📚 Planning Your T&T Dissertation
Exploring Themes & Research Questions in previous UCF T&T Dissertations
Theme 1: Digital Privacy, Platform Studies & Social Media
Examining how digital platforms shape communication, privacy, and social interaction
- (2025)
"Trust In Ephemeral Content In Social Media Platforms: A Mixed-Method Approach" - (2024)
"Contextualizing TikTok Controversies: Critical Discourse Analysis" - (2018)
"Using Hashtags to Disambiguate Aboutness in Social Media Discourse" - (2025)
"Netflix and the Platformization of Film and Television Content Discovery"
Theme 2: Gaming Studies & Interactive Media
Games as cultural texts: player experiences, design, and interactive entertainment
- (2019)
"Measuring Player Perceptions of Freedom and Control in Modded and Unmodded Skyrim" - (2018)
"Emergent Narrative: Stories of Play, Playing with Stories" - (2015)
"Making Waves, Mixing Colors, and Using Mirrors: Whole-Body Educational Games" - (2024)
"Unplayable Games: A Ludoarsonist's Manifesto on Trans Play and Possibility"
Theme 3: Digital Humanities & Archival Studies
Digital methods for preserving, analyzing, and presenting cultural heritage
- (2022)
"Creating a Reverberating Beat: Digital Curation of Women Beat Writers" - (2016)
"From Ashes To Ashé: Memorializing Traumatic Events Through Digital Archives" - (2015)
"Digital Markup in Preserving Texts: A Blank-Verse Translation of Virgil's Aeneid" - (2019)
"Acoustic Ecology and Sound Mapping the UCF Main Campus"
Theme 4: Critical Code Studies & Programming Philosophy
Software and code as cultural texts requiring critical analysis
Theme 5: Digital Pedagogy & Educational Technology
How technology transforms teaching, learning, and educational environments
- (2022)
"No More Pencils, No More Books: One-to-One Digital Device Implementation" - (2016)
"Building a Foundation for Goal-Attainment in Interdisciplinary Studies" - (2019)
"Moving Towards a Dialogic Pedagogy: Using Video Feedback as a Teaching Tool" - (2017)
"School Has a Bad Storyline: Gamification in Educational Environments"
Theme 6: Social Justice, Identity & Technology
Technology's intersection with identity, equity, and social justice
Theme 7: Digital Rhetoric & Professional Communication
Digital transformation of professional communication and rhetorical strategies
Theme 8: Media History & Cultural Studies
Media evolution, cultural production, and historical transformation
- (2022)
"The Nine Lives of Ula Stöckl: Recovering Germany's First Feminist Filmmaker" - (2017)
"Digital Dissonance: Horror Cultures in the Age of Convergent Technologies" - (2018)
"The Resonance and Residue of the First African American Newspaper" - (2019)
"The Heralds of the Dawn: A History of Florida's Motion Picture Industry"
Theme 9: Accessibility & Inclusive Design
Making technology inclusive and accessible to diverse user populations
- (2022)
"Seeing the Unseen: Interactive Narrative for Understanding Invisible Disabilities" - (2015)
"User-Generated Interfaces and Disability in Virtual Environments" - (2024)
"An Exploration of mHealth Applications Usage Among Older Adults" - (2021)
"Signals as Symbols: Applying Normalization of Deviance to User-Centered Design"
Emerging Theme: Meme Studies & Digital Culture
Internet memes as sites of meaning-making and communication
Methods You Might Use
We'll talk more about methods when we get to project design, but here's a few at work in these dissertations:
📝 Group Exercise
Explore & Share Back
Step 1: 🎯 Pick a theme that your pair feels connected with
Step 2: 📚 Choose one dissertation from that theme to examine together
Step 3: 🔍 Find the research questions in the document - look in:
- The abstract
- Introduction chapter
- Statement of the problem section
Share back: How were the research questions articulated? Was there a discussion of how they changed throughout the dissertation process? How did the questions relate to the methods of the project?