Difference between revisions of "Developing your Research Project (FutureLearn)"
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* A piece of advice I saw given to PhD candidates online read: “Finding some early-modern English laundry lists would not suffice on its own to justify writing a PhD thesis about them.” As the beginning point of my own research also starts with something as simple as a list, it is worth noting that not all laundry lists are unworthy of further research, and it is not the “quotidian” nature of laundry lists which renders most laundry lists useless, for the quotidian is radical in its antimonumentality and similarity to everyday life, and can be used to raise important questions about the connections between art, epic expeditions, and and everyday life. | * A piece of advice I saw given to PhD candidates online read: “Finding some early-modern English laundry lists would not suffice on its own to justify writing a PhD thesis about them.” As the beginning point of my own research also starts with something as simple as a list, it is worth noting that not all laundry lists are unworthy of further research, and it is not the “quotidian” nature of laundry lists which renders most laundry lists useless, for the quotidian is radical in its antimonumentality and similarity to everyday life, and can be used to raise important questions about the connections between art, epic expeditions, and and everyday life. | ||
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| + | * For several years I have been interested in cargo manifests, lists from archaeological digs, and museum inventories - commonly archived material documents that are mainly concerned with documenting the physical aspects of objects, artefacts, or pieces of cargo which may be in transit. These manifests exist in order to provide a practical guide for the visual identification of a physical object, and taken at face value, these manifests may seem to lack depth. But when activated by human eyes, these lists offer an opportunity for a range of readings, which can be used as the starting point for artistic speculations on the histories and geographies. | ||
Revision as of 15:02, 4 August 2016
- Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants - etched on £2 coin
- building on other scholars works - making original - but not adrift - a good project looks at work of previous + building on views
- My curiosity was triggered when I happened to read about a failed insurance claim for lost cargo destroyed in the fire on the ship Fame in 1824, which was sailing from Southeast Asia to London. I began looking into the procedure for such claims and the sheer mundanity and tedium of the process fascinates me.
- Transferable skills - selfawareness, initiative, committment, numeracy, leadership, teamwork, etc
- make a checklist
- make a learning/research log
- talk to as many people as possible
- find out if it has been done by someone else already
- Subject eg History
- Theme eg US foreign policy
- Context eg Counterterrorism under Clinton 1993-2001
- Topic (should have debate potential)
- Research questions (will reveal if it is viable in its process, and help you gather up information to prove the hypothesis)
- Draft hypothesis (broad enough but also narrow to be managable)
- keep track of changes of how you changed your mind in the process and keep it in the research log
- A piece of advice I saw given to PhD candidates online read: “Finding some early-modern English laundry lists would not suffice on its own to justify writing a PhD thesis about them.” As the beginning point of my own research also starts with something as simple as a list, it is worth noting that not all laundry lists are unworthy of further research, and it is not the “quotidian” nature of laundry lists which renders most laundry lists useless, for the quotidian is radical in its antimonumentality and similarity to everyday life, and can be used to raise important questions about the connections between art, epic expeditions, and and everyday life.
- For several years I have been interested in cargo manifests, lists from archaeological digs, and museum inventories - commonly archived material documents that are mainly concerned with documenting the physical aspects of objects, artefacts, or pieces of cargo which may be in transit. These manifests exist in order to provide a practical guide for the visual identification of a physical object, and taken at face value, these manifests may seem to lack depth. But when activated by human eyes, these lists offer an opportunity for a range of readings, which can be used as the starting point for artistic speculations on the histories and geographies.
