Subject/Object

Went into the professor’s office today to discuss my research proposal for Research Methods. I am doing really well in the class, and you need an A- to do the thesis option.

I have been considering it–when I came here I had a specific issue that I wanted to look at, but as I have been going through the classes I feel that whatever I was studying at the time caught my interest too strongly. However, as I got to the time to write the paper, it really didn’t motivate me.

In preparation for this research proposal I have been throwing myself in Information Science theory: Information Seeking, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Organization etc etc. Going through volumes and volumes of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.

When I started this degree, I had it in my mind to study how Intellectual Property came about, how information was commodified, and how it was sold to the rest of us. Clearly, to me, oral culture is a free culture, where things ripped, mixed and “burned” with every performance (see the wonderful Singer of Tales by Albert Lord.)

Manuscript culture was equally unbashful about its “theft.” I don’t have the quote in front of me, but Seneca encouraged his readers to be like bees: to gather all of the best of from the finest flowers, and mix those words together into a sweet honey so no single source could be discerned from the rest. Students in medieval monasteries would be responsible for copying texts as their magisters read them out in class. To graduate one had to present all the books one had copied.

And we all know where the Internet is going. There is one simple fact on the Internet: to read, view, watch or listen to is to make a copy. That copy is perfect and in exact fidelity to the original. The on the Internet there are no auras.

So, my argument is that, along with all the other goodness that print brought, it also brought along a notion of intellectual “property.” I am not original in this, McLuhan said it long ago. Many of you will have read that my department is making the transition from an Information Science school to a school of Information Studies. And it is clear that this topic I have in mind falls in the realm of the latter.

Yet, being steeped in Information Science theory, I presented a proposal in the best of positivist traditions, studying the independent variable of information behaviors of various scholarly disciplines and its effects on the dependent variable of OA knowledge and uptake.

And I was basically told it was crap. Or that I could do better, judged from the work I had already done in the course. It was suggested that I look at Discourse Analysis and apply some of my humanities background on designing something to research.

Of course I missed the class discussing Discourse Analysis, so it didn’t really occur to me. And I was confused, because I felt that the Social Science methods we were learning in the class were closer to the science then the social–derived from psychology and other such experimental milieus. I am basically interested in media theory and its relation to political economies of information.

So, discourse analysis is a good choice, except I know nothing about it. It is somewhat antithetical to the way things are done in Philosophy–while it may treat the same ideas, the method is not exactly the same. Philosophy is more about logical consistency, discourse analysis more about what is said and what is unsaid in a text, and power structures. So I am teaching myself. I have just over a week to do it.

How does one present a research proposal saying that one is going to study a text? Why do they not just do it? How do I write about ethical considerations. Or validity and reliability? Watching some other master’s theses published on the Internet in LIS, they don’t even tough on these theoretical considerations.

Any help?