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and those live-streaming the event at the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship/Studio@Butler at Columbia University, and the Rutgers-Camden Digital Studies Center. A special thanks to the on-site team, especially Danica Savonick, Karl Westerling, and Katina Rogers. Additional thanks to Hybrid Pedagogy for covering this event through social media and the online journal, and to the thousands of participants on Twitter. Finally we must thank our committee members, advisors, and professors for supporting our work along the way.
remixthediss
From: Graduate Training in the 21st Century
Building the Alternative Academy
By Melissa Dalgleish Daniel Powell
Call for Papers: Beyond the Proto-Monograph: New Models for the Dissertation
By Amanda Licastro Cathy N. Davidson Jade E. Davis Gregory T. Donovan Nick Sousanis
Toward Innovative Dissertations and Public Engagement
By Katina Rogers
What's the Point? The Dissertation as a Process and Not a Product
By Alexandrina Agloro Johanna Taylor Elyse Gordon
All work at #Alt-Academy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
#Alt-Academy is a project of MediaCommons, a digital scholarly network.


text:
import game
from game import *
import unittest

class GameTest(unittest.TestCase):
    # def test_acceptance_test(self):
    # val monteCarlo = new MonteCarlo()
    #val winProba = monteCarlo.winProbability()
    #winProba should be <= 1.0
    #winProba should be >= 0.7
    def test_game_lost_after_nine_crows(self):
        game = Game(iter([Dice.CROW]*9))
        assert game.play() == Outcome.LOST
    def test_game_is_won_after_20_baskets(self):
        game = Game(iter([Dice.BASKET]*20))
        assert game.play() == Outcome.WIN
    def test_game_is_lost_after_20_baskets(self):
        game = Game(iter([Dice.BASKET] + [Dice.CROW]*9))
        assert game.play() == Outcome.LOST
    def test_game_is_won_after_8_crow_then_20_baskets(self):
        game = Game(iter([Dice.CROW]*8 + [Dice.BASKET]*20))
        assert game.play() == Outcome.WIN
    def test_game_is_lost_after_19_baskets_then_9_crows(self):
        game = Game(iter([Dice.BASKET]*19 + [Dice.CROW]*9))
        assert game.play() == Outcome.LOST

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


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text:
// Normally, plugin's javascripts is not loaded until explicitly requested. However,
// there are situations where plugin functionality should be globally available. In this case,
// each such plugin should define a special file called global.js.
// Everything within global.js is executed on every page load.
import "../../plugins/**/app/javascript/**/global.{js,jsx}"


Shell the eggs and discard the yolks, reserving the whites.
Chop the egg whites. Combine the chopped egg whites, celery, scallion, green pepper, mayonnaise, yogurt, black pepper and Dijon mustard in a bowl.
Spread four slices rye bread with the egg salad mixture. Top with romaine lettuce leaves and the remaining four slices of rye bread.
3 Points per serving (1 sandwich).


text:
Q: Problems with repetition and grouping I'm trying to use repetition to trim down input for a sed pattern but I'm getting unexpected results.
The text that I am parsing is structured as:
   \s+\d+\s+\d+\s+\d+\s+\d+\[0-9A-Za-z] ...

I've tried using repetition to reduce the volume of input on one line and make the command simpler to read/debug:
   ^\s+((\d+\s+){4})([0-9A-Za-z]).*$

When I try to use this in sed as a substitution command, the value of \2 is always equal to the last word from \1. If I change the repetition from 4 to 5 I can get the alphanumeric pattern into \2 but then it also appears in \1. I need the values in \1 for something else so I don't want to muddle the results or use a work around like removing the last word form the \1 output.
Does anyone have any idea why this is happening or what I am doing wrong?
(I know that awk would be the easiest way to deal with this problem but I am determined to solve this with sed and improve my understanding of regular expressions.)

A: You can't do that. When you repeat a capturing group, precedant capture is overwritten with the next, this is the reason why your capturing group contains the last match.

A: sed 's/\(\([[:blank:]]\{1,\}[0-9]\{1,\}\)\{4\}\)\([0-9A-Za-z]\)/[\1](\2){\3}/' YourFile
#  \1  +---------------------------------------+
#  \2    +------------------------------+
#  \3                                           +-------------+

replacement variable are count front the order of open parenthesis, not the count of it in case of repetition

