Current location:	RMIT
Current mood:	accomplished

the rhythm of research
I occasionally muse about the rhythm of the research process. It's particularly present for me at the moment with my research assistant job at RMIT (see ** below for a quick summary of what I'm up to).

As part of this, I'm required - in the classic research assistant idiom - to produce (quickly) a report looking at all the places in the world that are doing similar things, what the state of play is, are there any effective competitors etc. and somehow summarise all of this into a 30 second grab that my professor can use to sell this project to the head of school.

So off I trawl...

I hold that green-fields research goes through a rhythm of 4 stages:

IGNORANCE
OVERWHELM
PATTERNS
SYNTHESIS

At first you know so little [IGNORANCE] about the topic that you don't even know which search terms to use. You occasionally get a random hit, and you feel nice and comfy because clearly there's not going to be much work for you to do.

Then you get the hang of the field you've walked in to, and you realise that most of the planet has spent the last 50 years apparently doing nothing except writing [OVERWHELM] about this topic. You've no idea how to separate the important stuff from the peripheral, or even to separate the field you're supposed to be researching from all the neighboring fields that use similar words. This is the Long Night of the Soul of Research. It's the ability to push through this phase that separates a researcher from...well, from something else. Probably something pejorative.

If you push through this, eventually you begin to see the same sources [PATTERNS] showing up. If you've kept good notes, that is, and maintained links etc. (i.e. done research good). You realise that 20,000 of the hits are actually all pointing back to the one conference - or even the one conference paper. You realise that most of the articles are from a particular discipline which isn't relevant to your research. Your buttocks begin to unclench a little as you realise that without knowing you've passed the hump, and it's just summarising and attitude from here on in. "Why 'attitude'?" I hear you say? Well, glad you asked...

Finally, you do a bit of root-cause analysis - you figure out who's referencing who, and who are the big names and organisations. Then [SYNTHESIS] I find it best to puff up your chest and gird your loins and do a ridiculous but invariably successful thing - you go and see the person who commissioned the research and you throw out an unsupportably broad and sketchy executive summary of the field and have a go at defending it. Don't even take along your notes. Don't worry that you've forgotten most of the names.

If you've done the preceding stages well, you'll amaze yourself with how much sense your summary makes. And they are so grateful to get some shape around the project that they don't mind if the shape is faintly reminiscent of pears. This firstly stops you from going off down the wrong path, and it also saves you from the trap of trying to get it all too detailed or too right. It will also pull out of your boss those remaining leads that they'd forgotten to mention in the first briefing. Also, it means that the report you write is far lower stakes, because you're just putting flesh what you've already sketched out. Oh, and it makes you look smokingly good at your job.

So, there you have it, the rhythm of research a la Daniel.

I've just done the 'throw out an unsupportably broad summary' thing to my boss. Went well. I look smokingly good.


** It's quite an interesting project I'm involved with - looking at how art can directly assist communities cope with and address climate change, particularly in the areas of psychological resiliance; design principles; sustainable land-use; and awareness and minimisation of resource use. [Tiki, this is what I mentioned I wanted to talk to you about the other night]