Day 3: Pulling it all Together

Current Working Paper

There's the link for accountability purposes. However, I advise no one actually look at it for at least another week even though I will post a new version every day. It is currently in a fairly unbalanced state. This is because my first task I gave myself was pulling in the papers that I have already published into a consistent text.

Like I said in previous posts, I've already published one poster, two papers, and one journal article. The dissertation is going to be an amalgamation of these papers with a different balance to tie them all together. To give you a bit of flavor of what I'm planning on doing, the summary of my papers/articles are:

1. A data survey of technology usage (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) on the Web.
2. A study on using visual feature extraction (what the page looks like) to improve genre classification (figuring out what the "type" of a Web page is).
3. A framework for evaluating whether this more complex information is "worth it" to calculate for Web pages or whether more simple information will be good enough.

All of this work really revolves around the idea that Web pages have more going on than plain text and ways that you can use this information to improve the way we analyze Web pages. So the point of the dissertation is to take that core idea and expand on it. I'll do this by focusing on the actual features that all of my papers used as well as explaining how others in the field have used this extra information. Then I'll finish it all by using genre classification as a use case where I have experimental proof that this extra information is definitely useful in improving precision. By focusing primarily on the features, I think I can add something that I didn't cover exhaustively in my papers and possibly even have something that the reader can use in their own experiments. My only concern is that this will read a bit like a reference manual, so I'm going to try to balance technical detail by putting the really technical stuff in the appendix.

I currently have two of the papers copied/segmented into the dissertation with all their references corrected. I have one more to piece in and then hopefully by the end of today I will have a chance to rearrange the documents to put the overlapping pieces into their appropriate sections. Luckily, the editor I'm using, Scrivener is really made for large-scale document rearrangement.