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Pregnancy > Fetal Health
8 Scientific Signs That You're Having a Boy or a Girl
by Sarah Williams
Medically Reviewed by Aaron Styer, M.D.
Sharie Kennedy/Corbis
Is it a boy or a girl? Although gender prediction old wives' tales are just for fun, there are a few science-backed signs that it could be a boy or girl that may offer clues about your baby's sex.
Signs you might be carrying a girl
Signs you might be carrying a boy
What is the heart rate gender prediction?
Gender prediction superstitions
It's certainly a lot of fun guessing when you're expecting … and there's no shortage of people willing to join in (you're carrying a boy because you're carrying high in your belly, says one friend; you've got acne because you're carrying a girl, says your mom).
But you may be wondering if there's anything, short of noninvasive prenatal testing and prenatal diagnostic tests like CVS and amnio, that can clue you in to your baby-to-be's sex. The answer is yes — and no.
Findings from numerous studies yield clues that can point to an increased probability of which gender you're carrying (though just as many gender prediction old wives' tales have no science to back them up).
While you shouldn't take the following findings to heart — they're still just for fun, and even the predictions that have been studied often tilt only ever so slightly toward one sex or the other — they may make the game of odds slightly more accurate.
You're suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum
Most moms-to-be experience some form of morning sickness when they're expecting. But some moms have it much worse, suffering from severe nausea and vomiting (called hyperemesis gravidarum).
Studies have found that women who are pregnant with girls may be more likely to experience nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. These findings were even more strongly linked to women who suffer from severe morning sickness.
What's to blame? The pregnancy hormone hCG, say researchers, which female fetuses produce more of than males. (Just don't tell that to Kate Middleton, who has suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum during all three of her pregnancies with two sons and a daughter.)
You're extra forgetful
For reasons unknown, some research suggests that women who give birth to girls consistently under-perform in tests of memory — specifically in areas of listening, computational and visualization skills — compared to moms carrying boys.
How to Have a Boy or a Girl
The Ring Gender Test: A Pregnancy Superstition That Really Works?
So the next time you can't remember where you put the car keys, you may be able to blame your pregnancy brain on the baby girl you're carrying.
You're under a lot of stress
The more stressed out you were when you conceived, the more likely it is that you'll have a girl, say researchers. That's because girls may be less vulnerable to unfavorable conditions in the womb than boys are.
One small 2019 study, for example, found that moms-to-be who reported experiencing physical and psychological stress were more likely to give birth to daughters.
Your baby is breech
Are you past 32 weeks pregnant and your baby is still stubbornly bottom-down, head-up? It may be time to think pink! A 2015 study of all singleton breech births in Hungary between 1996 and 2011 found that breech babies are significantly more likely to be girls than boys.
You ate a high-calorie diet at the time of conception
One study found that eating a high-calorie diet at the time of conception and eating regular breakfasts may slightly increase the chance that you'll be having a boy.
The researchers found that 56 percent of women with the highest calorie intake around the time of conception had boys, compared to 45 percent among women with the lowest caloric intake. The evolutionary thinking goes that sons require more resources (i.e. more calories) than daughters do, so a higher-calorie diet would favor a baby boy-to-be.
You're eating more during your pregnancy
Is it a boy or a girl? Your appetite may offer a clue. One study tracked the diets of moms-to-be and found that women who were pregnant with boys ate about 10 percent more calories than those who were pregnant with girls.
Why the greater appetite? Researchers suspect testosterone secreted by male fetuses could be sending their mothers a signal to eat more. And that could explain why baby boys tend to be bigger at birth than baby girls.
You're revolted by formerly favorite foods
Got food aversions — even to ones that were favorites? Researchers say that the more disgust toward foods a pregnant woman feels, the likelier it is she's pregnant with a boy.
The reason? Aversions are tied to the way a woman's immune system functions as she tries to protect her growing fetus. Squeamishness, say researchers, is designed to protect the especially vulnerable male fetus by causing the expectant mom to stay away from potentially sketchy substances.
You develop gestational diabetes
Some research has found that moms-to-be pregnant with sons are more likely to develop gestational diabetes — a pregnancy condition characterized by higher-than-normal glucose in the blood — than expectant moms who are pregnant with daughters.
Researchers aren't sure why a boy fetus leads to greater pregnancy-associated metabolic changes than a girl fetus does, but these findings seem to be backed up by more than one study.
There is one folktale, however, that scientists have studied — and it has to do with whether fetal heart rate can predict gender.
Conventional wisdom holds that if the baby's heart rate is less than 140 beats per minute, you're having a boy; if it's more than 140 beats per minute, you're having a girl.
Medical research has debunked this heart rate gender prediction theory. A 2018 study of nearly 10,000 pregnancies found that while the baseline fetal heart rate of girls was very slightly higher than for boys, any differences they noted were very small and essentially not meaningful in the big picture.
