Co-creating and debating knowledge: Citing literature, citing people

I wrote this in 2015 the first time I tried to unpick my difficulties with the concept of doing a literature review before doing the research, and privileging published academic work over conversations when thinking about theory and meaning. I rediscovered it as I trawled through past fragments and notes as I start writing my thesis. This won't make it into my thesis, but I'd like to put it 'out there' in the public domain. So here it is.

I like thinking and I like my thoughts. I learn by debating and discussing, especially with people who disagree or who approach to topic from a radically different perspective. I want to be able to order and lay out my thoughts to encourage further debate.

I don’t want to cite experts to justify my thinking, as if my thoughts have no value because I am not eminent. I do not want to hide behind experts in an attempt to abdicate personal responsibility for what I’ve written.

I do have to be careful in case the above is an excuse for trying to avoid citing because I find it difficult to develop the discipline of knowing where ideas have come from. I’m pretty eclectic and I’m getting old. I usually couldn’t tell you where I picked up an idea – it might have been a newspaper article, tweet, book I read in 1983, something overheard at a conference, a conversation, a lecture or something I scan-read when looking to see what others have read. And I’m not just eclectic, I also struggle to separate my immediate interaction with someone’s words and the words themselves.

But I digress. Whatever my beliefs and (limited) capability for citing, my thoughts are not my thoughts. They are a constantly evolving product of interaction with other thinkers. I need to keep notes so I can cite others in order to:

• give credit to those co-creators (at all stages of research)
• provide pointers to how my thinking evolved (when I get to the point of fixing my thinking in a thesis)
• signpost people to things I think worth reading (at all stages of research)

We have an established route for citation when we interact with texts, with rules for how to cite within the writing and how to reference that citation in the bibliography. That’s fine if the knowing or unknowing co-creators of your thinking are written, disembodied texts. And once I’ve learned the discipline of keeping accurate records…

There are newer rules for citing television programmes, videos, websites – almost anything can be cited as long as what we are citing could be accessed by others in the same way that we accessed it.

But how do we cite when our co-creators are encountered not as written texts but as conversations, debates, email exchanges, tweets? My reasons for wishing to cite are as valid for now as any encounter with a written text.

Back in the 1980s when I wrote a science dissertation, it was permitted to cite the odd 'pers comm' if it were from a respected authority. It was viewed as needing a strong argument for including a personal communication as, although it credited the person and directed you to someone of interest, it did not let other people reflect independently on that communication. In other words, how could others access the information, the data, that I cited?

It’s at this point that my thoughts moved to the concept and language of Open Data. After all, what is a citation but a way to access data? And in Open Data Institute terms, data (in my case, things needing citation) come as open, shared and closed.

Open is available to all on the same basis.

Shared is available to some (like publications behind a pay wall or personal communications).

Closed is private communication so shouldn’t be cited at all.

Some within the Open Data world argue that as much data as possible should be shifted to ‘open’ or ‘closed’, as ‘shared’ is where privilege is maintained. (As I said, I’m ill-disciplined in documenting where I hear things; all I can say is I believe this comes from articles I’ve clicked through to from Twitter that were written by proponents of Open Data, and conversations over dinner before a Gov Camp with someone from an Open Data Institute. If anyone reading this wants to direct me to something I can cite, that would be amazing)

If the language of Open Data applies to things a researcher might want to cite, does Open Data thinking show us a way to move personal communications out of ‘shared’ and into ‘open’? Possibly. One route is to shorten the time between finding something out or developing a new idea and publishing about it. It might be interesting if academics could add a ‘please publish’ button to their blogs to help work out which blogs need refining from a work-in-progress into a publication. Or perhaps we need to revisit the status and purpose of blogs.

Maybe, in this world of DOI (Digital Object Identifier; a code that means your information can be found even if the web address changes), there is scope for preparing a mutually acceptable version of a personal communication and deliberately moving it out of the shadows into the ‘open’ by uploading it digitally in a way that complies with guidance on what makes ‘good open data’ (http://theodi.org/guides/what-open-data).

This might make both parties think twice about how transparent they wish their communication to be. But if transparency is a problem, the communication probably needs to be shifted to the ‘closed’ category and therefore not cited at all.

Of elephants and ants (Part 1)

Last night I panicked. I worked on an abstract and the structure of my PhD thesis. By the time I finished I felt overwhelmed. Catastrophe thinking kicked in and within an hour I was ready to give up, doubting my ability to even start writing, doubting my ability to create a suitable structure, double-guessing versions of a dismal future.

