What is Research?
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Here's a world.
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Attention is naturally drawn to the centre; easily recognized, more resources, more order, more elaborated, established, ...
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If we all follow that tendency, if we all try to go to the centre...
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...the world might seem to get smaller
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But the world isn’t small.
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If we look to the edges...
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... the world reveals more, feels greater.
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Here order meets the unknown and reveals intricate heterogeneity...
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...liminal zones that reveal passageways or seeds into new worlds.
The OECD defines it thus:
"Research comprises creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications."
Satisfied?
As a member of the research community, you are building on the knowledge that others have acquired before you and providing a map for those who come after you. Research is built on sharing. You are adding to a body of work that will never be complete.
Place yourself in the shoes of one that follows you. What qualities do you look for?
- Interestingness? Innovativeness? Significance?
- Relevance? Specificity? Depth?
- Effectiveness? Trustworthiness? Usability?
Something else?
Documented research usually involves these:
- Asking a novel question (e.g. that nobody has asked before), and showing that it is worth answering
- Doing the approriate work to respond to it, and showing that it is done well (systematically/effectively/correctly/...)
- Communicating the knowledge you have acquired to a larger audience, in a way that can be built upon
Personal motivation. It should probably be something you are genuinely interested in, if you're going to dedicate mnonths or years to it. What does your curiosity dwell on? Do you have an original idea or independent perspective to contribute? Something that is difficult yet that you care about enough to make real?
Scholarly grounding. Often the problem statement of research is not apparent from the start. A literature review can identify flaws or holes in previous research, and provide justification/relevance for the study. Often the literature review happens before the problem is identified. A gap in the current literature engenders a research question/hypothesis.
Grounded speculation Through a feedback of speculation and grounding the idea can become concrete, specific, and narrow.
Notes:
When we say "what we don't know", the "we" doesn't mean a personal knowledge -- it refers to a resaerch community, or the world
"Literature" here doesn't mean old fiction -- it refers to the body of knowledge shared in research communities -- and not necessarily just written research, it can include documented artworks, media, software, community practices, ...
The broader motivation is often highly speculative, and often deeply questions or contradicts the status quo. Ask:
- What does (the world / my culture / my discipline) need (right now / in the future)?
- What are the "ten questions" in your field?
- What has been predicted as the impending future -- and what does it need? Or, what is missing from these predictions?
notes:
Governments, research boards, thinktanks, and so on often generate documents of high priority research topics, areas of opportunity and risk, and so on. These can be helpful but are often a little to generalized.
Futurologists, consultants, media speculators write endlessely about predicted futures; though beware, these are often focused on alarmist or other attention-grabbing features to support a business, economic or political motivation.
Some sub disciplines have even published papers along the lines of "open problems in (the field)" -- these kinds of open problems are often what really define that field, and are much more concrete and narrow, and a good place to start.
- Or, what have we missed in the past? Or, what are we missing by seeing the future through a rear-view mirror?
- Or, place your questions outside the field:
- What is common to all works in a medium, and specific to a medium, yet only rarely articulated? Look for the elephant in the room.
- What can change our perception of the medium itself? Or, what can be taken away without losing the essence?
- Or, what is the mountain to climb (not hill)?
- Go to the edge - there’s not that much there - then work back.
Work toward a definition of the problem that is clear & concrete.
At early stages, diagrams, maps and keywords can be far more useful than writing.
Use the literature
- Identify clearly the state of the art you are advancing (the field or domain). What are the assumptions you are overthrowing?
- Or, you may be inventing your own field. If so, don't try to hard to legitimate a new field by making a case; prove it by demonstration.
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Same amount of soil unearthed.
At the beginning it makes sense to cast wide, to understand the field by covering a wide area. But as your problem becomes clearer you need to dig deep and focused.
- The idea should be specific. Keep returning to the original question; the articulation is usually too general, and needs to be sharpened. A really good problem statement can take a while to refine.
- What will you do & why is it worth doing?
- What is the state of the art & where does your work fit?
- What is the form of the contribution? (Technical, artistic/compositional/performance, theoretic, ...)?
- What are the key decisions & unique differentials?
- What will you not do?
- What can you identify that differentiates world-changing ideas from common ideas?
- Architecture professor: "Take your brain and throw it into the future as far as you can. Take something said to be impossible and make it. The greater the impossibility, the greater the value of the contribution."
What will the field, or the world, look like in 5, 10, 20 years? What might be a Black Swan event that would radically change things? In what should you be conducting your research or research-creation?
SSHRC conducted a "horizon scan" to identify 16 future global Challenges for prioritization of emerging technology, whether as opportunities and new directions for societies as well as warnings of potential crises. They then asked researchers:
- Which areas would you prioritize?
- For each area that should be prioritized:
- What is a compelling example you have recently seen or heard related this area?
- What are the most significant changes that the challenge would cause?
- Over the next decade, what impacts would these changes have?
- What could happen when two of these impacts interact?
- Is there a challenge not listed that you think should be included?
notes:
- Working in the Digital Economy
- Global Health and Wellness for the 21st Century
- The Emerging Asocial Society
- Shifting Dynamic of Privilege and Marginalization
- Building Better Lives Across the Gender Spectrum
- Inhabiting Challenging Environments
- Balancing Risks and Benefits in the Emerging Surveillance Society
- Humanity+
- The Evolving Bio-Age
- Living Within Earth’s Carrying Capacity
- The Pervasive Contamination of the ‘Natural’
- Envisioning Governance Systems that Work
- The Changing Nature of Security and Conflict
- Truth Under Fire in a Post-Fact World
- The Arts Transformed
- Erosion of Culture and History
For another perspective, consider the Pew Report into Digital Life in 2025.