The truth is, a normal fetal heart rate fluctuates between 120 and 160 beats per minute. If you measure your baby's heart rate at random intervals, it's likely you'll get a different reading each time.
The only time when there is an actual difference in heart rate between a boy and girl? It's during labor itself, when female babies seem to have faster heart rates than males, for reasons unknown.
As for all the gender-prediction folktales — the ones that claim to predict with certainty what sex you're carrying? While they don't have any science to back them up, they're certainly fun to play around with. Here are some of the most common old wives' tales that claim to predict a baby's gender:
Where you're carrying. If you're carrying low in your hips, the theory goes, you're having a girl. If you're carrying high in your belly (like a basketball), you're having a boy.
Position of the linea nigra. If your linea nigra (the line of pigmentation on your belly) runs only up to the belly button, some say you're having a girl. If it runs past the belly button and up toward the ribs, it's a boy.
Nipple color. Darker nipples mean you're having a boy, the legend goes. But in fact, pregnancy hormones cause most women's nipples to darken (and maybe also become more tender), whether they're having a boy or a girl.
What are you craving? Hankerings for sour, salty or protein-rich foods mean you're having a boy. Can't get enough sweets or fruit? It's a girl.
You're (really) moody. Is every day an emotional rollercoaster? Intense mood swings are thought to be a sign of a girl, while more even-keeled moods indicate a boy. (In fact, pregnancy mood swings are totally normal no matter your baby's sex.)
Where are my socks? Some believe that boys make your feet cold during pregnancy, but girls don't.
What's your pee color? Having a girl makes your urine darker yellow, while having a boy makes it lighter. The truth? Darker pee is a sign that you might be dehydrated — so drink up!
Try the ring gender prediction test. Take your wedding ring (or another ring or needle) and attach it to a thread. Lie down, and have someone hold the dangling ring over your belly. If it swings in a circular motion, you're having a girl. If it moves in back and forth like a pendulum, you're having a boy.
Chinese birth calendar. Check out the Chinese gender predictor chart (a.k.a. Chinese birth calendar), which predicts the baby's gender based on your age and the month your baby was conceived.
Remember, predicting the baby's sex ultimately has about a 50 percent chance of coming true. Aside from genetic testing, the only way to be 100 percent sure of your baby's sex is to wait until he or she is born. In the meantime? Try a few guessing games — and look forward to seeing how your predictions pan out!
Written by Sarah Williams
Sarah C.P. Williams is a freelance science writer based in Hawai'i who covers medicine, biology, and anything else that makes her go "wow!" for magazines, websites, and scientific journals worldwide. Her writing can be found at www.sarahcpwilliams.com and www.facebook.com/sarahcpwilliams.
What to Expect When You're Expecting, 5th edition, Heidi Murkoff.
WhatToExpect.com, When Can You Find Out Baby's Sex?, July 2021.
WhatToExpect.com, When Your Baby's Sex Is Determined, July 2021.
WhatToExpect.com, Hyperemesis Gravidarum During Pregnancy, November 2020.
WhatToExpect.com, How to Relieve Breast Pain and Tenderness During Pregnancy, April 2021.
WhatToExpect.com, How Much Water Should You Drink During Pregnancy?, December 2020.
WhatToExpect.com, Chinese Gender Predictor, October 2021.
WhatToExpect.com, HCG Levels During Pregnancy: What is Normal?, May 2021.
WhatToExpect.com, Morning Sickness and Nausea During Pregnancy, June 2021.
WhatToExpect.com, NonInvasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT), January 2022.
Johns Hopkins Medicine, Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, Old Wives' Tales, 2022.
Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Stress During Pregnancy May Affect Baby's Sex, Risk of Preterm Birth, October 2019.
National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, Gender-Related Differences in Fetal Heart Rate During First Trimester, 2006.
National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, Severity of Nausea and Vomiting in Singleton and Twin Pregnancies in Relation to Fetal Sex: The Japan Environment and Children's Study (JECS), September 2019.
National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, Selective and Persistent Effect of Foetal Sex on Cognition in Pregnant Women, May 2005.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Maternal Prenatal Stress Phenotypes Associate with Fetal Neurodevelopment and Birth Outcomes, November 2019.
Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavia, Breech Presentation: Its Predictors and Consequences. An Analysis of the Hungarian Tauffer Obstetric Database (1996–2011), December 2015.
National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, Average Energy Intake Among Pregnant Women Carrying a Boy Compared with a Girl, June 2003.
Physiology & Behavior, Disgust in Pregnancy and Fetus Sex—Longitudinal Study, February 2015.
Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences, Experimental Alteration of Litter Sex Ratios in a Mammal, November 2007.
National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, Effect of Fetal Sex on Maternal and Obstetric Outcomes, June 2017.
Diabetes Care, Fetal Sex and Maternal Risk of Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: The Impact of Having a Boy, May 2015.
National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, Sex Differences in Fetal Heart Rate and Variability Assessed by Antenatal Computerized Cardiotocography, December 2018.
Fetal Health

