Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Working outline of basic research process


Problematizing = identifying or defining the problem or curio/curiosity

Questioning = inventing a question that corresponds to a problem that one is trying to solve through research (i.e., curio-probing or knowledge-producing tool)

Hypothesizing = making a statement of expectation that is either subject to being rewritten as new data is gathered during the research process in medias res (working/responsive) or subject to being affirmed or denied at the end of the research process (formal) 

Predicting/deducing = “determining the logical consequences of the [formal] hypothesis”

Conceiving/conceptualizing = finding, inventing, and using analytic concepts, propositions, and rules in order to direct attention, concentration, consideration, methods, and analytic thinking in general

– Operationalizing = defining specific concrete presences or appearances as criteria that obliquely or directly indicate or embody the presence of something abstract, theoretical, or “fuzzy”; defining something unobservable and latent in terms of something observable and manifest

– Planning of research action (i.e., designing a research procedure) = answering the following questions…

1 – Where to look? Where to travel?
2 – What to look for or pay attention to? What is worth seeing there?
3 – How to probe, manipulate, or treat a situation in order to make it produce recordable phenomena? What to do when you get there?
4 – How to document? How to record phenomena? How to translate phenomena into recordings, records, or documents?
5 – How to handle, manipulate, calculate, or analyze documents? How to make sense of documents or manipulated documents (e.g., statistics)?

Probing & Orientation
– Probing = making the real “speak” by cutting into, interfering with, or stimulating it

– Orienting = directing analytic experience locomotively (i.e., in terms of positioning the sense-organs of the body of the observer) or cognitively (i.e., in terms of attention to or focus on particular details)

1 – Searching for a data source (e.g., searching Google)
2 – Soliciting of data source (e.g., clicking a Google link)
3 – Acquiring of data source (e.g., reading or downloading a webpage, video, audio clip, picture, etc.)
4 – Probing of data source (e.g., interview questioning; clicking around [in the case of Internet archives])

Observing = experiencing the “speech” of the real sensuously by means of one’s body; i.e., Observation of data source (e.g., viewing, reviewing, listening to, etc. an archive)

Recording = making the “speech” of the real endure through converting or folding it into another medium capable of furnishing evidence or information (i.e., a document)

Documentation of observation (i.e., writing down or putting into words one’s ideas about what one sees and notices)

Documentation of research actions (i.e., inquiry log)
1 – What appointments were made?
2 – How did others react to the study?
3 – What surprised you about the strangeness of the field?
4 – How was the study conceived?
5 – Which person was met?
6 – What source was accessed?
7 – What was the precise date and time of each research action?
8 – When were these notes taken? Etc.

Analyzing = questioning, comparing, inspecting, cataloging, categorizing, describing, and otherwise thinking about documents, observations, and the relation between the two

chronological organization of documents (i.e., organizing documents according to their date; organizing documents according to the date of publication of the observed archive; organizing documents according to the date of the events referred to in the observed archive)

categorical organization documents (i.e., files and subfiles) (i.e., organizing documents according to various categorical criteria – e.g., Group A vs. group B; instances of X, instances of Y, and instances of Z; etc.)

Interpreting/Concluding = making concepts, propositions, and inferences about the analyzed “speech” (i.e., observations) and recorded “speech” (i.e., documents) of the real

Reporting = publishing a final edited draft

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