I’ve been working on a post about humility as an organizational strategy. This is not that post, but it is also about humility.
I like to think of myself as a research methodologist, because I’m more interested in research methods than any specific area of study. The versatility of methodology as a concentration is actually one of the biggest draws for me. I love that I’ve been able to study everything from fMRI subjects and brain surgery patients to physics majors and teachers, taxi drivers and internet activists. I’ve written a paper on Persepolis as an object of intercultural communication and a paper on natural language processing of survey responses, and I’m currently studying migration patterns and communication strategies.
But a little dose of humility is always a good thing.
Yesterday I hosted the second in a series of online research, offline lunches that I’ve been coordinating. The lunches are intended as a way to get people from different sectors and fields who are conducting research on the internet together to talk about their work across the artificial boundaries of field and sector. These lunches change character as the field and attendees change.
I’ve been following the field of online research for many years now, and it has changed dramatically and continually before my eyes. Just a year ago Seth Grimes Sentiment Analysis Symposia were at the forefront of the field, and now I wonder if he is thinking of changing the title and focus of his events. Two years ago tagging text corpora with grammatical units was a standard midstep in text analysis, and now machine algorithms are far more common and often much more effective, demonstrating that grammar in use is far enough afield from grammar in theory to generate a good deal of error. Ten years ago qualitative research was often more focused on the description of platforms than the behaviors specific to them, and now the specific innerworkings of platform are much more of an aside to a behavioral focus.
The Association of Internet Researchers is currently having their conference in Denver (#ir14), generating more than 1000 posts per day under the conference hashtag and probably moving the field far ahead of where it was earlier this week.
My interest and focus has been on the methodology of internet research. I’ve been learning everything from qualitative methods to natural language processing and social network analysis to bayesian methods. I’ve been advocating for a world where different kinds of methodologists work together, where qualitative research informs algorithms and linguists learn from the differences between theoretical grammar and machine learned grammar, a world where computer scentists work iteratively with qualitative researchers. But all of these methods fall short because there is an elephant in the methodological room. This elephant, ladies and gentleman, is made of content. Is it enough to be a methodological specialist, swinging from project to project, grazing on the top layer of content knowledge without ever taking anything down to its root?
As a methodologist, I am free to travel from topic area to topic area, but I can’t reach the root of anything without digging deeper.
At yesterday’s lunch we spoke a lot about data. We spoke about how the notion of data means such different things to different researchers. We spoke about the form and type of data that different researchers expect to work with, how they groom data into the forms they are most comfortable with, how the analyses are shaped by the data type, how data science is an amazing term because just about anything could be data. And I was struck by the wide-openness of what I was trying to do. It is one thing to talk about methodology within the context of survey research or any other specific strategy, but what happens when you go wider? What happens when you bring a bunch of methodologists of all stripes together to discuss methodology? You lack the depth that content brings. You introduce a vast tundra of topical space to cover. But can you achieve anything that way? What holds together this wide realm of “research?”
We speak a lot about the lack of generalizable theories in internet research. Part of the hope for qualitative research is that it will create generalizable findings that can drive better theories and improve algorithmic efforts. But that partnership has been slow, and the theories have been sparse and lightweight. Is it possible that the internet is a space where theory alone just doesn’t cut it? Could it be that methodologists need to embrace content knowledge to a greater degree in order to make any of the headway we so desperately want to make?
Maybe the missing piece of the puzzle is actually the picture painted on the pieces?