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Dr. Jennifer Terry is a professor of Women's Studies/Gender & Sexuality Studies with affiliations in Anthropology and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine. My scholarship is concentrated in feminist cultural studies; science and technology studies; comparative and historical formations of gender, race, and sexuality; critical approaches to modernity; state-sponsored violence and biomedicine; and American studies in transnational perspective. Her work has intersected with the area of sexuality, war, and security. Her many works include a book-Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America (Duke 2017), also an article-"'Momism' and the Making of Treasonous Homosexuals" in Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, (Eds.)., Bad Mothers The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America (1998), New York University Press, pp. 169-190.
Bloom, Richard W. and Terry, Jennifer (2019) "Sexual Orientation and Personnel Security," International Bulletin of Political Psychology: Vol. 19 : Iss. 1 , Article 2.


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https://www.evernote.com/l/AA1k9PiF_bJM3qju6-DeE1ZLwkKV17TVyV8


text:
Tratatul pentru crearea Uniunii Republicilor Sovietice Socialiste este documentul care a oficializat crearea federației a mai multor republici sovietice în forma URSS-ului. Preambulul acestui tratat a fost Declarația pentru crearea URSS.

Pe 29 decembrie 1922 a fost convocată o conferință a delegațiilor din RSFS Rusă, RSFS Transcaucaziană, RSS Ucraineană și RSS Belarusă, care a aprobat Declarația și Tratatul pentru crearea URSS. Aceste două documente au fost aprobate de Primul Congres al Sovietelor și semnate a doua zi de șefii delegațiilor: Mihail Kalinin, Mihail Țhakaya, Mihail Frunze, Grigori Petrovski ș Aleksandr Cerviakov.

Structura
Documentul original a inclus coperta, Declarația, Tratatul (care conținea o prefață și 26 de punte) și semnăturile delegaților.

Pe Copertă era tipărit textul Uniunea Republicilor Sovietice Socialiste în patru limbi: rusă, franceză, engleză și germană. Tot în patru limbi era tipărit și textul Tratatului pentru formarea Uniunii Republicilor Sovietice Socialiste. Tot în acest document se află Stema originală a URSS.

Declarația era o reflectare a relațiilor internaționale contemporane și conținea o expunere de motive. Această declarație statua că lume ar fi fost împărțită în două tabere distincte: a "exploatatorilor" capitaliști, colonialiști, șovini, promotori ai discriminării și inegalității sociale, opusă celei "libere" a socialismului, a încrederii reciproce, păcii și cooperării și solidarității internaționale. Societatea liberă urma să distrugă societatea  exploatatorilor, iar înfrângerea intervenției aliate în Războiul Civil era reflectarea acestui principiu.

Declarația prezenta în detaliu motivele pentru care crearea Uniunii era necesară. În primul rând, după încheierea Războiului Civil, economia multor republici era distrusă, iar reclădirea acestora după modelul superior socialist ar fi fost mai dificilă fără o cooperare economică strânsă. În al doilea rând, amenințarea externă continua să planeze asupra taberei socialiste, iar nevoia apărării suveranității acesteia făcea necesară o alianță defensivă. În cele din urmă era subliniat factorul ideologic conform căruia regimul sovietic era internaționalist și promova unirea maselor muncitoare într-o singură mare familie socialistă. Acești trei factori justificau unirea într-un singur stat, care avea să garanteze prosperitatea, securitatea și dezvoltarea.

La sfârșit, Declarația subliniază că URSS este o uniune creată prin dorința liber exprimată a popoarelor și că scopul acesteia este să împlinească idealurile Revoluției din Octombrie. De asemenea, Declarația afirmă că fiecare republică sovietică poate să se alăture sau să părăsească Uniunea după cum dorește, iar obiectivul politicii externe este revoluția mondială. La final, Declarația exprimă convingerea că tratatul "… va servi ca un pas decisiv pe calea unirii tuturor muncitorilor în ‹‹Republica Socialistă Sovietică Mondială››".

După Declarație urmează Tratatul, care este format la rândul lui dintr-o prefață și 26 de puncte.

În  Prefață era declarat faptul că  RSFS Rusă, RSS Ucraineană, RSS Belarusă și RSFS Transcaucaziană (compusă din  Georgia, Azerbaidjan și Armenia) au acționat liber consimțit și au căzut de acord să formeze o singură   Uniune , care urma să fie condusă în conformitate cu principiile tratatului.

