Ideas and inspiration

Hi, As far as I can remember it was exactly the same month i.e May last year (2011) when I realized that I need to come up with a new method in my research. I got stressed, tensed, started pulling my hair, eating etc. But the lucky thing was that I was able to come up with a new idea. Then it was a process of implementing that idea and see how good it was.

Well that time has passed and it is again May (which is almost over) but the year is 2012. Well, I am again looking for some sort of inspiration to come up with a new idea. I always tell my self that it is only May, I have only spend 5 months (Jan-May) but then I realize that I enrolled in October so I have spend 7 months. This is when I tell my self come on! I need to develop a new method before the year ends.

It is hard to believe that after a year I am again back to the start (Idea??).

Faisal Azhar : 22 May 2012 14:35 |  Tags: Faisal PhD |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Help, I'm drowning in questions – by Tom

Today, I found a letter from my younger self which shook me to my core. Leafing through my laptop’s myriad folders, I came across a file entitled ‘PhD questions I have to answer right now!’. Curious, I opened it up, expecting to find absent-minded ponderings like ‘What shall I have for lunch?’, ‘When is the U1 arriving?’, and ‘Where did all my pens go?’ Instead, I found some rapidly written queries which I had clearly rattled off after a few months of research. They were good questions, thought-provoking and incisive. I tipped my hat to my younger self.

Then I sat back and realised the terrible truth. I had a handful of excellent questions…and absolutely no answers. Zilch, nowt, π-π, a grand total of zero.

Indeed, I have been stumbling in the dark for almost a year, making a mental list of things I would like to find (a lamp, a torch, a light-switch!), but instead of finding a way out, all I encounter is more darkness. Now that my eyes were accustomed to the gloom, all I can tell was that the forbidding shadows stretch further than I can see, further, even, than I could walk in three years.

How is it that I am now comfortably easing myself into research life, and yet I have no response to the eager questions of ‘me-but-six-months-ago’? I’m not even any closer to working out how I would even go about finding an answer.

I wonder if this may just be the plight of the humanities student, but I suspect not. Pretty much every research student I talk to reports the same feeling, the sensation that one is just a machine for producing questions. It’s that odd tree-like structure whereby every article leads to three more, every experiment invites another five, and, yes, every question splits into a veritable network of others.

I started with one big question: now that single specimen has multiplied like a rabbit, its offspring scrawled onto pieces of loose paper which populate my desk. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Whatever it is you’re studying, you are always going to find that your brain keeps taking your hard-earned new findings, and saying, hey, what if?

And, frustrating as that may be, I’m beginning to think that it may be the whole point. I have yet to meet a PhD student who has completed their project, sat back in their swivel-chair, and muttered to themselves, ‘Well, that’s an academic field done and dusted.’ We would be lying to ourselves if we did believe that the whole point of these three years was to calmly take a subject, and then completely wrap it up for all time.

So, I say embrace the questions! Yes, they are never-ending, and it can be dispiriting to constantly prove to yourself your ignorance…but every question is a future project, whether it can be solved over a heavy session in the pub, or takes someone’s entire career to answer. No-one else may understand why you asked the question in the first place (I have found that different disciplines take very different things for granted), but in asking it, you have taken the first step on what may be a very productive journey.

It may not be your journey to make, of course, but even better: inspire someone else to head to the archives, return to the lab, or get out the atlas. To find something dazzling and new that no-one knows – that seems to me to be the highest aim of the lowly researcher.

Now…where DID all my pens go?

Thomas Bray : 17 May 2012 10:39 |  Tags: First Year Research Process Thomas |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Ethics Committee Approval – by Salma

For those of you that are familiar with conducting research with human participants, you are probably familiar with the research ethics committees based at the University. Almost everyone I know in the academic sphere seems to have a word or two to say about ethics committees. But I'm not here to rant; I'm here to share my utter relief at gaining an approval after a three week wait, and I think this calls for a mini-online celeberation with a slice of 0-calorie-cake:

Source

As you've probbaly figured by now, no, I'm sorry, it wont pop out of your screen and land on your desk ... ;)

Back to the topic (cakes are distracting), have you had experience of undergoing ethical approval for your study? How was the experience for you?

Salma Patel : 16 May 2012 16:06 |  Tags: Ethics PhD PhD Blog PhD Student Research Research Process Salma |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Preparation for Euro heartache talks and game! – by Ian

Hi all. On Thursday week 7 (also known as June 7th) the PhD network is going to host an event with 3 short talks (5 mins) loosely based around the impending Euro 2012 competition, followed by a Euro (not all football!) based game.

We are calling for people to send us a title for the talks and would be interested in any topic, from your favourite Euro moments, how much Southgates penalty miss has destroyed your life to how stupid and over paid footballers are (in your opinion!).

