Progress
October 31, 2008
I discuss the progress I’ve made on my book project.
Progress
As I’ve said before, I’m making an eBook for my class project for CLST 355, and the title was going to be something like: “Digital archaeology of social spaces: revealing social structure of open source software communities through examination of public artifacts.”
A PDF of what I’ve got so far can be downloaded here: CLST355 Project (12.5MB).
I knew that I had a lot of things on my plate this semester, so I had originally designed my project so that it would be one that I could not not fail to complete, one such that no matter what I ended up with, it would still be a reasonably complete and interesting end result. And so I said I would write a narrative of my process of performing research, starting at Point A, the conceptual space that I was in at the beginning of class, and ending in someplace I’m not even going to call Point B.
After recently discussing the the progress I’d made on the book with my classmates, I realized as I talked that I suffer under the myth of the idealized researcher and research process, and that I have been using my project in order to help me address that. What I now hope for my project is to write exactly the kind of personal narrative of the research that I’ve wanted to find for myself. I hope to use the process of writing the book as an exorcism of the myths I suffer under, and in the end to offer it to other new researchers so that they may see that they are not alone in coping with doing research in the midst of their full, messy and real lives.
Other works will inform my project. Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, an enthralling read which tells the gritty human side of a project within Data General Corporation to bring a revolutionary computer to market, is most directly similar in spirit to what I am attempting. Terkel’s Working, a collection of interviews with people in which they talk about their jobs and how they feel about them, immediately comes to mind. It was another captivating read both for its captivating humanity and the the wonderfully clear window it gives on the time period. Similarly relevant is Terkel’s The Good War, interviews with people about their experiences in World War II (really, pretty much anything by Terkel is relevant), and Bowe et. al.’s Gig, the 2000s successor to Working. Such works allow the reader to flesh out the idealized versions of their subjects (job descriptions and the historical World War II in which regular people had no voice) with a human and everyday face that they can identify with directly. In the non-academic literature, Harvard Business Review case studies and gamasutra.com post-mortems (in which game developers detail why their game either failed or succeeded, and which tend to include much non-development oriented narrative; example: “Postmortem: Brothers in Arms: Double Time” ) both have things to offer me.
I’ve prototyped the first eleven pages of the book, which I anticipate to be around 30-40 pages long if I can find the time to actually do make the whole thing. I’m employing a dual narrative structure: the primary narrative of my research, plus a second parallel narrative of what happens in my life and how that relates to and contextualizes my research process. The primary narrative is in a larger font, in black and red, while the contextualizing entries are presented as footnotes in a small grey font. I intersperse the text among images which relate to the text either directly or metaphorically.
I won’t be working with direct representational images in the book. The imagery is either metaphorical, direct screen captures of a piece of software, or information graphics. In my work, I’m concerned with systems for the most part, with virtual communities and virtual teams. The people, the physical people, are not the object of my study, and in large part, they are unknowable due to the anonymizing effect of computer mediated communication, the only evidence I have of their existence. The subjects of my research are really digital identities.
The work I do here in this blog will directly feed the book, both with text and with images. My original goal for my posts here were to write mostly finished short, research related articles that I could drop into a paper without too much editing. Now those same posts will feed the book, as will the images associated with them.
References
- Bowe, J. and Bowe, M. (2001). Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs. Three Rivers Press.
- Kidder, T. (1981). The Soul of a New Machine. Back Bay Books.
- Price, R. and Reiner, K. “Postmortem: Brothers in Arms: Double Time “, retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3804/postmortem_brothers_in_arms_.php on Oct 30, 2008.
- Terkel, S. (1974). Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Pantheon Books.
- Terkel, S. (1984). The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two.Random House.