Articolul 1 prezintă pe larg competențele și responsabilitățile autorităților unionale. Printre acestea se aflau toate problemele legate de afacerile externe, (negocierea tratatelor internaționale, trasarea granițelor internaționale, acceptarea de noi membri ai uniunii, declararea războiului și semnarea păcii), de comerț (intern și extern), dezvoltarea economică, poșta și serviciile de transport, forțele armate, migrația internă, justiția, educația națională și asistența medicală și, nu în ultimul rând, unificarea unităților de măsură. Toate aceste domenii erau controlate în mod explicit de autoritățile unionale. În plus, autoritățile unionale puteau anula hotărârile autorităților republicane, (Congresele Sovietelor, Sovietele Comisarilor Poporului sau Comitetele Executive Centrale), care încălcau prevederile tratatului unional.

Articlolele 2-10 determinau structura autorităților supreme ale uniunii.
1 Autoritatea legislativă era exercitată de Congresul Sovietelor Uniunii Sovietice, iar între sesiunile acesteia de către Comitetul Executiv Central al Uniunii Sovietice
2 Membrii Congresului urmau să fie aleși de sovietele locale astfel: 1 reprezentant pentru 25.000 de alegători în orașe și 1 pentru 125.000 de alegători în regiunile rurale.
3 Delegații la Congres urmau să fie aleși de sovietele guberniale.
4 Congresul avea să fie convocat anual, la cererea a cel puțin două republici sau la inițiativa Comitetului Executiv Central al Uniunii Sovietice.
5 Comitetul Executiv Central al Uniunii Sovietice (ȚIK SSSR) urma să fie principalul organ executiv, care funcționa între congrese. Acest Comitet era format din 371 de delegați, care reprezentau în mod proporțional populația Uniunii, fiind aleși de Congres.
6 Comitetul Executiv Central al Uniunii Sovietice trebuia să se întrunească în ședințe ordinare de patru ori pe an și ori de câte ori era convocat la cererea guvernului unional – Sovietul Comisarilor Poporului sau a unuia dintre Comitetele Executive Centrale ale uneia dintre republici.
7 Ședințele Congresului și ale Comitetului Executiv Central urmau să aibă loc pe rând în câte una dintre capitalele republicane, într-o ordine pe care o decidea Prezidiul Comitetului Executiv.
8 Prezidiul era numit de Comitetul Executiv Central al Uniunii Sovietice și era organul puterii supreme în Uniune între sesiunile Comitetului.
9 Prezidiul era format din 19 membri, cu patru președinți, câte unul pentru fiecare republică a Uniunii.
10 Prezidiul avea puterea să convoace sesiunile neordinare ale Comitetului Executiv Central.

Articolul 11 Autoritatea executivă era Sovietul Comisarilor Poporului (SNK). Membrii Sovietului Comisarilor Poporului erau numiți de ȚIK. Guvernul era format din zece miniștri, un președinte și adjuncții acestuia.

Articolul 12 trata funcțiunile Curții Supreme a Uniunii Sovietice (subordonată ȚIK), a poliției politice OGPU - Administrația Politică Unită de Stat de pe lângă Sovietul Comisarilor Poporului al URSS (subordonată SNK) și ale președintelui OGPU, ministru fără portofoliu în SNK cu drept de vot consultativ. Justificarea dată în acest articol pentru crearea acestor două organe de stat a fost realizarea "măsurilor pentru lupta împotriva elementelor criminale și contrarevoluționare".

Articolele 13-17 trasau cadrul general al procedurilor legale între organele puterii supreme ale URSS (Comitetul Executiv Central și Sovietul Comisarilor Poporului) și cele corespunzătoare de la nivel republican. Decretele guvernamentale aprobate la nivel republican aveau putere legală doar pe teritoriul respectivelor republici.
13  Era subliniat caracterul multilingvistic al Uniunii prin faptul că toate decretele unionale urmau să fie tipărite în limbile oficiale ale republicilor constituente – rusă, ucraineană, belarusă, georgiană, armeană și azeră.
14 Era stabilit faptul că rezoluțiile guvernului unional puteau fi anulate doar de Comitetul Executiv Central sau de către prezidiul acestuia.
15 Suspendarea unui decret unional era posibilă doar dacă viola în mod evident legile existente.
16 Dacă un Comitetul Executiv republican nu era de acord cu un decret unional, opoziția republicană nu putea opri punerea în practică a hotărârii.
17 Republicile care remarcau o încălcare a legilor unionale de către un decret unional, trebuiau să se adreseze de îndată Comitetului Executiv Central al Uniunii Sovietice și comisarului poporului (ministrului) responsabil.

