[Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"? (Dr. T. Michael Roberts) / Research Survey

[Peter Ryan]

Dear all,

This is my first post to the AoIR listserv, although I’ve been lurking for a few months now. 

I’m currently completing by doctorate in an interdisciplinary graduate research program, and I find this discussion of methodology interesting in that the pedagogy of my university definitely supports the view that methodological issues should be approached from the perspective of using the "best" methods for addressing and observing a researcher’s object of study.  For example, if I’m researching best practices for how people interact with and use a particular software, perhaps an ethnographic or qualitative usability study would better serve my needs, rather than a quantitative study that captures the order of icons that a user selects while using the software (and other such statistically measurable items) -- although the survey would definitely add extra elements to the research “story” if it were well designed, as Dr. T. Michael Roberts is describing.  

Similarly, on-line content analysis and textual analysis tools are now often helping reduce narrative reports to numbers with ease.  In other words, new on-line tools and communities like TAPoR, for example, are adding to the ease with which quantitative analysis can now be conducted.  Often it is an issue of simply adding an automated survey, or other form of reporting, that could lend itself to later quantitative analysis, for an added perspective to a qualitative study “story”.

For example, here’s a shameless self promotion, if anyone has any free time this holiday break, I’d greatly appreciate anyone interested in the topic of how literature affects research and development filling out my quick little doctoral research survey – which can be found at the following link:  

* <a href="https://www.runner.ryerson.ca/PRSurvey/survey.cfm">https://www.runner.ryerson.ca/PRSurvey/survey.cfm</a>
* https://www.runner.ryerson.ca/PRSurvey/survey.cfm

*Please take the time to fill the survey out, especially if you are either 1) a published author or 2) employed in the information communication technology sector. The survey should take about 15 minutes of your time, depending on your level of involvement.  I appreciate any and all comments and feedback – the more information recorded here, the better because it will help both my quantitative and qualitative research analysis in the long run.

*Also, if you know any other interested networks or listserves that might not mind this type of research circulating on its servers, I would appreciate the survey being forwarded on...

More information on my research can be found by following the link above.

At this point, I hope that the survey will travel far and wide like a stolen garden gnome that will one day come back to its owner.


*Importance of this Research*

I hope that you will take the time to help this research because of its importance in the following listed areas of study. Specifically, this research aims to develop:

1)	a better understanding of how to improve the potential of networked research via the use of computers. Computers have been called the “imagination machine”, but are we using our new abundance of information effectively and imaginatively?

2)	an interdisciplinary understanding of how the “two cultures” of the Arts and Computer Sciences do in fact work together (if they do at all).

3)	recommendations for economic policy that is being led by the creative sector. In particular, funding for the Arts have been cut in recent years, despite the huge economic impact that the cultural industries have on local economies; while the funding for ICTs continues to increase without any apparent regard for the environmental problems caused by the development of the infrastructure that is required by a technological society – how can these two policy arcs be realigned in a focused and mutually beneficial way?

4)	maps of ICT networks that emphasize and link these two cultures.  If we can visualize how research networks overlap with artistic and literary capital, then perhaps improvements can be made to the systems of communication between the agents of these two cultures. Such an analysis can also be used as a valuable case study for other communities.

Thank you for your time and consideration of this message, and I hope it helps add to this conversation of methodological considerations.

Sincerely,

Peter Malachy Ryan
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Peter Malachy Ryan, PhD Candidate
Rogers Fellow, Communication and Culture
Ryerson University

Blog: www.cprobes.com/pr 



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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Community "Critical Mass"? (Dr. T. Michael Roberts)


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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2006 08:08:13 -0800 (PST)
From: "Dr. T. Michael Roberts" <dr_haqiqah at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Message-ID: <701748.35560.qm at web36804.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Mary-Helen,
I am one of those rare birds thoroughly trained in
both qualitative and quantitative Research
Methodology. I started out with degrees in philosophy
and literature and was drawn into the Department of
Educational Psychology, Counseling and Special
Education by an interest in Transpersonal Psychology.
I was told once admitted that I would have to take at
least four courses in Statistics and Research
Methodology to become a doctor and was a damn fool if
I did not take every course offered by the department
in number crunching. Qualitative Research Methodology
was not mentioned during this conversation or, at the
time, in the catalog of courses. The folks over in
Psychology looked down on the folks over in the
education school but granted us the left-handed
compliment of being better statisticians than they
were and better trained in Psychology than the average
math nerd. 

