It’s been a while since I’ve put a substantial post here, because my spring schedule was rather crazy (3 classes, 4 conferences, 1 paper, 1 poster, lions, tigers, bears, oh my). Mostly I continue to write regular posts over at Musematic.. After a few weeks of tying off the loose threads of the spring semester I’m settling into a fairly quiet academic summer. I thought it would be helpful (for me anyway) to reprise what I did during coursework this spring.
Doctoral Research Methods
The second required class for the PhD program here at GSLIS, it is the jack-of-all-trades, master of none course on research methods. For those of you unfamiliar with LIS, the field draws from an extremely interdisciplinary set of approaches to conducing research. Some see this as a weakness because it makes us scattered and unfocused, but I find that its one of the attractive things about being here. I’m not sure where else I might find a home for myself otherwise.
The class confirmed my preference for qualitative methods (interviews, “thick description,” ethnography) over quantitative methods (surveys, bibliometrics, statistical analysis). As something of an outsider to the social sciences (ok, ok, history is considered a social science in some circles) the debates between the two camps are interesting to observe. It essentially boils down to an ontological commitment of how you want to view the world. I don’t see that one or the other provides a “better” or more true understanding of the world, instead each reveals a particular kind of understanding of the world.
Being a glutton for punishment I decided to look at mixed methods for my final paper. These combine qualitative and quantitative methods within a particular study. For example, conducting qualitative interviews that inform the development of a quantitative survey. This seems obvious, but there are debates about how to do it right and how to blend the right mixture of different methods to answer the questions at hand. This seems like it would work best as a collaborative method. Take a quant person and a qual person and set them after the same research questions.  Trying to be good at both just seems like too hard a task.
Design of Information Use Studies
This class is a more focused methods class, looking at how one designs studies to increase our understanding of how people use information. I continued to dig into the question of of how information gets used in museum settings by looking at research on information use in museums, such as Starr & Greisemer’s study of the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (link) Of course if you are familiar with Paul Marty’s work, you will recognize this kind of research.
Again I’m trying to blend different kinds of methods here. Many information studies look at what people say about the here and now, maybe with a little background. However, distance choices made by our predecessors have framed the environments in which we are working and can influence what we see as our range of choices. I looked at a small body of literature on historic ethnography – which combines historic research methods with contemporary ethnographic interviews. Of course one of the problems here is that this sits squarely at the intersection of the the present and the past and raises some interesting questions. We know that memory can be a slippery thing and historical methods can help to cross-check what informants report – if there is available documentation. Conversely, what gets documented may be the party line or an inaccurate or incomplete representation of events (I’m looking at you, grant report writers) and interviews can help reveal what went on between the lines. Following on this theme I’ll be taking a course in the Anthropology department this fall called Anthropological Approaches to Memory.
I’m also extending this research method over the summer by doing a case study that combines historical research with interviews. More on that later.
Ontologies in the Humanities
This class continued my work with formal methods from applied philosophy. This semester extended our work on high-level approaches such as the FRBR and the CIDOC CRM and the harmonization of the two (FRBRoo).
Related to some of the work I was doing in Information Studies and an earlier Practicum I completed, I took a look at how collections are represented in the CRM. Currently the CRM treats collections as aggregates of physical objects and therefore they are modeled as physical things themselves. I’m exploring whether “collections” could be represented as conceptual objects that are related to a group of physical objects through the intentions of actors.  Extrinsic concepts are the glue that binds two or more objects together into a collection. Further, it’s rarely any single well-defined concept, but rather a collection of concepts that together create a “collection.” (if that’s not too circular).
Another intersection here is how these kinds of standards and ontologies get created in the first place. Often a group of smart and committed people sit down together and write them up. As a group they often have both a deep knowledge of the domain and a broad understanding of the context where it will be applied. On the whole then, standards usually come out looking like pretty good models of a particular area. What I find interesting is that I’ve come across very few papers that tie empirical studies of “ontologies” in the wild, with formalized expressions of them. I’m left with the question of whether formal ontologies can be improved through the application of quantitative or qualitative research methods.  At the same time qualitative data often gets marked up using a coding system (ala Strauss and Corbin). I’m interested to see if this is a two way street – can formal methods inform the construction of qualitative coding systems? There’s a lot of literature out there to traverse, so if you know of something in this area, send it along.
I’m hoping this idea can also inform the independent study mentioned above. Stephen Asma’s Stuffed Animals & Pickled Heads is a nice complement to this work, because he’s able to present the underlying philosophies (and ontologies) of natural history collections in an accessible form.
You’ll notice that I didn’t mention Second Life once in this post. That’s a whole other ball of prims that I’ll get caught up on in a future post.
