Dear Amanda, Derek, and All,
Thanks for your notes. Because this addresses the issue of Mendeley and
the Twitter version of scholarship, I want to tease out a few key
dimensions of both posts.
(1) Amanda states, correctly, that developing private and scholarly
databases into literature reviews that contribute to a discipline
requires resources. She also notes that few of us manage to secure those
resources. While this is true in that few among the world nearly seven
billion human beings have these kinds of resources, most of us on this
list belong to the fortunate few.
Most of us are paid by our universities to work as researchers. We have
an obligation to contribute to the discipline. It’s part of our job
description.
While this isn’t the case for the doctoral students on the list, they
are working to make an original contribution to the knowledge of the
field through their research and the thesis that will ensue.
(2) Amanda states that social networking has raised the profile of many
design academics, supplying funding for their research projects. This
doesn’t seem accurate to me.
The statement may be true in two senses. First, there have always been
social networks for scholars, researchers, and scientists, and these
networks are always part of the networked systems that allocate research
funds. It may also be true in the sense that universities are focal
points for different kinds of funds, especially funding for applied
research or for practical projects that universities prefer to
categorize as research.
Nevertheless, I’d suggest that the major returns on research funding
go to those who publish. It’s the same across all fields, and nearly
no design research funding compares with the massive funding in fields
that publish substantive research. There is no way to test this on a
world-wide basis without empirical inquiry, but I’d guess that the
serious research projects in design are funded in ways similar to
funding for other fields, and on similar criteria.
(3) Content counts, not the storage system or the software. Like Derek,
I use books rather than Endnote. I’m sure I ought to use it –
everyone tells me so, but I did my graduate work somewhere between the
Pleistocene and the founding of Uruk. I got in the habit of doing it the
old-fashioned way. After setting my clay tablets aside, I pounded notes
into sheets of dried pulp using die-cast letter-forms on muscle-powered
levers linked to a mechanical system known as a typewriter. While I now
use an advanced form of Turing’s computing machine to record and
store, I keep my notes by hand, and start again each time with books and
journal articles. The one time-saving device that I sometimes use is to
cut and paste some of the bibliographic details from one project to the
next when I use a similar reference list.
To speak of “years of endnoted interrogation of design canons”
misses the point of literacy. Literacy entails knowing and using the
useful literature. But this is not simply a matter of a canon in the
sense of an historical, philosophical, or literary canon. In any field
of research connected linked with an applied profession such as
medicine, law, or design, literacy also entails understanding and
applying empirical, conceptual, and theoretical research.
The issue is not a matter of interrogating the canon. The issue
involves interrogating the human and physical world, using theoretical,
conceptual, and empirical literature as tools in the process of
interrogation.
(4) My argument with Mendeley is that it simply does not bridge the
different forms of knowledge. It’s a clumsy and poorly structured way
to develop a discourse.
All media that record and represent knowledge through external
information systems are social media. In raising the concept of
“social media” in my earlier post, I used the term in its current
colloquial sense, referring to such systems as Twitter or Facebook.
These are not suitable social media for the research discourse.
(5) Amanda concludes her post with a profound question. “Is it
possible to design a scholarly, rigorous approach to socially networked
knowledge production?”
There are three answers I can think of off-hand, all of them good.
The first is that we already have a scholarly, rigorous approach to
socially networked knowledge production. One major tool for this
approach is the university, along with the larger network of parallel
linked tools including journals, research councils, university presses,
scholarly and scientific societies, and the like. Universities do what
they do very well indeed. While research universities struggle to carry
on in the global era of austerity, they remain effective mechanisms for
“a scholarly, rigorous approach to socially networked knowledge
production.”
If you’re curious about this system, how it evolved, what it does and
how it works, I wrote a fair amount about the history of the university
in
Friedman, Ken. 2003. “Design Curriculum Challenges for Today’s
University.” [Keynote conference lecture.] Enhancing the Curricula:
Exploring Effective Curricula Practices in Art, Design and Communication
in Higher Education. Center for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design.
First International Conference at the Royal Institute of British
Architects (RIBA) London, UK, 10th - 12th April 2002. Co-sponsored by
ELIA (European League of Institutes of Arts) and ADC-LTSN (The Art,
Design and Communication - Learning and Teaching Support Network).
London: CLTAD, The London Institute, 29-63.