In terms of the game, we plan to give each group a choice of 5 research areas, a choice of 5 Euro nations and a choice of 5 random pictures and teams have to come up with a research title. For example:

So for this example, Borris likes to ride his bike, the Netherlands is known to be flat. Therefore one title could be 'Calculating how much energy Britain would save if we flattened our landscapes and all rode bikes!' Obviously not a well thought through example! However on the day teams will have 15 minutes to make choices, come up with a title and prepare a 3 minute presentation, with prizes for the best!

What do you think about this idea? Any volunteers for a football themed talk? Please look out for the chance to register and hope to see you at the event, with drinks and nibbles as usual!

Ian Hancox : 13 May 2012 16:34 |  Tags: Ian Research Exchange |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Poster designing: a warm welcome to Hell! – by Bernie

Can I just say, I hate making research posters. Back in the mists of time, in my musician days, I used to make fun posters for concerts involving bassoons - there would be pictures, bright colours, general nonsense. They were easy to make, because there was always a theme of sorts, and essentially, as long as you included the date, time and venue, you couldn't really go wrong.

Research posters, on the other hand, are a completely different ball game. I make about one per year, and I have very specific reasons for doing so - either there's a competition at university, of I'm off to a conference and want to communicate something about the work I'm doing.

As an example, here are the two I've done so far during the PhD. The first year involved a giraffe:

I know - a giraffe. I took this poster to a university competition at Nottingham, but nobody seemed to get the giraffe analogy. People just wanted to tell me their birth stories as soon as they noticed the word 'midwifery'. That poster was also invited to an interdisciplinary research festival - when I got there, there were 19 scientific posters, and then mine. With a giraffe on it. That was a very odd day.

Last year, I again eschewed the traditional approach, and made a methodologically-themed poster for the postgraduate competition:

I did in fact enjoy making this one, despite the previous giraffe trauma. But again, I got it wrong: the head and heart pictures confused people, and once again I ended up hearing birth stories once people made the midwifery connection (there's a definite theme to being an ex-midwife!)

When I look at these posters now, I think they reflect exactly where I was in those two years: in the first year, I hadn't really got much further than a massive literature review and a theoretical framework. In actual fact, I'm still using the giraffe image these days - it appeared on the front cover of my completion review. I'm not sure whether to use it on the thesis - I'd like to, but someone important has suggested I maybe shouldn't. Hmmm.

As for the second year poster, I look at that and laugh - I was properly drowning in questions of how to put myself into the study, and it's very evident in the poster. I really was deep in the pit of think at that time.

So, today I have once again submitted a poster. This year is a bit different, as I finally have a poster WITH DATA ON IT!! This is very exciting, and I thought it might make the construction a bit easier. That was true, during the bit where I planned the layout: introduction, methods, findings, conclusions... The tricky bit came when I had to condense several million words into an A1 size document. I'm envious of scientists, with their lovely graphs and images. I have no graphs, just too many words. It's like writing a research paper, only more like Hell, I've found.

Anyway, it's done now, and I wait with bated breath to see what it will look like in real life. Why not come along to the Postgraduate Poster Competition on May 30th and have a look at LOTS of posters. And if you see me, looking a bit lost without my giraffe, feel free to tell me a good birth story. It's been a while since I heard any...

And just to finish, here's an example of the kind of poster I really enjoy making:

Bernadette Divall : 11 May 2012 17:17 |  Tags: Bernie PhD PhD Student Research Research Posters Research Process |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Special Interest Groups – by Faisal

Hey, In my previous blog I mentioned the importance of collaboration and networking. Well, here is something that I personally find a marvellous platform to form connections, collaborations and bridges, i.e., Wolfson Research Exchange's "Special Interest Groups", (SIGs). If anyone out there was around or in the Research Exchange then you might have seen the Creative Wall being filled by student names. This project is all about providing a perfect environment for researchers to sit across a table, and collaborate with each other. There are several groups ranging from arts, social sciences, medical to engineering. If you would like to be a part of any of these groups and form rich collaborations, then this is the chance for you.

Each SIG has an Academic Staff, Early Career Researcher and Research Exchange Ambassador to facilitate the collaborations within the group. The Special Interest Group is going to start off with an event some time next week. This is the time to keep an eye on your emails, departmental boards and register as soon as you receive the information about it. For further information students can contact help desk at the Research Exchange or talk to one of the Research Exchange Ambassador (who are always around in the Research Exchange).

How to identify an Ambassador, well some tips....