Articolul 18 numea autorităților care urmău să fie păstrate în subordinea republicilor sau a Sovietelor Comisarilor Poporului. Ffiecare guvern republican urma să aibă un președinte, adjuncți, unsprezece miniștri și miniștri plenipotențiari, care aveau vot consultativ în câteva comisariate unionale – cele ale afacerilor externe, apărării, comerțului exterior și transporturilor.

Articolul 19 numea organizațiile de la nivel republican: Sovietul Suprem al Economiei Naționale (al cărui președinte avea  rang de ministru în guvernul republican), comisariatele petru aprovizionarea cu alimente, pentru finanțe și muncă ca și inspectoratele sovietice care, deși erau subordonate guvernelor republicane, funcționau după regulamente stabilite de guvernul unionel

Articolul 20 stabileau modalitățile de formare a bugetelor republicane, ca parte a bugetului unional. Cheltuielile republicane urmau să fie aprobate la nivelul guvernului unional. Același guvern unional avea să decidă cota de profit care i se cuvenea fiecărei republici.

Articolul 21 crea cetățenia unică sovietică.
Articolul 22 stabilea simbolurile statului; Steagul Uniunii Sovietice, imnul național și Stema Uniunii Sovietice.
Articolul 23 stabilea drept capitală unională orașul Moscova.
Articolul 24 stabilea ca republicile să-și modifice constituțiile în conformitate cu prevederile tratatului unional.
Articolul 25 specifica ca toate amendamentele, adăugările sau modificările tratatului să poată fi făcute doar de către Congresul Sovietelor Uniunii Sovietice.

Articolul 26 stabilea dreptul fiecărei republici să părăsească Uniunea.

Motivația tratatului
Tratatul a fost un rezultat al numeroaselor conflicte politice interne din rândurile bolșevicilor și guvernelor republicane. Vladimir Ilici Lenin nu se aștepta ca Revoluția din Octombrie să ducă la prăbușirea granițelor internaționale în modul în care a făcut-o. El și colaboratorii săi apropiați precum Troțki credeau că victoria revoluției în Rusia nu era decât primul pas spre declanșarea viitoarei Revoluții Mondiale. Odată ce Armata Roșie a preluat controlul a unor teritorii mult mai întinse, inclusiv din apropierea frontierelor interne și internaționale, a apărut nevoia unei justificări a violării acestor granițe. Una dintre metodele folosite a fost crearea unor guverne alternative a unor republici sovietice, care să ceară sprijinul Armatei Roșii. Acesta a fost scenariul folosit cu succes în cazul intervențiilor din Ucraina, Georgia, Armenia și Azerbaidjan. Scenarii asemănătoare au eșuat însă în campanile din Lituania și Belorusia sovietice sau Polonia. Variante ale acestei politici au fost folosirea minorităților naționale pentru lupta împotriva etniei majoritare ca încazul fondării unor republici autonome în   Tatarstan sau Bașchiria. În zonele în care nu existau minorități naționale s-a folosit formarea unor entități statale artificiale, bazate doar pe amplasarea geografică, precum  Republica din Chita sau Turkestanul.

Înfrângerea Armatei Roșii în campania din Polonia a dus la amânarea oricăror planuri pentru declanșarea revoluției mondiale. În paralel, creșterea puterii lui I. V. Stalin a dus apariția unei noi orientări politice, și anume a  "socialismului într-o singură țară". Lenin a considerat mai potrivită crearea unor republici naționale și a sprijinit noua politică de  "indigenizare". Lenin a suferit primul atac cerebral în primăvara anului 1922, iar Stalin, pe atunci doar comisar al naționalităților, a fost promovat ca  Secretar General.

Stalin a afirmat că, odată cu încheierea Războiului Civil, comunismul de război fiind încheiat de Noua Politică Economică are nevoie de o țară a cărei structură de jure sa corespundă cu cea de facto. Din acest motiv era nevoie de o reorganizarea a statului bolșevic într-o singură entitate, care să elimine guvernele separate sovietice și să restaureze supremația Moscovei.

Această orientare intra în conflict direct cu sprijinitorii politicii de "indigenizare" și cu organele republicane de conducere. Printre oponenții cei mai cunoscuți ai acestei politici au fost Cristian Racovski în Ucrania și Filipp Makharadze și Polikarp Mdivani în Georgia (vedeți și Afacerea georgiană). Tratatul unional poate fi considerat ca un compromis între diferitele grupuri din tabăra bolșevicilor, care satisfăcea aspirațiile popoarelor mai mici (precum ucrainenii și georgienii) și asigura cadrul pentru posibile expansiuni viitoare. Astfel Belarusul, deși era cea mai mică republică, a adopta ca limbi oficiale și poloneza și idiș în încercarea de subminare a autorității vecinei sale, Republica Poloneză, prin folosirea minorităților belaruse și evreiești pe post de coloana a cincea. În același timp, tratatul a creat un guvern federal centralizat, în care cele mai importante funcții urmau să treacă sub controlul Moscovei.