The specificies of research methods and values can vary widely according to the values of different disciplines and communities. For example,
- Basic/pure research: pure knowledge, unknown applications.
- Applied research: more pragmatic, empirical.
- Research & development (R&D): services/products, typically commercially driven.
(Q: Where does art-as-research fit into this?)
Q: What about research in Digital Media programs? We are a combination of art and engineering schools, and science & humanities, with researchers spanning various mixtures of these.
- Application of scientific methodology.
- Providing information and theories to explain the nature and properties of the world.
- Often involves conducting experiments in the lab or in the field.
- Values:
- Predictability (a theory that can be used effectively to predict phenomena)
- reproducibility (results that can be repeated and verified by others)
- cohesion with existing models (but paradigm shifts)
This is dynamic.
"In the world of scientific research today, there's a revolution going on—over the last decade or so, scientists across many disciplines have been seeking to improve the workings of science and its methods. To do this, scientists are largely following one of two paths: the movement for reproducibility and the movement for open science. Both movements aim to create centralized archives for data, computer code and other resources, but from there, the paths diverge. The movement for reproducibility calls on scientists to reproduce the results of past experiments to verify earlier results, while open science calls on scientists to share resources so that future research can build on what has been done, ask new questions and advance science."
https://phys.org/news/2020-09-outlines-cultures-science.amp
notes:
The move for reproducibility has also exposed a number of instances where what were considered "established results" are now shown to be false. Sometimes this was down to human errors, or failures to understand the complexities of a situation, or poor assumptions, etc. In the worst cases this has actually been down to issues of falsification of data (i.e. corruption).
The move for open science has reduced a significant amount of the boundaries between academic and non-academic worlds, particularly financial boundaries. Today it is much easier to find research papers that are not behind "paywalls", for example. It has also changed the nature of how we publish and share research.
- Less searching for an ultimate correct answer, more exploring the issues and details surrounding a topic
- Context (social, historical, political, cultural or ethnic) is critical.
- Archival work, surveys, in-depth interviews, etc.
Pablo Picasso said: "I never made a painting as a work of art, it’s all research."
Also known as:
- artistic research,
- practice-based research,
- research-creation
When creative works are both the outcome and the object of research.
This entered academic institutions relatively recently, and is still somewhat controversial. If art is also research, how is it defined, and how is it evaluated?
notes:
"research-creation" is the terminology most widely-used here in Canada -- but it is not widely-used internationally.
(after all, you may be asking them for funding)
SSHRC describes "research-creation" as follows:
An approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation.
The creation process is situated within the research activity and produces critically informed work in a variety of media (art forms).
Research-creation cannot be limited to
- the interpretation or analysis of a creator’s work,
- conventional works of technological development,
- or work that focuses on the creation of curricula."
notes:
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), is one of Canada's three large research funding agencies, and primary source of arts-based research funding; i.e. who you may be applying to funding from.
For alternative perspectives on art-as-research, here's an annotated bibliography of writing about arts-based research.
(This happens to also be a decent example of what an "annotated bibliography" can look like)
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Here are some established arts researchers researching art research:
"Artistic Research Will Eat Itself": The 9th International Conference on Artistic Research
"The provocation of the title is intended as a warning against the dangers of methodological introspection, or as a playful invitation to explore the possibilities of a field in a constant state of becoming."
"If we are to constantly defend and define, are we in danger of having no art left, only the claims for its ability to embody knowledge?"
What qualifies as good research? One way of knowing this is to look at how research is reviewed. Again, most grant appplications, but also journals and conference review bodies often publish guidelines for reviewers. These are the criteria by which your work will be evaluated.
These are general guidelines, but practices and cultures of value can differ very greatly between different research communities -- and we are often transdiscplinary...
notes:
Later in this course we will perform a mock conference review process on our own papers, to help develop the perspective from the reviewer's point of view.
For an example of reviewer guidelines in the sciences: https://researchinvolvement.biomedcentral.com/about/reviewer-guidelines
- Is the manuscript written in an understandable way?
- Is all the relevant information available to you?
- Is there an aim, research question or reason for doing the research, and has this research been put in the context of previous work?
- Have all methods been described in sufficient detail to allow others to evaluate and/or replicate the work in similar circumstances?
- Have the results been presented and discussed clearly and completely?
- Do the results support the authors’ conclusions?
- Are the included additional files (supplementary materials) appropriate?
- Are there any ethical or competing interests issues you would like to raise?
- Do you have any other suggestions that might help the author(s) strengthen their paper to make it more applicable to the community?
For an example of research-creation we can again look to SSHRC.
SSHRC Proposals should contain:
A sustained, reflective research set directly and actively within the creation process itself.
- a developed scholarly apparatus and
- an integral connection to contemporary literary/artistic practices.
Research exclusively about
- the creation process
- or about literary/artistic productions,
- or creative work involving minimal scholarly investigation,
will not be considered.
SSHRC Proposals requirements continued:
- Address clear research question
- Offer theoretical contextualization within relevant fields of inquiry
- A well-considered methodological approach and creation process
Both the research and any resulting creative work must meet peer standards of excellence and be suitable for publication, public performance and/or viewing.
The theory and methodology must be aligned with the proposal’s objectives.
The proposal should clearly demonstrate how the research informs the creation process, as well as how the creation process is integrated into and relevant to the project.
notes:
Those first three roughly correspond to the first three chapters of a thesis: the statement of the research question/problem, the literature review, and the methodology.
The next is a question of community evaluation.
The next, alignment, is simply a question of consitency.
The final requirement follows from the definition of what research-creation is defined to be; but you still have to demonstrate the work's validity.
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