Most interactive, talkative, communicative and lively person near you :)

Faisal Azhar : 09 May 2012 21:18 |  Tags: Faisal |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On bullshit – by Anna

I spent the day on Friday attending 'Othering Academia: A (B)ull/shit Conference' put on by three postgraduates in the English department. I was expecting a day of laughs and lightheartedness about academia and the sometimes obscure or silly ways we talk about things - which I definitely got. But underneath it all, as we discussed in a roundtable at the end, it was actually a serious interrogation of what academic bullshit is, and how it functions within the academy.

Highlights of the day included Virginie Sauzon and Claire Trevien's paper 'A la recherche du Tesco perdu: The unbearable lightness/otherness of capitalism in Rimbaud', which was a hilarious sendup involving a supposed sexual liaison between Arthur Rimbaud and the founder of Tesco. Another favourite was Anirudh Tagat's 'Mine is faster than yours: Analysing speed of speaking from an economic perspective', in which Tagat completely made up his evidence and conclusions for our edification. Andrea Selleri's 'Vibrating subjects: Motorhead and the cunnilinguistics of the Other' also stood out as the day's most straight-faced piece of pure unadulterated bullshit. Well done, everyone!

However, all this came with a serious set of questions, which coincidentally have been coming up for me in the past few days anyhow. In the US there has been a bit of a furore this week amongst academics over a blog post in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Naomi Shaeffer Riley which dismissed and ridiculed the work of four young Black Studies scholars as irrelevant 'hackery'. What's interesting is that she essentially accuses these scholars of bullshit - of looking at topics irrelevant to the wider culture, and of doing so in a way that is based on left-wing ideology and is impossible to understand (although she has not taken the trouble to read the dissertations).

This highlights, to me, the complicated thing role that bullshit seems to play in the academy. As philosopher H.G. Frankfurt's now-classic essay On Bullshit suggests, bullshit is not the same as a lie - rather it's a statement that is made without regard to truth; the bullshitter, he contends, is more interested in gaining power for himself (and it is often a male-gendered thing, though not always) than in stating the truth.

Here are some possible uses of or contexts for bullshit, according to ideas that came out at the conference on Friday:

• Impressing funding bodies in applications
• Making what you're saying sound complicated or intelligent (although this might not always be done at the conscious level)
  
• Taking a simple pleasure in obscure language, or in the feeling of mastering it
• Lubricating social interactions amongst academics
• Applying a potentially complicated theory to a particular set of texts or artifacts
  
• Showing that you have achieved fluency in academic language (for. e.g. PhD students)

This last point seems especially relevant to the Black Studies case, because Schaefer Riley is essentially (beyond the obviously racist comments she makes, which have been eloquently discussed elsewhere) accusing these doctoral students of taking the language of academia too seriously. Yet, as someone pointed out today, the overuse of technical academic language often relaxes after an academic has tenure; bullshit contains an aspect of proving that you belong within the academic 'priesthood'. So in this sense, her picking on PhD students, which seems very unfair, is actually quite telling of the ideological structures of academic bullshit.

Anna Sloan : 08 May 2012 08:00 |  Tags: Academese Anna Humour Research And Society |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

External examiners and the birth of a PhD – by Bernie

It's now just under five months until this whole process will be over. Well, I say the whole process, but actually that doesn't include the very grown up bit where I have to defend the thesis. I'd like to approach that in the same way that I approached childbirth back in the days before I was a midwife: I had a book about being pregnant and giving birth, and I deliberately refused to look at the 'birth' chapter until I was about 38 weeks pregnant. Some people might call this denial, but I preferred to think of it as 'not worrying about it until the time when I would need to'.

In actual fact, that proved a good way to proceed in my case, and I had a lovely birth (yes, really). I'd very much like to do the same thing with the viva: if I could just write the thesis (the being pregnant bit), and then think about the viva (birth) afterwards, that would be perfect. Sadly, that's not possible, as there appear to be some HUGE decisions to be made about who my external examiner should be.

This dilemma stems largely from the interdisciplinary nature of the study: I could have an external examiner from any one of several areas - midwifery, business school, or sociology - potentially. The problem is that some part of the research will be unknown to any one of them. This has been a thinking point for me over the past few months, particularly since the panel at my completion review said it might be appropriate for me to have somebody from midwifery, something I had not considered a possibility up until that point. As I wrote at the time, I was uncertain as to how I felt about spending three years in a business school, only to go back to midwifery for the viva.

But last week, I had a good conversation with a midwifery professor, in which she asked me where I wanted the research to end up. I immediately said, 'midwifery, of course', at which point she just smiled and said, 'Well, there's your answer, then'. And she was right - for the centre of the thesis to be properly understood, I guess it would be ideal to have someone from the world I'm writing about. And I suppose a midwife is less likely to say, 'Midwives? They're just like nurses, aren't they?'

And now that I feel the decision has been reached, can I go back to enjoying the pregnancy, and I'll worry about the birth nearer the time?