Urmări imediate

Politică
La începtu, tratatul unional nu a modificat în mod semnificati spectrul politic. Cele mai importatnte poziții guvernamentale din RSFS Rusă au fost transferate în mod automat către URSS. De exemplu, postul de președinte al Comitetului Executiv Central (ȚIK) unional a fost preluat de  Mihail Kalinin, care a rămas în același timp și președinte al ȚIK al Rusiei. În același fel, Lenin președinte al Sovietului Comisarilor Poporului (SNK) al Rusiei, a devenit și președinte al SNK unional.  Alexei Ivanovici Rîkov a asigurat interimatul pentru ambele poziții, dată fiind boala lui Lenin.

Poziția de secretar general al lui Stalin a rămas neschimbată, nu și  poziția partidului. Până la semnarea tratatului unional, Partidul Comunist Rus (bolșevic) avea birouri care coordonau activitățile bolșevicilor din regiunile îndepărtate de centru (birourile din Turkestan, Transcaucazia, șa). După intrarea în vigoare a tratatului, partidul a fost reoganizat ca "unional". În vreme ce partidele bolșevice republicane și-au continuat existența, partidul rus nu numai că a păstrat  statutul de primus inter pares, dar a devenit autoritatea supremă în URSS.

Asia Centrală
Una dintre regiunile unde problema puteri nu fusese rezolvată până în momentul în care se semnase tratatul unional a fost Asia Centrală,unde existau o serie de probleme. Regiunea a fost una dintre cele mai importante teatre de luptă în timpul Războiului Civil și rămăsese foarte instabilă după încheierea luptelor. Turkestanul intrase sub la sfârșitul secolului al XIX-lea, în perioada 1867 – 1885. În plus, spre deosebire de alte granițe etnice din  fostul imperiu, care fuseseră stabilite cu mult timp în urma Revoluției Ruse, autoritățile sovietice au moștenit două provincii care nu fuseră niciodată parte de jure din imperiu – Emiratul Buhara și  Hanatul Hiva. În timpul războiului civil, aceste două teritorii au avut aceeași soartă cu restul republicilor, dar chiar și atunci a fost păstrat statutul lor special, fiind transformate în "Republici Populare Sovietice". În ciuda eforturilor și victoriilor în regiune a lui Mihail Frunze, conflictele începute în perioada țaristă în această zonă au continuat până în 1922.

Pentru rezolvarea tuturor problemelor și în conformitate cu politica de indigenizare, bolșevicii au lansat un program amplu delimitare a frontierelor etnice în Asia Centrală. Pe 27 octombrie, ȚIK a emis un decret prin care republicile populare din zonă și Turkestanul autonom din cadrul RSFS Ruse  au fost reorganizate ca RSS Uzbekă și RSS Turkmenă, care au devenit republici constituente ale URSS-ului pr 13 mai 1925. Noile granițe corespundeau  în mare granițelor etnice, iar în cadrul Uzbekistanului a fost cuprinsă pentru o vreme și RSSA Tadjikă, care a fost transformată în RSS Tadjikă și a devenit republică sovietică cu drepturi depline pe 16 octombrie 1929.

Constituția sovietică

În ianuarie 1924, Congresul Sovietelor Uniunii Sovietice, convocat în conformitate cu Tratatul unional, a ratificat prima prima Constituție sovietică. Constituția prelua și dezvolta în cea mai mare parte articolele Tratatului unional. Dacă tratatul avea 26 de articole, Constituția a fost dezvoltată până la 72 de articole, grupate în 11 capitole.

Urmări și probleme de drept
Unii experți în drept constituțional afirmă că Uniunea Sovietică "originală" a încetat să existe în sensul tratatului unional odată cu adoptarea Constituției din 1936, care a modificat complet aranjamentele din 1924 și a trasformat și redefinit URSS-ul dintr-o confederație într-o uniune federală. În locul Congresului Sovietleor Uniunii Sovietice, noua constituție a creat un Parlament permanent, Sovietul Suprem. Cel mai semnificant aspect al noii constituții era afirmarea rolului Partidului Comunist de "forță conducătoare"a maselor muncitoare.

