The first supervision meeting of a PhD is a big experience, especially with all the minds around the table. It was universally agreed that an interesting PhD is to be found in the fragmented mess that is the proposal, though that is being hacked to pieces to pass muster. The process will no doubt get there, hopefully sooner rather than later.
From my perspective one of the most interesting things to come out of the proposal process so far is the inability for other academics to name the same thing. So far the research could fall under ‘Crisis Mapping‘, ‘Time Critical Volunteered Geographical Information‘ (aka crowdsourcing) and ‘Crisis Informatics‘.
While the aims of this PhD are to interdisciplinary, eventually a contribution needs to be solidly made to a particular field, as such it needs to be within the vocabulary of that field (or does it?). For the time being we’re taking ‘Crisis Informatics’ to be the mcguffin that defines the PhD, but formalising how each of the terms and their definitions combine and affect the future research is something that I’ll be also working on in future, adding to the list of things to do!
Written and submitted from the Nottingham Geospatial Building (52.953, -1.18405)
Mark's Brain 