A collage of various webcam screenshots with the same woman in each.

Archiving as You Go Along: The (Un)expected Performativity of Documenting the PhD

Many PhD researchers decide to document their PhD research, but what about the PhD journey itself? This week, Emma shares how she’s capturing #phdlife through a durational digital performance she calls ‘Snippets From a PhD’…

Shortly before I began my residency as SGSAH Blogger, our Communications Coordinator, Mariam, offered up some engaging ways to share your research. As a longtime blogger, one of the big questions early on in my PhD was how do I share my research?

In response, my supervisory team would ask why do you want to share your research? I realised that, for me, it was less about sharing the research and more about documenting the PhD itself.

The Origins of ‘Snippets From a PhD’

Early on in my first semester, I was doing lots of early reading and exploration on my topic. In the midst of going down a net art rabbit hole, I encountered artist Maya Man through a magazine I picked up at the Glasgow CCA gift shop. I was so enamored with her work – largely about digital identity, duality, and networked society – that I decided to look into it further. That’s when I discovered the Glance Back plugin. Once you download it to your browser, Maya explains

“once a day at random when you open a new tab, Glance Back will quickly snap a photo of you and inquire: ‘What are you thinking about?’. Once you type your answer and press enter, the photo and thought will be collectively saved to your history of glances, cumulatively creating an archive of moments you share with your screen.”

And so, on 2 October 2024, I began what would become my personal PhD archive, Snippets From a PhD.

A webcam capture of a woman with curly red hair and glasses with a black turtleneck. Behind her is a glass door and windows with a sunny Edinburgh city scape in the background. The caption of the capture is 'Literature Maps!'.

Archive or Repertoire?

I call it an archive now. At the time, I considered it as nothing more than playing around with a random plugin I found on the internet. However, in the process of capturing these small moments from my tiny webcam, I slowly realised I was building a faithful ‘repertoire’ of PhD-related memories. In The Archive and the Repetoire, performance studies scholar Diana Taylor queries, “Is performance that which disappears, or that which persists, transmitted through a nonarchival system of transfer that I came to call the repertoire?” Taylor argues that performance is something deeply embodied: impossible to archive this full embodied experience, it may still be possible to carry on a repertoire of deeply embedded gestures and habits.

Through this archival process, for instance, I came to know something of my own unique habits. For instance, I check my emails a lot…

A webcam capture of a woman with a towel in her hair wearing a cozy white fluffy button down top. The caption of the capture is 'gmail'.
A webcam capture of a woman with curly red hair making a duck face to the camera. The caption of the capture is 'email'.
A webcam capture of a woman in an empty office. She has curly red hair, in a bun, with glasses. She has headphones over her ear and a rainbow University of Edinburgh lanyard around her neck. The caption of the capture is 'gmail'.
An overexposed webcam capture of a woman with red hair in a bun. She has a stripey, green and white wool jumper. Behind her is a window and several shelves full of various liquor and glasses for special occasions. The caption of the capture is 'checking my email'.
A webcam capture of a woman with curly short red hair wearing glasses, a beige cardigan, and green turtleneck. In the background is a seating area in a cafe, and you can make out a Christmas tree in the distance to the right of the seating area outside the cafe. The caption of the capture is 'email'.
A webcam capture of a woman with red hair up in a high bun with a hot pink scrunchy. She is wearing a big purple sweatshirt. Behind her is the headboard of a hotel bed. The caption of the capture is 'whether i should be checking my emails on vacation'.

Quite often, my daily ‘snippet’ would appear to be far removed from what constitutes the everyday activities of a PhD researcher: these actions are not exactly submitting abstracts for publication, preparing for conferences, readying lesson plans, or writing funding applications.

A webcam image of a woman with red hair in a high bun and glasses. She is wearing a pink and blue patterned cardigan with a beige turtleneck jumper. To her right is a man with a baseball cap sitting next to her. The caption of the capture is 'I x'ed this person?'.
A webcam capture of a woman with curly red hair. Behind her is a living room ceiling. The caption of the capture is 'anything'.

Generating New (Embodied) Knowledge

On the other hand, with my embodied knowledge, I (secretly) know that these two images, for example, are more than just the sum of their parts. You would hardly be able to discern that the first image captures a moment of drafting a play that parallels this research. In the image, I’m envisioning the dystopian future of digital platforms with my partner: Twitter, X, and Musk, in particular. In the second image, I have just finished my first pilot study, taking my first shot at ‘sense making’ after some heavy rounds of coding on NVivo. My brain is so fried that I can hardly manage to think about what’s on my mind. ‘anything’, I type with futility.

Taylor notes that “not everyone comes to ‘culture’ or modernity through writing. I believe it is imperative to keep reexamining the relationships between embodied performance and the production of knowledge.” Considering this series as a performance, it seems to generate new knowledge that, although far removed from my thesis (whatever this may look like in two years’ time), is equally as useful. Beyond revealing some (arguably) unhealthy digital habits and marking key moments in my development as an artist and a researcher, Snippets From a PhD has documented the subconscious preoccupations that I will surely look back on throughout the remainder of my PhD. In the ‘snippets’ below, LaMama’s work, upskilling creatives in new technology, and digital curation and performance studies scholar, Toni Sant, take centre stage…

A webcam capture of a woman with red hair in a bun. She looks ready to go to bed and is sitting in what appears to be a hotel bed. You can see just the headboard behind her and a few pillows. The caption of the capture is 'LaMama's Experiments in Digital Storytelling'.
A webcam capture of a woman with red hair half up in a hot pink scrunchie. She is wearing an oversized, purple sweatshirt. In the background is her living room. The caption of the capture is 'training for new technologies'.
A webcam capture of a woman with curly red hair wearing a navy 'Marfa' beanie and oversized purple sweatshirt. In the background is a window and a row of shelves holding liquor and nice glassware. The caption of the capture is 'Toni Sant'.

As I document it, I also look back upon this archive of memories I have collected, looking for some sort of guidance from my past self to point me in the direction I need to go.

Final Thoughts

To me, the PhD is something of a performance. It has been described as ‘a marathon, not a sprint’. Many talk about the ‘PhD journey’ or create entire social media accounts or blogs related to ‘PhD life’. For however many years you are in it, your life becomes dedicated to your PhD, and ‘PhD Student’ becomes something of a character you inhabit. But you also get one opportunity to do everything the first time. I wanted to document my PhD precisely because I have the rest of my life (hopefully!) to document my research. I only have the next 2.5 years for my PhD. Years I won’t ever get back.

‘Snippets From a PhD’ is an ongoing digital performance series. You can follow it on Bluesky and Instagram nearly every weekday.

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