Față de textul original al tratatului, Constituția din 1936 a reorganizat forma de organizare a Uniuni Sovietice. RSFS Transcaucaziană a încetat să mai existe, cele trei republici constituente câștigându-și locul de republici fondatoare ale Uniunii. O republică autonomă a Rusiei, Turkestanul, a fost reorganizat și împărțit în două noi republici sovietice cu drepturi depline – RSS Kazahă și RSS Kirghiză. Numărul republicilor unionale a crescut la 11.

1940
În perioada interbelică, mai înainte chiar de declanșarea invaziei germane în URSS, au fost create câteva noi republici. Prima dintre ele a fost RSS Karelo-Finică, care a fost ridicată de la statutul de republică autonomă la cel de republică cu drepturi depline.

După anexarea statelor baltice, acestea au fost transformate în republici sovietice; RSS Lituaniană (13 iulie), RSS Letonă (21 iulie) și RSS Estonă (21 iulie) și au devenit membre ale Uniunii pe la începutul lunii august (3-6 august). Ultima republică care a devenit parte a uniunii a fost RSS Moldovenească, formată prin contopirea celei mai mari părți a Basarabiei cu partea apuseană a RSSA Moldovenești, până atunci parte a RSS Ucrainene.

După război, nu a mai fost creată nicio republică, dar în schimb RSS Karelo-Finică a redevenit republică autonomă în cadrul RSFS Ruse (16 iulie 1956).

Anularea

Pe 8 decembrie 1991, liderii Ucrainei, Belarusului și Rusiei au convenit în cadrul unei întâlniri să declare nul tratatul din 1922. Tratatul unional și-a încetat existența pe 25 decembrie 1991, ducând practic la dizolvarea URSS-ului.

Duma de Stat a Federației Ruse a adoptat pe 15 martie 1996 o poziție oficială față de decizia Sovietului Suprem al RSFS Ruse de "Denunțare a Tratatului de formare a Uniunii Sovietice", care ar fi fost greșită, neconstituțională, promulgată printr-o gravă violare a Constituției RSFS Ruse, a normelor legilor internaționale și a legislației în vigoare în acele timpuri.

Cronologie

 21 decembrie 1922 – Tratatul a fost semnat.
 30 decembrie 1922 – Ratificarea Tratatului unional.
 27 octombrie 1924 – Regiunile uzbece și turkemene ale RSSA Turkestani (parte a RSFS Ruse) au fost ridicate la nivel de republici unionale.
 16 octombrie 1929 – a fost creată RSS Tadjikă, (fostă parte a RSFS Ruse).
 5 decembrie 1936 – Crearea simultană a republicilor sovietice Armeană, Georgiană și Azeră și dispariția RSSF Transcaucaziene. În același timp, Turkestanul aflat sub administrația directă a RSFS Ruse și-a încetat existența ca republică autonomă, fiind create două noi entități – RSS Kazahă și RSS Kirghiză.
 31 martie 1940 – RSSA KareloFinică a fost ridicată la rangul de republică sovietică cu drepturi depline.
 3 august 1940 – RSS Lituaniană a devenit parte a URSS.
 5 august 1940 – RSS Letonă a devenit parte a URSS.
 6 august 1940 – RSS Estonă a devenit parte a URSS.
 24 august 1940 – a fost creată RSS Moldovenească prin unirea părții apusene a RSSA Moldovenești (administrată de RSS Ucraineană) și o parte a teritoriului anexat de la Regatul României (Basarabia).
 16 iulie 1956 – RSS Karelo-Finică a fost transformată în republică autonomă, administrată de RSFS Rusă.
 8 decembrie 1991 – liderii a trei republici fondatoare au căzut de acord cu privire la încetarea valabilității tratatului unional.
 25 decembrie 1991 – Tratatul și-a încetat valabilitatea.

Vedeți și
 Noul tratat unional
 Acordurile de la Belaveja

Resurse internet
 original scan

Note

Tratate ale Uniunii Sovietice
Tratate ale Rusiei
Tratate ale Belarusului
Tratate ale Ucrainei
Tratate ale Azerbaidjanului
Tratate ale Georgiei
Tratate ale Armeniei

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


With the draft approaching and everyone nervous about what ireland will do with the most important year in our franchise history lets go ahead and have a laugh at the dispense of our rivals.
Funny stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a video of Miami's recent draft blunders. Miami has had their share of head scratching picks too. Jamar Fletcher, Ted Ginn, Jason Allen, John Avery and Yatil Green are a few that come to mind. And it gets even better when you look at 2nd and 3rd round selections.
Sweet baby Jesus I love this picture!
Agreed. Our draft house is definitely made of glass.
Only to be outdone in recent years by the Raiders.
I'm Ron Burgundy, F-you San Diego!!