About PhD-Live

What it is

• PhD Live is a public digital garden of my doctoral research, an ongoing, transparent performance of thought.
• It’s part website, part studio, part sketchbook:
• A place where fragments come together, connections emerge, and the process itself becomes the work.

How it works

The website supports live tracking, session logging, and real-time reflection as part of my research process.

Each type of note serves a different role:

• Notes – timestamped fragments that capture spontaneous thoughts or actions
• Sessions – focused working periods marked by start and end times
• Posts – developed reflections or essays, often synthesised from earlier notes
• Milestones – project checkpoints and turning points along the PhD journey

These feed into a dynamic homepage that continuously updates to show:

• What’s happening live now or today
• The most recent posts and reflections
• An interactive graph showing conceptual links between notes

Unlike a traditional blog, this site does not present finished work, but an ecosystem of evolving thoughts and ideas.

The source code and content structure live in the public repository here: https://github.com/mahaliahr/phd-live
this site is a constant work in progress

How it’s built

PhD-Live is built from my evolving collection of notes, managed locally in Obsidian and published automatically as a living website. ^[1]

Why it exists

This website forms part of my practice-based PhD at the Creative Computing Institute, UAL.
My research explores how generative AI is transforming learning and teaching and uses speculative design and imagination as a method in creating new ways to engage with these systems.

By designing this platform, I am exploring what it means to make research processes visible, inspired by my practice as a live coder, I was wondering ‘what if you could “live code” a PhD’, I believe in this new era of learning which is greatly shifted by the impacts of generative AI - process becomes everything.

This site therefore functions both as a tool and as a case study within my broader inquiry.

Rather than presenting polished outcomes, PhD-Live foregrounds the process of becoming:

• how ideas unfold, cross-pollinate, and sometimes fall apart.
• It is both archive and performance - an experimental rehearsal for what scholarship might look like when it becomes live, networked, and entangled with AI.