Monday 24 September 2012

Still drawing…


It seems that this week’s readings elaborate further and offer some advice on some of the concerns I’d had last week about devising a good research question. Ideas about ‘framing’ the question come up in Luker, and I had some mixed feelings about some of the points. I like the advice to read anything that piques your interest, even if it doesn’t exactly seem relevant at the time. At least for me, even reflecting on some of the kinds things I’ve enjoyed reading relatively recently, even though they are a bit all over the map, could at least help in guiding my own thinking toward what I might like to pursue. Nevertheless, being in the LIS program I do have the feeling that ultimately I’d want to frame something relevant to that.

Luker’s discussion of the “cocktail party” metaphor made me kind of uneasy though. I can see the value in looking at a journal or conference to see if your work would fit in there, and using the kinds of things published as a guide for framing your own work. But at the same time it seems kind of deceptive to “pretend your topic of interest is connected…even if it’s not”. Putting it this way seems to suggest that the framing and presentation is just as, if not more, imperative to the work’s success than the work itself. Hmm...

1 comment:

  1. Mike, I think this is Luker being a cold pragmatist. And she probably has a point. All organizations/societies, once they have been around for a while, tend to ossify, to cling to the past, instead of looking forward. Which means the respected journals, the ones that have been around for a while, will have developed a certain culture, with a set of (perhaps implicit, perhaps explicit) criteria of what's in and what's out. As a new researcher, your work will get more exposure if you get it into a "respectable" journal, BUT you'll have to convince them that you fit their criteria. I'm no seasoned researcher, so I don't know if it's really that bad, but what Luker says seems very believable.

    On the other hand, you could find some small, "cool" publication that will take you up with the exact topic of interest that you say you have. It's just that it won't be read by a lot of "important" people.

    Lots of quotation marks...

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