Newbie anxiousness
September 30, 2008
I’m anxious about being at the beginning of a long, big project, such as this one I’m about to embark upon.
Newbie anxiousness
I’m anxious about being at the beginning of a long, big project, such as this one I’m about to embark upon, doing the literature survey for “Digital archaeology of social spaces: revealing social structure of open source software communities through examination of public artifacts.” Even though I’ve used open source software, and I’ve participated in open source development projects, this will be my first encounter with academic research on open source, and my preliminary searches have turned up 1500 articles (about open source, not about my particular sub-topic), so I’m pretty intimidated.
When I start a new broad area like this one, I cannot stop thinking about what so many different successful faculty have told me: (a) you must make a contribution (which means you must do something that hasn’t been done before, which means of course that you must know what has been done before) and (b) don’t move into an area that is overpopulated with researchers (because there’ll be so much competition that it will be difficult to be heard and (c) preferably, move into a brand new, promising area so that you can get all the good, interesting fundamental questions (in an old area, you’ll be filling in the details, unless you’re really perceptive and see something profound that nobody else has seen).
This seems utterly necessary to me to have the piece of mind to continue with a project that may take a year or more, and to live in a field that I might inhabit for the next ten years, but I wonder if other people do this? If I’m lucky, I’ll find a recent review article that reviews the whole field, and that will short circuit my search somewhat, or at least give me one perspective on the field.
So what this means is that I like to start with a survey of the broad field (”open source software development” in this case), see what people have been working on over the last ten years, and see how what I want to do fits in with that. Along the way, I should find some of the prior work around my questions (and be able to adjust my question appropriately), and try to estimate whether that field is mature or new or done.
But it is a lot of work, I’ll tell you. I find literature searches to be painful even in this Internet age where the databases are all online, because what if I miss something, especially that crucial paper that did what I want to do?
I’ve got some new techniques I could use to make the analysis go better, so I’m excited about that, and it’ll be over before I know it, but nonetheless, I’m nervous about the start.
