The Whole Story
December 11, 2008
Announcing the first edition of my book about doing doctoral research in the midst of a real life.
The Whole Story
Announcing the first edition of my book about doing doctoral research in the midst of a real life: The Whole Story: Researching Power in Open Source Communities While Life Happens.
Download the PDF of the book here (38.3 MB): The Whole Story
Summary
When you see a paper in a journal or conference proceedings, or a book whole and clean and published, you see it standing alone, separated from a personal context. When you see a researcher late in their career, with a CV as long as their arm and watch them be seemingly effortlessly productive at research, you see them as an idealized snapshot, separated from the torturous life path they walked to get to that point. This is the myth of research and the myth of the researcher.
Both doing research and becoming a researcher are fundamentally transformative processes. In research, we transform an idea into a story, and as Ph.D. students, we transform from not-researcher to researcher. Both transformations take time, and they are messy, and difficult.
I have two audiences: me, and other people who are still learning to be researchers. We are the not-yet-scientists, the not-yet-researchers, the researchers-to-be, and we need help.
So I have two goals: show a real, unfiltered process of research, and show part of my personal transformation from not researcher to researcher. I want my audiences to know that they are not alone, or slow or strange or worse off than their peers or their mentors. It helps you to know what someone in your situation did and felt.
Stories
What we are trying to do in research is to tell a story. A true story of the world (and I mean true in the scientific sense here): one that both we and our peers accept as true. Starting with an idea and ending with a true story is a messy messy process, and I want to reveal that.
We are the story we tell ourselves, and the kind of story we tell ourselves matters. Because that story strongly affects the quality of our lives and how we see ourselves. And when the stories change, you change. Personal transformation is about changing your story to incorporate a new self-definition. You become a different person.
I want to record the stories I tell myself while I do my research, because these are the real stories of what it is/was for me to do research, and incidentally what it was for me become a researcher.
What I hope to get out of this
For myself, I am using the writing of the blog and book to work through these transformations. The process of writing the book is important for me because it is that process, of having to formulate and write down my thoughts as stories I can read, that helps me along in my transformation from not-researcher to researcher. In reading what I have written, I hope that I will come away with more insight into myself and my process and progress, and that my readers will come away with an example of what another not-research went through.
My second goal is of exploring my research area and detailing for myself why I find it interesting, and in the process, reassure myself that it is worth working on.
What I hope others get out of this
In reading what I have written, I hope that my readers will come away with an example of what another not-researcher went through: a human, unfiltered version of what it is to make those transformations. This so that they can see the reality of the process, hopefully be able to identify themselves in it and so they know that they are not alone, or slow or strange or worse off than their peers or their mentors. It helps to know what someone in your situation did and felt. Possibly they may find some strategies in it: what to do, what not to do.
My second unintended goal is of teaching people about my research area and why I find it (and hopefully they will find it) interesting, and in the process, reassure myself that it is worth working on.
Writing the book
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.
Structure
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.
