I handed in my Ph.D. dissertation “Interests and Arguments. Towards an Analytic Philosophy of Textual Scholarship” in September 2017: almost to the day 3 years ago. I defended in April 2018 – and immediately moved on to a new job that had nothing to do with what I had been researching during my Ph.D. period. I admit I was a bit fed up with both my topic and the academia at this time. My thesis was properly printed as a book, and the copies I received for my personal use were quickly stored away in a moving box in the basement.
Some time had passed when I decided to submit the pdf version of the book to the University of Oslo’s Research Archive – so it could be accessible for anyone interested, without having to ask me for a copy or trying to get a copy of the book via cumbersome interlibrary loan. Once you have submitted your thesis at UiO, there will be a review process discerning whether it can be published openly: many of current day theses are article-based, and there might be copyright-issues with re-publication. My dissertation is – partly – article-based, so I was expecting to have to wait until it will be released.
Again, time passed, then COVID-19 happened and I shifted my focus to other things, not checking in on the review process. When I finally did, I couldn’t find the thesis in the research archive, thinking it was likely due to the articles not being released yet. Or me having made a mistake when submitting the digital version.
However, since I work door-to-door with one of the admins of the research archive, I thought it would be good to investigate why it was still “stuck”. Turns out it wasn’t stuck after all! I had just been unlucky in finding it… So, I am happy to announce that my dissertation is available for download via the University of Oslo’s research archive via a stable link. The format is pdf, the file is quite large (ca. 33MB). The pdf version has not been changed or edited and mirrors the physical book publication, except for the book cover. There’s a summary in English, however, the thesis itself is written in (academic) German, so be warned. It’s also 600+ pages long and there are 1.443 footnotes…
Feel free to get your digital copy of “Interessen und Argumente” here: http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-80732.
I might, at some point, re-publish parts of it in a different, re-worked format, not least my bibliography of almost 7.000 items: as a re-usable data set as well as an open Zotero library.
