Daisy

Here is the result of my Daisy exercise. What I found interesting is the topics I am interested fall under community development and branch from there.

Methodological Restraints

My background is primarily in English, but I've also studied a Biology, Psychology, and even a bit of Physics. I'm familiar with a lot of the conventions of research in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. I've thought a lot about interdisciplinarity and mixing methods for research, and I find it fairly easy to relate to Luker's concept of salsa dancing researchers. However, when I sat down to write about my own research ideas, I found myself drawing a complete blank. This is particularly strange to me because I find it very easy to be interested and curious about things. I often come up with questions about the world that I'd love to research and answer, or at least take a step toward answering. But I found that in the frame Luker created, one focused so closely on sociology research, my ideas about research became focused on the sort of topics she was posing. The only questions I could think of were ones related to, say, human sexuality, or online communities. I was hesitant to write them down, though, for two reasons. Firstly, those questions felt highly unrelated to my current studies in libraries and information systems, particularly since I wasn't focusing on information seeking. But secondly, I was primarily thinking of approaching them in fairly rigid, scientific ways that I felt Luker wouldn't approve of. I'm sure that thought in itself is problematic from a free-wheeling, salsa-dancing perspective, but the whole experience was particularly startling to me since, previously, I've been very interested in pursuing research in Chaucerian studies, and because there are so many information science topics I'm interested in. It was very interesting to me that my conception of what made interesting research was so influenced by Luker's perspective in her text - and perhaps that in itself could be an interesting research project. That is, how researchers conceive of their research question, and what influences them to pursue specific methodological avenues.

I think that what I need to keep in mind in the future is that Luker's ideas and advice are useful and interesting, but her perspective is very focused on the world of an academic social scientist. To keep myself open to all of the topics and approaches I find interesting - and useful - I need to remember that research is conducted in many different ways, from the highly controlled and regimented quantitative lab studies in physics and microbiology to the practice-based case studies common in library science.

When presented with the question of what research topic would I choose if I were guaranteed not to fail, I find that I am at a loss.  Being given that much freedom and a guarantee of success is such an unusual situation that my mind freezes at the prospect...Thinking about this obstacle, I started to wonder about my own desire for knowledge.  What would I actually want to know, and why would I want to know it?  Being guaranteed success means that at the end of the reasearch project, I would have succeeded in gaining the knowledge I wanted, but what knowledge would I want to possess?

Being this puzzled and lost feels like a failing of mine.  Why can't I think and act more effectively when I am presented with a problem with this?  Why don't I understand myself better?  Asking these critical questions is why I decided that, to answer to this week's question, if I were to choose a research project in which I was guaranteed not to fail, then I would choose to research myself.

What can I actually reasearch to help better understand myself?  I should, arguably, know everything there is to know about me, as I am seeing the world through my own eyes.  But, that is what makes the topic difficult.  As said in class, "we are fish studying water".  Taking yourself on as a reasearch topic means that you will have to overcome your individual perception and knowledge to try to understand yourself better.

However, one method to better understand yourself is to examine the lives of others.  Particularly the lives of those close to you, or that have had a large influence on your life, such as your family.  My mother once suggested for me to go and visit with my grandmother and document the history of her life.  My grandmother is Polish, and lived in Poland during the occupation by Germany.  She has lead an interesting life and has a great deal of information about her past and my family.  I would like to think that understanding my family's past might help to understand my present self.  This could be a possible avenue of research for me to undertake... 

Poetry & Print in Lebanon

“Las Casas knows the Indians less well than Cortés, and he loves them more; but they meet in their common policy of assimilation. Knowledge does not imply love, nor the converse; and neither of the two implies, nor is implied by, identification with the other. […] Columbus’s attitude can be described in altogether negative terms: he does not love, does not know, and does not identify himself with the other.” (Todorov, 1984, 185-6)

Identity. Memory. Knowledge. Power. These inextricably connected concepts come to mind often, as I look around the world and attempt to engage the constructed character of the ostensibly natural fit of objects in the social order. (A relevant concept here, as per Luker’s discussion, is what “Bourdieu calls “‘doxa’ - those taken-for-granted ideas that are so much a part of our social world that we rarely even notice them.” (2010, 3)) It concerns me as I experience the much touted info-glut today while being aware that some kinds of information, of knowledge is scarce, non-existent or has been erased completely. Here, I have in mind what scholars have termed the limits of historical knowledge, or the ways in which the subaltern as object is not given a subject-position from which to speak (Prakash, 1994). In turn, memory, as a category of political practice, can best be understood as a site for the contestation or consolidation of identity, and constructions of the past.

