Kiana is offline.
When she is online and writing, you'll see her here.
Live-ish writing cam
Open a quiet writing space where you can see Kiana’s live-ish cam and share your own with her.
Other visitors will not see you.
No writing shared yet.
Draw a little flower, then plant it in the garden.
Drag your new flower to place it anywhere in the garden.
You've been writing together for 0 minutes.
A tiny weekly accountability note from Kiana's dissertation cave.
This is a web app connected to my dissertation writing workspace. Because I am the type of person who works better when I am being perceived, I built this to make accountability feel as seamless and fun as possible while I write my dissertation. Here, you can see my status updates, what I have recently written, and a live-ish cam (live-ish, it only updates every few seconds) when it is on. You can also send me notes, doodles, and little flower drawings that show up in my writing space while I work in real time.
PLEASE do, this is my little experiment to keep me as motivated as possible. If I know a little weekly notice is going out every Sunday that'll reveal how many hours I worked, words written, etc, I'll feel extra motivated to make sure the email is impressible. I also tried to make the updates at least mildly interesting so it's worth looking at.
The login and logout updates are also optional. I mainly added those because Eric asked for them. It'll just be an email that says "Kiana is online and working!"
My writing workspace is a separate web app I built in Visual Studio Code and connected to this public-facing page. I had never built an app before this, and I only had some experience with JavaScript, so a lot of it was me learning as I went and figuring out how to make the thing I actually wanted. I designed it to make dissertation writing feel more playful and less isolating, but also to make the actual writing process easier for me. A lot of it came from realizing that Microsoft Word does not really work the way my brain works when I'm trying to write something this big. So I built my own tools into the workspace, including an APA reference keeper, a notes section, automatic backups, task organization, and other small features that help me stay organized without constantly opening new tabs or getting pulled away from writing.
The coolest part is that this page is not just a cute public page. It is actually connected to my private writing workspace. So when someone sends me a note, draws a doodle, adds a flower, or connects through the webcam feature, those things show up for me while I'm writing. The flowers, notes, doodles, status updates, and writing-presence features are all part of the same silly little accountability system that works for me. I built it this way because I wanted writing to feel a little less like sitting alone with all this writing. Even when I'm deep in the throes of writing, those small signs that someone is there keep me sane.
My dissertation is about life completion: how people, especially older adults and people facing serious illness, come to feel that the life they have lived is sufficiently whole, meaningful, accepted, and complete. I frame life completion as a retrospective life-story appraisal, meaning it is not just general happiness or satisfaction, but a process of looking back across one's relationships, choices, losses, regrets, accomplishments, and values and evaluating whether the life as lived can be accepted as it was genuinely lived. Although life completion has strong theoretical roots in in my opinion these ideas have not translated cleanly into measurement or practice. Life completion is often discussed/used in palliative care and end-of-life research, but it does not fully capture the specific sense that one's life, viewed as a whole, has been sufficiently lived, reconciled, and accepted. In other words, life completion is not simply feeling good, peaceful, or comfortable in the present moment; it is a broader appraisal of the life one has lived.
The dissertation includes two studies. Study 1 uses a dataset of 204 older adults with terminal cancer to test whether people who more fully acknowledge that their illness is terminal report higher life completion, and whether this association is explained by life story coherence. By life story coherence, I mean whether people tell the story of their lives in a way that feels organized, connected, and meaningful rather than fragmented or unresolved. The idea is this: maybe being able to tell a really strong, coherent story of your own life at the end helps you feel a little bit more that your life is complete. A fun part of this study involved training human coders to evaluate life story coherence in these narratives. I am also using that training data to validate an AI-assisted coding workflow, to examine whether AI itself (when trained) can follow our specific coding manual and code narratives. Study 2 is a qualitative study (no numbers!). I interviewed older adults in the Gainesville area who reported reflecting on their own mortality. In these interviews, I asked them what life completion means in their lived experience. I then analyzed the interviews for themes. Some themes so far include how people reinterpret the past, reconcile regrets, affirm their life path, maintain continuity of self and recognize sources of fulfillment.
The background is a filtered image of my actual view this summer. My office is in a third-story attic in Eastern Pennsylvania.
Ever since I was a kid, I have subconsciously doodled flowers while working. I still sometimes take breaks from writing to draw them while I work through something confusing. I thought it would be fun to make a little flower garden that other people could add to while I work.