A PDF copy is available at URL:
http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/47336
The paper itself offers a fairly brief overview, but the reference list
will lead you to a rich series of resources that describe how the modern
research university evolved, and how it manages to provide “a
scholarly, rigorous approach to socially networked knowledge
production.”
The second answer is that universities are not the only such
mechanisms. The world supports a wide range of socially networked
knowledge production organizations. Many of these are scholarly and
rigorous in their approach. I won’t list them all here, but they
include serious newspapers and magazines (The New York Times, The
Economist); government research organizations and private research
organization that do contract work for government (CSIRO [Australia],
Mind Lab [Denmark], Policy Lab [USA], VTT [Finland], SITRA [Finland],
and many more); effective private companies (in design, IDEO is a
well-known example, as are the research arms of Intel, Apple, IBM, and
many more); as well as thousands of other examples, public, private, and
hybrid.
The third answer is that there must certainly be new ways to develop
“a scholarly, rigorous approach to socially networked knowledge
production.” Human beings are always evolving, creating, and designing
such systems.
What doesn’t work are systems that operate on the notion that a group
of ill-informed and often ignorant contributors will develop a “a
scholarly, rigorous approach to socially networked knowledge
production” by aggregating the products of uninformed opinion.
(6) Amanda’s post got me thinking about an issue that links and
undergirds these other issues. What is it that we do for living when we
work at a research-intensive university?
This will take a bit of thought, and I’m not going to answer that
question now. I want to think on it for a while before responding with
respect to the challenges and questions we address on the list.
(7) Derek’s post offered a sharp summary of many key issues. I tend
to agree with him on most of them. If we were a court, I might file a
concurring opinion in some cases, teasing out multiple dimensions or
agreeing for slightly different reasons. On the whole, though, I agree
and for many of the same reasons.
I’d like to urge list readers to read that post again: that’s the
kind of note that makes for a provocative and useful seminar with PhD
students.
(8) Where I’d like to tease out a little bit more is on the question
of crank research or even reasonably professional research that fails to
attend to current evidence.
Stephen Gould’s book gives a wonderful overview of just what this has
meant in human history.
Our field is responsible for generating the human built and social
environment. To do this well, we must understand more about our
environment and our fellow human beings than our predecessors did.
Derek’s note points to the consequences of sloppy research – this
involves more than what we know and what we don’t know. It involves
what we think we know that isn’t so. This involves more than
interrogating a canon: it involves understanding and attending to
research.
Best regards,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3
9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design
--
Amanda Bill wrote:
—snip—
However, to develop these private and scholarly databases into reviews
of literature, which then contribute to a discipline, requires resources
(valuable time and authority). Few of us manage to secure those
resources. By contrast, social networking has raised the profile of many
design academics, and supplied funding for their research projects much
more effectively than years of endnoted interrogation of design canons.
This seems to bear out the idea of Gibbons et al (1994), that new
cultures of knowledge are socially distributed and produced in the
context of markets, rather than being concentrated within traditional
university boundaries.
Perhaps mendeley is best viewed as an attempt to bridge these different
types of knowledge? The question I’d like to ask this list is whether
its possible to design a scholarly, rigorous approach to socially
networked knowledge production? Or is this now an oxymoron?
—snip—
Derek Miller wrote:
—snip—
Social networking has produced more voices, not more authority. Yes, we
are indeed in a tremendous period of transition — due in part to
technology and also due to the constructivist turn in the Academy which
are contemporaneous, but were not caused by the same things — but that
only retrenches our need to determine how best to learn, ensure we know
what an “authoritative” argument is (i.e. based on how it is
produced, not who produces it, though doing the first well builds the
reputation of the person, which is just fine), and teach our students
how to make them.
This is not a game or an intellectual dance. Bad arguments hurt people.
I would encourage everyone to read The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen J.
Gould, who did a wonderful job of explaining how the reification of
“IQ” lead to a particular form of measurement, and how people who
fell below that number were sterilized (even in countries of supposed
liberal values like Norway), or else murdered as undesirables (the list
here is long). Phrenology mixed with social darwinism with a dash of new
thinking on fascism helped “scientifically” defend the Holocaust.
And the list goes on. Intellectuals yield power by virtue of their
agenda-setting ability if nothing else. Right now, we are going this
like children yielding scissors.
—snip—
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