Such issues call for an interdisciplinary approach. Luker discusses the importance of such an approach to research today, which brings to my mind the work of Edward Said. In Orientalism reconsidered, he states:

“[There is a] need for greater crossing of boundaries, for greater interventionism in cross-disciplinary activity, a concentrated awareness of the situation political, methodological, social, historical in which intellectual and cultural work is carried out. A clarified political and methodological commitment to the dismantling of systems of domination which since they are collectively maintained must, to adopt and transform some of Gramsci’s phrases, be collectively fought, by mutual siege, war of manoeuvre and war of position.” (1985, 15)

With such questions long in mind, I would love to work at the intersections of a range of disciplines - Book History & Print Culture; Critical Theory; Post-Colonial & Subaltern Studies; and Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations - in exploring memory, identity, knowledge production and power in the Middle East. In brief, my research concerns exploring the physical, cultural and technological facets of the trail-blazing periodicals of the modern Arab literary movement in 1950s and 1960s Lebanon.

In particular, I hope to focus on the prestigious Beirut-based Shi’r magazine (شعر مجلة), translated as ‘Poetry’ in English. Launched January 10, 1957, Yusuf al-Khāl was its manager, publisher, editor, and frequent contributor (Al-Sālisīsee, 2004, 68-71). Shi’r ran almost uninterrupted for forty-four issues until 1969, when it halted in the face of the mounting crises engendered by the 1967 Six Day War (ibid). Then the only Arabic-language poetry periodical, Shi’r was a crucial organizing node and ideological tool of the modern Arab literary movement. Its editorial committee included notables such as Adūnīs, while many now famous poets would contribute their work and, often, their time as distributors, editors, and public defenders - all on a voluntary basis!

Indeed, Shi’r was part of a multifaceted socio-cultural, intellectual network, and was produced by al-Khāl’s renowned Shi’r Publishing House. This institution also published many modern Arab poets and writers for the first time, other cultural periodicals like al-Adab magazine (الأدب مجلة), and first-time translations of Euro-American authors. It also introduced a number of key technological print innovations along the way. Intellectuals associated with these initiatives organized a regular Thursday poetry night program, a hub of the fermenting literary revolution, and many other public initiatives. Hence, this movement’s print culture is a rich site for historical scholarly inquiry. A book history lens is especially useful for the study of this fluid and dynamic movement given that it is involved in decentering the principle elements of the production and consumption of a printed text, making them interactive and interdependent, while destabilizing critical interpretation and personal identity in a print culture (Jordan and Pattern, 1995, 11).

In establishing and running this periodical, Yusuf al-Khāl as journalist, writer, poet, and publisher was following in a long line of distinguished personalities from what became the colonial borders of modern Syria and Lebanon, which together constituted historically the cradle of Arab journalism and periodical printing (Ayalon, 1995, 28-31). Such figures include the Syrian born Rizqallah Hasun, who in 1855 Istanbul established the first Arabic-language newspaper, Mi’rat al-Ahwal; the poet Khalil al-Khal who founded the Beirut-based news weekly Hadiqat al-Akhbar in 1861; and the important intellectual Butrus al-Bustani who in 1870 Beirut launched one of the earliest literary magazines, al-Jinan (ibid). After this foundational period, the Arab periodical press would continue to grow and expand until the end of the nineteenth century. In the inter-war years, it underwent alternating periods of decline and revival. The Arab press would truly flourish, however, in the post-WWII period. This series of ruptures and continuities constitute the important historical background to Shi’r and related activities.

