Sep
12
Help Me HGTV !
September 12, 2006 |
Through the wisdom of Home and Garden TeleVision I have gained new insight into the process of researching and writing my dissertation. There are a lot more people doing home improvement projects than there are writing doctoral dissertations so it is much easier to “learn by example”.
My wife and I have been obsessively watching HGTV as we go through the process of renovating our home. With such a huge number of design projects to consider it is easy to make a distinction between those that are practical, affordable, and “our style” and those that are not. This part of the process is much like finding a dissertation topic. You pick an area (kitchen-bath-basement) and then figure out how it relates to the rest of the house and how you want it to look.
After that you go shopping. For the home renovation you might wind up at Lowes or a local design center. For the dissertation Proquest will be a better choice, in most cases, than Home Depot. Unless you have one of those TV crews performing a 48 hour makeover either project will most likely evolve as the result of an emergent process.
You may have particular materials in mind for the kitchen; a certain type of floor or countertop. Sometimes you will find just what you were looking for. Sometimes you will find that you can’t find what you were looking for. Sometimes, in the search process, you will find something that you hadn’t even thought of. There also may be times when you discover something that necessitates redesigning the whole project.
The other day, while going through the continual process of buying and installing large varieties of building materials, I discovered a major flaw in my dissertation research process. I remarked to Linda, “It looks like our project is finally catching up with our purchases”. As I reflected on my offhand remark I had a flash of insight.
When you are doing a home improvement it is very easy to tell the difference between “making progress” or just collecting large and unwieldy amounts of raw building materials. The paint in the can and the pile of lumber and the boxes of nails and fastening screws scream their potential at you everytime you trip over them in the chaos of, what once was, your family room.
Research materials, on the other hand, can be much less obtrusive. PDFs take up considerably less space than a stack of 2×4s and don’t cause nearly as much pain when you slam your big toe into the pile. In your enthusiasm over the hunt for new reference materials and after you have tracked down all the citations in the bibliographies of the articles whose citations you found in the bibliographies of the articles whose citations you found in the bibliographies…… well you get the idea….. you may well have collected enough raw, unprocessed research material to write two dissertations and a text book.
So there you are (or so there I am) with a pile of lumber, or PDFs, and nothing has been built yet. What do you do with all of it? I realized, at this point, that I should have started the building process already. If I, at least, had a framework in place as opposed to a concept in my head, I would know what to do with all this material. There would be some kind of organization forming. I would have an idea of what went where.
As it stands, I will have to go through all the material again just to see why I collected it in the first place. This time the process will be more of a chore since the bloom of ‘first time discovery’ will already have shriveled away. This time I’ll realize that I am doing double-work.
Writing the Doctoral Dissertation
Page 35 in my handy-dandy guide to Writing the Doctoral Dissertation exhorts me to “eliminate redundant processes”. This is a valuable piece of advice for those of us who actually want to finish the dissertation. Somehow I feel the need to balance that with a favorite HGTV maxim; “Measure twice, cut once.”
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