After several minutes
of careful soul-searching and button clicking, it was revealed to me that I am
Michel Foucault. Or possibly Ferdinand de Saussure. It’s amazing that two
variant answers out of seven are enough to change one’s identity.
As I went through the
quiz, I noticed that I was pulled in multiple directions, and I found myself
thinking several times, “Well, it kind of depends on the research, doesn’t it?”
The first time
through, I answered with my current endeavour in mind; applying bibliographic
collation techniques to early movable type printed books. For this work, I am
looking closely at minor details and looking at what human creation can reveal
to us. I suppose you could say it fits alright with structuralism. After all, I’m
looking at small symbols on paper and considering them as remnants and traces
of a larger system (printing and binding) to hopefully understand more about
the people and process involved. The entire workings of collation are dependent
on the existence of a system outside the single resultant book in order to be
able to tell us anything about its creation. If these individual parts can’t be
understood as results of a systemic process, then there isn’t much use left to
collation.
And then, because the
results are very much geared toward social research, I thought about another
project I’ve worked on in the past; examining the preservation of women’s
histories and how the transmission of oral and informal history has changed
over time. With this research in mind, and a mere two answers different, I was
informed that I am, in fact, a post-modernist. And yes, virtual quiz, I do
resent your attempt to label me. When working with research that considers the ways
in which information is transmitted over time, I am always considering it in
terms of relationships. Narratives are incredibly powerful, and much of my
interest lies in who says what, and how
they say it.
My results weren’t
surprising to me as both ideologies (structuralism and post-modernism) are ones
that appeal to me in different ways.
What I did notice,
going through the quiz again a few times, was that the results function on the
assumption that a school of thought is tied to a particular way of doing
research, not just a particular way of viewing the world. The questions focus
on how one is gathering information in their work space, what type of
observation is being conducted and how, and the degree of objectivity of truth
in one’s work. To me, those aren’t necessarily tied to an ideology; rather they
are tied to specific methods. If one is conducting a scientific experiment, the
methods would make use of a different definition of truth, and different
best-practices for arriving at it, especially compared to a purely social
ethnographic ‘experiment.’ Can a scientist really only be a positivist? Is a
post-modern approach really always the best way to study marginalized social
groups?
If we are to consider
with an open mind which methods would be best for addressing our research question,
I think it is dangerous to tie our guiding ideology so tightly to a particular
method. In more traditional fields this may be less of an issue, but in an
interdisciplinary area such as information, putting limits on methods by ideology
also puts limits on the types of questions we can effectively ask as
researchers, before we’ve even begun to decide what to study.
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