In taking up this research project, I have many questions in mind, although I am uncertain which will engage me most as the research unfolds. Some questions include: What social processes, social relations, and technologies were involved in the production and reproduction of this movement’s publications, such as Shi’r? How were tensions over information ownership and control grappled with? How did this new media, with its new distribution channels and new delivery systems, affect traditional means of creating and disseminating information? Can we determine the economic value of the knowledge and its consequences for its production, distribution and ownership, especially given the voluntary labour involved? (Here, it is to be understood that information/knowledge is not to be viewed only from a classical economic lens as commodity. Rather, more recent paradigms elucidate, for example, the tension between information as a public versus private good.) What impact did this emerging information infrastructure have on notions of governance, civic participation, democracy and freedom of expression, during this foundational period in post-Independence Lebanon? How was the new information system defined, conceptualized, developed, evaluated, adapted and sustained? How was Lebanese identity, or that of the modern Arab or intellectual or poet, constructed, contested, negotiated and consolidated in this intellectual milieu? This question is especially pertinent given that pan-Arab nationalists, Lebanese particularists, communists, secularists, Islamists and other political currents participated in Shi’r and related activities, even as partisan tensions mounted, and civil war loomed. What does the materiality of the publication tell us about this period? Where was it read, and how? How was authorial and intellectual legitimacy defined and negotiated?

… many questions indeed! I think for me this research would be one of discovery, surveying the archives of al-Khāl’s publishing house in Beirut to find out what this print culture can tell us about that crucial period in Lebanese history, and about ourselves today. 

References

Al-Sālisīsee, Jāk Amātāyīs. (2004). Yūsuf al-Khāl wa-majallatuhu "Shiʻr" [Yūsuf al-Khāl and

His Magazine “Shi’r”]. Beirut, Lebanon: Dār al-Nahār bi-al-taʻāwun maʻa al-Maʻhad al-Almānī lil-Abḥāth al-Sharqīyah.

Ayalon, Ami. (1995). The Press in the Arab Middle East. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jordan, John O. and Pattern, Robert L., eds. (1995). Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-

Century British Publishing and Reading Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Luker, Kristin. (2010). Salsa Dancing in the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Info-Glut.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Prakash, Gyan. (1994). Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism. The American Historical

Review, 99(5): 1475-1490.

Said, Edward. (1985). Orientalism reconsidered. Race & Class, 27(2): 1-15.

Todorov, Tzvetan. (1984). The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other.  New York:

Harper & Row Publishers.

Why is it so difficult to pick a research topic?

The question that naturally comes to my mind after reading the first chapter of the Luker textbook and attempting to come up with some research questions using "ambitious and wide-ranging" thinking is: what makes it so difficult to pick a research topic? I believe exploring this question would make it easier to come up with some relevant research topics. 

For the past ten years or so, I have been a passionate reader of blogs and online discussion forums, I rarely post contributions however, probably due to the fact that, in the end I consider them to be personal opinions of the participants relating to the topics of discussion. While conducting personal online research on various topics, I often end up on blogs and discussion forums, this has me considering other potential research questions such as: How do research and blogging relate? Can objective research be somehow conducted via a blog/forum? Are participants of a blog seeking to find the truth about a particular topic? Are they rather attempting to form an opinion based on critical reviews of the different contributions? Are blogging and research ultimately motivated by the need to influence public opinion?  

Another potential topic of research I stumbled upon while considering options for purchasing/obtaining the Luker textbook (I ended up buying the e-book kindle version online from Amazon) is: Evaluating the pros and cons of printed as opposed to digital books from a reader's perspective.

... 

Happiness and freedom: a couple of research topics

In this post, I would like to describe a few themes and specific questions that I developed in my fifteen minutes of word vomit, where I tried to decide what I would like to research, if I were guaranteed not to fail. In general, I seemed to focus on happiness and freedom; more specifically, I focused on how these two states are related to the sort of knowledge that librarians facilitate. To unpack the previous sentence, I'll provide a few more details about what I mean by happiness, freedom, and knowledge in turn.

