Results tagged “research” from Collin vs. Blog

Paul's got a great entry today, on "How to Read Everything?" Seriously great. Lots of good thoughts in there.

One of the things that's instructive about his entry is the list of various strategies that he's tried and abandoned, which is one of the things I recommend to folk on a regular basis. There are all sorts of ways to manage one's "mental intertextual map," and the trick is find the ones that will work for you at a given time.

One thing that I would add to Paul's account is that you have different needs at different times. My own strategies tend to resemble his quite a bit--I don't take a lot of notes myself, although that's changed a little as I've gotten older and more forgetful. Like him, I tend to have a very strong procedural memory--I remember colors, covers, the place on the page where an important quote is, etc. But I do do a little bit of underlining, not so I can go back through a text and cull the marks, but because I find that it reinforces my procedural memories. It keeps me on a given page and at a particular spot on the page a little longer, which seems to burn that spot into my memory a little more.

A couple of other points worth raising. There's a difference between reading a book and reading a discipline, even if we tend to use the same verb. So in "reading everything," I hear "everything" to mean the discipline, and that's a different strategy. You can "read" a journal in 10 minutes if you're reading it to know what's there, so that you can return to what's valuable to you later. And that kind of reading is ultimately quite valuable--Brian has written recently about "ambient research," and I just finished a collaborative piece with a friend on a similar topic--it's a matter of entering the flow of a discipline, getting a feel for what's going on, before you make the choices about where to drill down.

So maybe I'd describe this as a difference between ambient and directed reading. We are trained very heavily in directed reading, and rarely are advised about ambient reading. In part, this is because it comes as a result of enculturation, and so seems a "natural" outgrowth of that process. I think I could argue that what I've been working on in my graduate teaching in the past 4-5 years is pushing my students more towards a model of ambient reading, an approach that could productively complement the emphasis on directed reading that tends to dominate graduate coursework. And I think that part of my current interest in Web2 stuff is how those tools can help us accomplish that.

So there's that.

As most people who expected to see me in New Orleans have learned by now, I'm not there. It's not as dramatic as some may think. I've been struggling a little health-wise this semester--nothing big, but a lot of small things, and it's taken me longer to recover than it did when I was, say, 20. Or 30 even. I was sick again last weekend, when otherwise I would have been leaving on the road trip that took me to NO and to CCCC, and I thought to myself that it would be sooo much easier on me physically if I simply bailed on it this year. And so I did.

I feel sad not to see everyone, and a little guilty about bailing on my co-panelists, but I feel really good today, and it took a few days of sleep that I wouldn't otherwise have gotten to feel that way. So I think it was the right choice.

I have a couple of QuickTime versions of my talk, which I used to test out Keynote's recording and exporting functions. It's a pared down version of the talk I would have done, and the visuals are done up a little as well. It's not great, but it's there. I've got two versions that you can either watch on screen or download: a smaller 10MB version and the monster 44MB version. You may need to right-click the links to download. The larger version is more faithful to the smart builds in the original presentation, but still a little choppy. It would have looked and probably sounded much better in person. Deal.

And have a good time in NO, everyone. That's all.

Update:It occurred to me that it might be nice if, prior to downloading a 40+ MB file, you had some idea of what it is you were downloading. Here's the abstract that I submitted:

Speaker X: Visualizing the Invisible Collage of Research

In 2006, Brad DeLong likened the academic blogosphere to an invisible college, a metaphor familiar to those of us who use email, discussion lists, and blogs to maintain our social networks of friends and colleagues. Speaker 5 argues that Web 2.0 represents an opportunity to make public other disciplinary networks as well. These technologies allow us to conduct practices like annotation, referencing, and collection collaboratively; in doing so, they permit a different model for knowledge production to emerge. If the blogosphere makes visible the invisible college, our journal web sites may help us reveal the "invisible collage" of texts and ideas that each of us now assembles in isolation.

Ahhh, prognostication. My talk ends up being less about "journal websites" and more about the college/collage play on words, I think. And my examples are drawn more from my own experimenting than from anything happening right now in the field, I fear. But the talk's true to the spirit of the abstract if not the letter. My favorite moment is a slide with Robert Boyle (17th C originator of the phrase "invisible college") and "Ye Olde Webbe 2.0" in an old English font. Cracks me up every time. Anyways. That's what all you're in for if you take a peek. The panel's in a matter of hours, and I have it on fairly good authority that they're going to screen my cast. So you'll sort of see me there. 'Night.