I had never taken Algebra. I took business math with
Coach Vickers in high school and then majored in
Philosophy at a small, liberal arts college which
cross-listed logic courses as both PHIL and MATH. So,
you can imagine how splendidly self-confident I felt
as I stood in Dr. Donald Ary?s office explaining to
him that I would be taking his Educational Statistics
1 next term because I really had no choice. I had
dropped by to apologize in advance for the ineptitude
I was sure I would display and, perhaps, to convince
him that I was, when allowed to speak English rather
than being forced to express myself through numbers,
at least slightly brighter than a turnip.

I enjoyed Dr. Ary?s course tremendously and took every
course offered by the department in number crunching
for the pure joy of it. I realized at some point that
much number crunching is done for the pure joy of it
and developed a bit of a habit in that direction
myself. I spent so long finishing the degree I started
while doing another simultaneously that I passed comps
and became officially ABD the same term the
department?s first semiotican was hired. I did a
quantitative dissertation but probably would not have
if the semiotican had burst upon the scene a year
earlier. 

Upon graduation, I began teaching Psychology for a
community college. My greatest success came teaching
Psychology 2317 (Basic Statistics) both online and in
the traditional classroom. I never got a single math
nerd in that class in all the times I taught it. My
classes closed shortly after opening every term after
the first, filling up quickly with would-be nurses
told by the State of Texas that 3 hours of statistics
were required for licensure. These nurses genuinely
loved my Education School approach to teaching
statistics, an approach that involved dealing with
statistics at the level of concept rather than getting
bogged down with all those elaborate formulas and
tricky computations. You can get away with that if you
have them buy SPSS ($80.00) instead of a text-book. 

Anyway, I now teach English rather than Psychology. I
miss my nurses but enjoy working with my composition
students even more. I was always a story-teller. My
fascination with statistics was an attempt on my part
to embrace my opposite. That fascination began during
a time in my life when I felt that I was drowning in
an ocean of competing stories and desperately needed
to feel something solid beneath my feet, something
that was there before anyone started interpreting and
which refused to be interpreted away.  Will that do as
a definition of reality? Patterns in numbers that were
just numbers standing in abstract relationship without
anything being defined except within the web of those
relationships felt like solid ground to me. 

Later, I faced the awful fact that these patterns only
come to mean when you turn them into a story by saying
that 17i is the length of Jessica?s nose which is why
Roger and Jessica eloped to Vegas. The truth is ?out
there?, as Fox Moulder used to say, but can only be
lived ?in here? in the form of a story that must go
beyond the information given in order to become a fit
place for human beings to live, love and occasionally
try to jump out of the story like cat nipped kitties
chasing their own lovely tails. 



I hope I have made all this perfectly clear. My
students tell me that my learned discourse holds
together at least as well as jazz and that they do
profit in some vague way by exposure. Then again, I
tell them that their essays will make fascinating
reading if they just capture themselves in a net of
words. I try to be kind and, perhaps, they do also in
return.
T. Michael 

--- Mary-Helen Ward <mhward at usyd.edu.au> wrote:

> But why? Why reduce people's words, thoughts and
> emotional responses  
> to mathematical coding? Why not use qualitative
> methods to capture/ 
> represent/investigate the interactions? I understand
> that it's still  
> a reduction; a distillation from the original, but
> it speaks in clear  
> ways too.
> 
> Theory can be developed from life using many
> methods; maths is only  
> one of them. Maybe when we talk about the 'body of
> knowledge' we need  
> to think about its blood and guts (the messy stuff)
> and well as bones  
> and ligaments.
> 
> M-H
> 
>