To operationalize the term happiness for use in quantitative research I could have participants point to a specific emoticon in a set of emoticons, where happiness is represented by this face :) and unhappiness is represented by this face :( On the other hand, to operationalize happiness for qualitative research I could define happiness in a broader way to account for the complexity of the term happiness and the complexity of people's feelings about their own happiness. The latter method seems more fitting to the sort of research that I would like to conduct, namely, research about the happiness that comes from human flourishing, rather than eating a chocolate bar.

Next, I'll define what I mean by freedom by sharing my personal experience of installing the operating system (OS) Linux on my computer. At first, I was drawn to the idea of using Linux as an OS because it would allow me to customize and control many aspects of my computer that I could not manipulate on Mac OS; in other words, it would give me the freedom to take control of my computer. However, I realized very quickly that the sort of freedom a Linux noob has in comparison to a Linux guru is very limited because a noob like me simply does not have the knowledge necessary to customize an OS. To return to my original goal, which is to define freedom, I define freedom as being able to do what one wants, without being hindered by external barriers or internal obstacles, such as, lack of knowledge. 

So, what is this knowledge that noobs are lacking and how is it relevant to librarians? Here I am operationalizing knowledge as any sort of information that is acquired through conversation and claiming that librarians facilitate conversation, which, in turn, facilitates knowledge creation because I agree with most of what David Lankes argues for in his Atlas of New Librarianship (2011).

In an attempt to try to link these three concepts, I'll pose a few research questions that I would be interested in studying:

• Is freedom really freedom without knowledge or could it be the opposite? 
• relevant terms: info glut and synaptic pruning
• Are knowledge and happiness correlated? In what way? What facets of each are related?
• Does visiting the library or interacting with a librarian increase happiness and/or freedom? The freedom aspect of this question only really seems to make sense if freedom is dependent on knowledge.

In general, I'm interested in these sorts of questions because they are fairly positive (I mention happiness often), they are a little bit philosophical (when I mention human flourishing I am hinting at both Plato and Aristotle's discussion about eudaimonia), and they intersect library science with computer science (more discussions about my adventures with Linux are sure to follow).

References

Davis, K. (Photographer). (2007). Freedom Street [Photograph], Retrieved September 20, 2013, from: www.flickr.com/photos/kevandotorg Lankes, R. D. (2011). The atlas of new librarianship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hanging out in a brainstorm...

Based on the posts so far, the diverse research interests of our group have been so interesting to read about – psychology, politics, art, books, history, film – and I really look forward to learning more about all of your interests and approaches to research.

Last week, I listened to an interview with Marc Abrahams, founder of Improbable Research. The organization strives to celebrate and facilitate research that “makes people laugh and then think”; activities include the Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded each September, which honour the outlandish, the hilarious, and the downright bizarre in the world of research (“What is Improbable Research?”, 2013). Past winners include a team which analyzed the effects of listening to opera on mice who have received a heart transplant, and another which determined the ideal density of airborne wasabi to alert sleeping people about an emergency, such as a fire, via a wasabi alarm (“The Winners”, 1991-2013). Strange and creative, the awards have incited my excitement in research!

I enjoyed listening and reading about Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel Prizes precisely because of the participants’ joyous attitudes towards research, and the way the event connects researchers from a range of disciplines, including chemistry, education, economics, literature, and more. In the first chapter of Salsa Dancing Into The Social Sciences, Kristin Luker examines her early experiences in research (an act of “mastering …within a narrow set of parameters”) and compares the process  with what she observes as a more contemporary practice of integrating various fields of study in projects (2008, p. 13). I find the interdisciplinary approach she describes to be both thrilling and daunting – there are no limits! Which is exactly the problem – how to go from an infinity of engaging topics to specifics. The exercise Luker proposes at the end is the perfect advice, because in the act of writing down many ideas and thoughts, I find it is easier to slowly tailor and refine each concept. Although I have not reached a more detailed plan yet, I will continue to work in this preliminary stage. I welcome your thoughts and ideas about how to balance focusing on a specific area of study, while also being open-minded, and engaged researcher who considers various facets of a given topic.

References

Luker, Kristin. (2008). Salsa Dancing Into The Social Sciences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

What is Improbable Research? (2013). Retrieved September 19, 2013, from   http://www.improbable.com/about/

Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize (2013). Retrieved September 19, 2013, from http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/