Bernadette Divall : 03 May 2012 16:33 |  Tags: Bernie PhD PhD As Birth PhD Viva Research Research Process |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

My Adventures on Tweet Street – by Tom

I was, until recently, a Twitter virgin. Shameful, I know, but for all my Web 2.0 wisdom, Twitter had long seemed like a strange, foreign land, full of tweets and hashtags, trending and linking. Friends of mine would sometimes travel there, even perhaps choose to stay, but when they invited me along to the wild climes of the Twitterverse, I would politely decline. After all, I reasoned to myself, what could I possibly say in one hundred and forty measly characters?

However, when I started my PhD back in October, I soon began to hear of a strange twist on the Twitter game. Some people, it seemed, were using it to promote their research, and – shock horror – it seemed to be working. I heard stories of people finding jobs, opportunities, and connections. But still I kept my distance from the Twittersphere, always wondering in the back of my mind whether it wasn’t time to get involved.

In the end, all the encouragement I needed was a Wolfson Research Exchange workshop, run by the veritable foundation of experience that is Charlotte Mathieson.

The workshop was split into two halves, a practical session to get us onto Twitter and tweeting like pros, and then a discussion of the possible uses and issues of this exciting new toy. Signing up for Twitter was simple, and after a few clicks here and there, we were all soon taking our first 140-character steps. Soon I was following everyone whom I had ever met or remotely heard of, academic or otherwise, and tweeting my every thought, which usually considered of something like ‘I’m on Twitter. Woah.’ Of course, Charlotte is herself an avid Twitter-er, with, at my last count, just under forteen hundred tweets, so she knew all the tricks and shortcuts. Seen something you want to pass on? Retweet it. Want to squeeze in a link to a webpage? Shorten that URL. I soon found myself gleefully using hashes, probably for the first time outside of an automated telephone service. #ifinallyunderstandwhatthismeans

After a quick break for tea, coffee, and further tweeting, the group sat down with Charlotte and Peter Murphy to exchange our thoughts on and first-impressions of the strange world of Twitter. The biggest theme was how to best utilise Twitter to help our own research, disseminate our ideas, and get in touch with those people who would want to hear what exactly we were up to. There were some simple tips here: make sure to tweet regularly, to keep things coherent, and perhaps most of all, follow if you want to be followed. In the end, we all felt that Twitter was just a new form of blogging, with many of the same advantages and risks. Some people asked whether there was any danger of having their ideas stolen, perhaps one of the nightmares of the hardworking research student. Others raised concerns about the time needed to plough through the many tweets floating around, not to mention devising your own scintillating contributions. The problem of balancing the personal and the professional was another worry discussed. Ultimately, it was a case of practice and discretion. Twitter is a great tool, but it can be easily abused. Done properly, however, it’s a gateway to a new and exciting way of networking. Your next collaborator, inspiration or mentor might be only 140 characters away.

Since the workshop, I have found myself wandering through the Twitterverse with relish. Quite simply, there is a whole world to discover, and I personally have only scratched the surface. Perhaps my biggest problem has been finding things to tweet about: whereas with Facebook I was recommending videos of cats and commenting on the weather, Twitter was different. Here I actually wanted to give my avid followers (nineteen so far, not quite the fourteen and a half million who follow social critic Kim Kardashian) something to think about, some proper academic sustenance. After a while, however, I realised that it was really about reflecting the ups and downs, ins and outs of research, about creating your own narrative of PhD life. That might sound a little heavy: in the end, Twitter is really just a way of chatting to the world, and if the world thinks your research is the best thing since bread came sliced, then so be it. Tweet, tweet away. The Twitterverse is waiting.

Oh, and by the way, just sayin', nudge nudge wink wink, you can follow me @ThomasBray12, and even better, you can follow the Research Exchange @Researchex. #averygoodideaindeed

Thomas Bray : 02 May 2012 12:38 |  Tags: Research Exchange Thomas Twitter |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Research Collaborations and Networking – by Faisal

Hi, Today I would like to emphasise the importance of collaborations and networking. We all know the importance of research and work hard to produce good quality research during our PhD. This is essential for us as a researcher but I think it is also important to form collaborations during our research. This increases our chances of not only selling our research but also to form bridge with other researchers so as to do a project or research together in future.

It is important to expand ourselves to create a network of people around us and to feel the real world research atmosphere. This is because our knowledge and research does not stops at our own door, it has to gain some experience from people or researchers from various social, culture and research backgrounds. The more people you come across, the more diverse views you get to hear on your research. This is where you see yourself and your research expanding based on input from researchers around you.

Faisal Azhar : 28 Apr 2012 21:04 |  Tags: Faisal PhD |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem