My dissertation writing makes me a mass of total insecurities. Writing about social media is worse because the topic seems so simplistic that anyone can understand it. I also want to make sure that everyone can understand it because if it gets too highly technical, I worry that industry people and journalists who might benefit from my insights won’t be able to.
The problem is that some types of analysis are so complex I can’t understand them. Chi-Square, T-Charts, Z Numbers… I BOGGLE. Lots and lots of math. To date, math wise, I’ve used only mean, median, mode, slope, correlation, difference, percent difference.
Today, looking for sources for a chapter I’m writing about Foursquare (older data. Trying to fill in some areas of my dissertation and trying to use older data I’d not used yet to get more chapters written faster, rather than waiting for some new event to happen), I found this thesis about social media. It makes me happy as the analysis is very accessible. It doesn’t appear to be hyper academic. The writing level appears to be lower. The level of writing does not appear super formal. In short, it reaffirms to me that while I feel my writing is at times inferior, it isn’t. Some one else wrote a thesis and it got approved. (The major criticism I’d have of their dissertation is it has a lot of meaningless images that aren’t cited as figures.)
That thesis has 127 total works cited in the bibliography. I’m currently at 118. I should easily be able to get to the total that author has. I might be able to get more. I’ll need some one to edit my work to determine if I need to add citations in various places and to make sure my citations are more consistent.
Pick me ups for the win yo! 
I’ve got two chapters written since December 18. I should have a third chapter written today if I stop being so lazy and off task. When I’m done with this, I should have a another long chapter that should add about 5,000 words. (Unlike some of my other analysis, because of the complexity of a particular scandal, I’m going to break it up into four different analysis: 1 player on Facebook, 1 player on Twitter, 1 player on other sites, Comparing the performance of team that those people play for to other teams.) I should crack the 40,000 word mark by the end of the day. Weeee. I think I have a 75,000 word max for my dissertation.
