Hi, I wondered if anyone could give me some advice on a point relating to my appendix. I am doing a PhD in geography and part of my fieldwork has involved using remote sensing techniques to repeatedly survey part of the landscape and measure change. I have conducted 6 field visits, each of which have involved the capture of thousands of data points. The first step of processing involves converting the data into a format readable by Microsoft Excel, essentially giving me thousands and thousands of lines of data.

My supervisor has told me that all my raw data needs to go into my appendix. Unfortunately my department still has a policy of requiring a printed as well as digitial copy of the full appendices, so I don't feel like this is reasoable - my appendices would be many times longer than my thesis and very expensive to print as everything has to be double spaced!!

Is she correct in insisting that all of my raw data has to be included?

Would it be possible to include the data on a CD attached to the thesis? Surely no one would expect you to print hundreds of pages of data.

That does seem rather tricky - have you checked with your graduate school what their guidance would be?
I attached a data/SPSS output CD (indexed by Chapter and Table/Figure) in the back of my thesis. I don't see the point of including the raw data in hard copy as most PhD's have stacks of raw data..
how about putting it into an Annex... or somewhere other than an Appendix... seems a silly rule though - what have other students done in the past?

p.s. just checked my thesis - I just put the data disc on the final page (after Appendices, but not actually in the Appendices!) it was just called 'data disc' on the list of contents

Data disk seems like a good idea.
I had no idea some unis require all the raw data. We certainly didn't have to include it for our theses at my uni.

I am with catalinbond on this - we were not required to submit ALL our raw data - a sample of it was sufficient. Perhaps you could ask your supervisor if it would be acceptable for you to include only the most significant parts and leave out the rest?

I am sure it depends across universities and indeed disciplines , but we knew that my external examiner would want to look at it and that was the deciding reason.