Okay. Don't blame me if this wasn't worth the wait.

I'm subbed to the ACRLog, and this came across the other day, a piece by "StevenB" about Why Students Want Simplicity And Why It Fails Them When It Comes To Research. The question of how to move students from "I'll just Google it" to a more nuanced, complex understanding both of research and of how to go about doing research is a topic near and dear to my heart. So I read with interest.

Two tangents. First, in the piece itself focuses on simplicity and complexity when it comes to research:

A defining quality of a complex problem is that right answers are not easily obtainable. Excepting those students who are passionate about the study matter and research project, most students would prefer to simplify their research as much as possible. The problem, as a new article points out, is that applying simple problem solving approaches to complex problems is a contextual error that will lead to failure.

For a long time, as I was working on my book manuscript, I had in mind something that I called my secret 6th chapter, the first 5 being revisions of the classical canons of rhetoric (and all beginning with the letter P, but that's even more tangential). The 6th chapter was going to be an exploration of another P word: plectics. I mistakenly believed that the word was mine all mine. Yeah, not so much. But anyhow, I'd planned on talking about how plectics might give us a spectrum along which to locate texts without recourse to the print/screen distinction. I've always been a fan of Deleuze's The Fold, and I'd never been happy with the assumption that even the most intricate and complicated print texts were simply linear compared with digital texts.

But alas, such a chapter was not to be. And that's the end of the first tangent.

Tangent #2 is a little shorter, and the reference in my title. StevenB draws on something called "Cynefin," which according to Wikipedia is a concept from Welsh:

The name Cynefin is a Welsh word which is commonly translated into English as 'habitat' or 'place', although that fails to convey the full meaning. A fuller translation would be that it convey the sense that we all have multiple pasts of which we are only partly aware: cultural, religious, geographic, tribal etc. The multiple elements of this definition and the inherent uncertainty implied were the reasons for the selection of the name.

The name seeks to remind us that all human interactions are strongly influenced and frequently determined by our experiences, both through the direct influence of personal experience, and through collective experience, such as stories or music.

What's really interesting to me here is the parallel between Cynefin and ethos, specifically as it's defined as "haunt" as both a location and something that affects us. It reminds me a little of Diane's writing--here's a little taste of "Finitude's Clamor; Or, Notes toward a Communitarian Literacy" from CCC, for example:

You (writing-being) are a limit-cruiser, so even when you're alone, you are not alone. You are (already) heavily populated with encounters, with others whom you have welcomed and who continue to work you over--to live on in you, haunting you and making demands of you--even in your solitude.

Someone with more experience than I in Wales will have to decide how many times removed cynefin is from ethos, but they sure sound related.

What's uninteresting to me about cynefin is its appropriation for the system that apparently bears its name. Maybe I need to do some background reading, but I have a tough time understanding how the term itself translates into a "decision-making framework" other than to serve as a reminder that not everything can be reduced to conscious decision-making frameworks. But oh well.

Back (finally!) to the entry itself. StevenB restricts himself in his discussion to 2 of the 5 "domains," simplicity and complexity, which runs the danger, it seems to me, of inscribing a binary between them. One of the things that I think we try to get at with the notion of inquiry is the habit of allowing "simple" to become "complex" through what this framework calls "emergent practices" (and perhaps even complicated). The ability to take complex questions and to simplify them is (to my mind) the difference that turns research into research writing.

But neither of these moves, simple->complex or complex->simple, is (a) easy, (b) frictionless, or (c) naturally acquired through osmosis. StevenB's suggestion is

that we add "identify and understand the context of the research problem and choose a decision-making style that matches that context" to that long list of information literacy skills that many of us list in some planning document.

And that's all well and good. But I guess I feel like that just identifies what is for many of us (and I presume, our students) the black box of academic research. I can come up with 407 examples of good writers (and designers) taking complicated questions, issues, and ideas, and helping to return them to simplicity (which is one effect of much writing that is good), but examples of moving in the other direction are few, in part because we tend to box up that part of things ourselves. And part of that is because, in academic prose, making the complex simple is one of the few near-universal justifications for the work that we do. Figuring out and articulating how we arrive at those complex problems is one of the things that a course focused on research writing could usefully accomplish.

That's all.