eScholarship: A novel as thesis

Guest post written by K. Joan Harrison


Did you know that past McGill English students have submitted a novel instead of a thesis in requirement for the Master of Arts degree? If you are looking for some fiction to give you a break over the semester you can read these great stories by downloading them from eScholarship, McGill’s open access institutional repository.

A few interesting ones to check out


K. Joan Harrison is a McGill School of Information Studies student who has been working with the Digitization & Delivery team to digitize and upload McGill theses to eScholarship, our open access institutional repository.

Songs without music : aesthetic dimensions of law and justice.

Guest post by K. Joan Harrison


One of the most interesting theses I have come across is an interdisciplinary thesis written by Desmond Manderson for the Doctor of Civil Laws degree in 1997.

Abstract: “Songs without music” is about aesthetics, law, and justice.  It is written in a creative and novel manner, as explained in the abstract: “I attempt to develop my argument by aesthetic as well as rational means. Music is the focus for this. Each chapter is based on a different musical form, and each uses music as comparison and metaphor. But more than this, in different ways and in different styles, each chapter embodies a complex of aesthetic resonances which relate to the argument the thesis develops. Songs Without Music has been designed not only to talk about aesthetic meaning, but to embody it.”

The table of contents is divided into phrases, bars, and units – each with a musical theme.  Dr. Manderson went on to publish Songs Without Music : Aesthetic dimensions of law and justice in 2000, and taught for ten years at McGill before moving to the Australian National University (“Professor Desmond Manderson,” Australian National University, last modified August 21, 2014, https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/manderson-dra).

Table of contents. Manderson, D. (1996). Songs without music: Aesthetic dimensions of law and justice.

Table of contents. Manderson, D. (1996). Songs without music: Aesthetic dimensions of law and justice.

K. Joan Harrison is a McGill School of Information Studies student who has been working with the Digitization & Delivery team this summer to digitize and upload McGill theses to eScholarship, our open access institutional repository.

The McGill Retro Thesis Digitization Project

thesis_0A proposal was made in the summer of 2011 to digitize all retro McGill theses. The goal was an ambitious one: to digitize all archival theses from Rare Books and Special collections that did not already exist on microfilm from the National Library of Canada. The period would span over 80 years, from 1881 all the way to 1966.  A project launch date set for spring 2012.

The equipment consisted of two high-production auto-feed scanners for loose sheet pages and a large-format scanner for over-sized material such as maps, commonly found in geographic papers. Bound theses would be digitized on the APT2400, the auto page turner that was purchased several years before and was best-suited for digitizing hardcover books.

Not only were theses digitized and processed, meta-data were entered and PDFs were uploaded for each thesis record in eScholarship@McGill, the digital repository that stores electronic theses and other student publications.

To date  – two years since the project was launched – two decades of material have been digitized and uploaded, including a record 5000 theses and over 712,000 digitized pages for the period between 1946-66.

Most of the theses were scanned as sequences of full-colour raw images. After a quality check was done for missing pages, the raw images were processed and cropped into derivative files and assembled into a text searchable PDF. Text pages were converted to bitonal, while photos, illustrations, and diagrams were kept in full-colour. Many challenges were encountered during the digitization, including detached photos, fragile paper, faded text, and ink that left a powdery residue on the scanner. Despite these issues, we have managed to digitize every thesis and ensure the best reproduction possible. The process is continuing with the plan to complete all of the digitization up to the year 1881.

APT book scanner

The Automatic Page turner (APT2400) digitization system.

Figure after p206. John T. Copp. 1962. The Canadian general election of 1908. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/-?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=113604&silo_library=GEN01

Figure after p206. John T. Copp. 1962. The Canadian general election of 1908. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/-?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=113604&silo_library=GEN01