I had looked at the elephant, and I was scared.

For those who haven't heard of elephants and ants, it's a handy way to categorise any undertaking.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

How do you eat ants? You wait until you've gathered enough to make a decent mouthful.

My emails are ants.

My thesis is an elephant.

Now I've realised it's an elephant I have stopped panicking and started analysing. I know I've eaten an elephant before. 

In Crossfit language, producing my thesis is just like doing a year-long chipper WOD [WOD = Workout Of the Day; chipper = keep chipping away because it's long and usually looks impossible]. Pretty terrifying unless you have a strategy together with focus, determination and enough common sense to set a sustainable pace. But with those ingredients, it's not easy but it's doable.

I have an abstract. I have a narrative flow. I even have a sketch of the mosaic I plan to make to illustrate both the journey and the destination of my PhD.

Tomorrow I revisit my work plan. I buckle up and knuckle down. I can visualise handing in my thesis on the last working day of 2019. It's going to be an awesome 15 months. 

I have found my tribe!

Today I found my academic tribe.

It is not a tribe of methodology. It is not a tribe of topic. It is the tribe of the neurodivergent. 

It is my tribe because I don't have to worry about how to present myself. It's where I can be myself among academics. 

I have an academic tribe. I am content. 

De-skilled or ...

I had a disconcerting patch recently where I thought I'd lost all my skills. Suddenly I found myself asking questions and checking everything, even tiny details, because I was no longer certain what to do and I was fearful of making mistakes. 

Initially I put it down as a loss of confidence and a dose of good old-fashioned imposter syndrome. But sometimes when this intense questioning and checking happens, it isn’t actually about a loss of confidence or skills, or poor judgement.

Sometimes that’s simply a recognition that the landscape and the map that we thought were in operation are not those by which others around us are operating. What we are doing as we question and check each tiny detail is mapping a newly-encountered landscape.

We haven’t lost our confidence.

We aren’t deskilled.

We are simply mapping out a new territory, using the perceptions of those around us and the skills and confidence we bring with us from navigating known territories.

When I left Hereford

I'm still experimenting with styles. 

I blogged before about how I use writing to work out what I think. That's still true for how I approach data analysis; writing is a key element of analytic work. 

Here, I've used writing to work out what I am thinking and feeling. I wanted to see what happens if I use artifacts as a lead-in to exploring things that are less tangible.

When I left Hereford, I kept my first toy. Yellow Ted travelled with me. He grew up with me as I grew into an adult, and a parent myself. Technically he is now my husband's. I could think of no greater gift of myself to him than the one who saw all as I grew up. My own memory of childhood is almost non-existent.

My father died, and I have been clearing the family home. I found the loft toys. I had remembered none of them. Yet as they emerged from the loft, parts of my childhood emerged with them and I remembered me as a child holding them and playing with them. These flashes of first-hand childhood memory left me motionless, not breathing, then blinking. So different from all previous, second-hand childhood memory, my dissociative dispassionate observation of another life, a different child.

Yellow Ted is now back where he belongs. With the toys from the loft. With the cot duck, floppy bunny, the spirograph, and Cubby who was too delicate and precious to be allowed to play with me. 

The loft toys did not grow up. They remained in my childhood. And my childhood remained as separate from the adult me as the lofted toys remained from Yellow Ted.  

Those flashes of me as the toys emerged from the loft are the first taste of a me that crosses the generations within me – child, young adult, parent to children. I am disconcerted, scared and curious. 

For now, cot duck and Cubby sit on the mantelpiece at home. Their friends are back in their storage bag. There is only so much memory one can handle at a time.

Experiments in creative writing

I'm planning to start writing my thesis at some stage (!) and that means practising choosing words and conveying meanings and feelings.

I've started experimenting with different styles and techniques. Here's today's creative piece.

"Sitting on the dock of the bay" is swimming in my brain and under my breath as I sit in the cold air, warm sun of a very different dock. Back to the water, face to the Dylan Thomas centre. Mind wandering and meandering in a style worthy of the old alcoholic himself. 

My meandering is gentle, kindly, lightly turning my attention to sensory input then releasing my attention, relaxing and awaiting the next thought. I wonder if the poet in him sat, relaxed, observed, released, crafted in the sun. I don't imagine him relaxing and sitting and waiting for the words to form. I imagine him tense, coiled, wired, multiple thoughts, plucking his chosen words from the torrent of his mind. 

I sit. I relax. I observe. My dock, my bay, my Swansea.