Plants have all the anthers

After numerous attempts at drawing a daisy, and multiple sheets of paper later, this is the resultant bedraggled daisy:

I found this exercise quite hard to do because I am perfectionist but not a very good drawer. When reading this chapter for Week 2, I actually paused at Luker’s explanation of the bedraggled daisy and created a preemptive list of elements to include on the petals. Unfortunately, when it came to this exercise, I was more focused on the appearance of my daisy and less so on the ideas it is supposed to convey. I cut down my list to topics I felt were important so that they could fit nicely onto the daisy.

After I drew the daisy, I went back to my notes for the first blog post, where we had to write as much as we could in fifteen minutes. The daisy, and my list for it, are much more condensed and organized than my sprawling disorganized jumble of notes where I seemed to have been creating a circle of lists:

I much preferred the exercise for the first blog post because it allowed me to come up with all possible topics related to my research interest without confining them to a specific diagram. I understand the daisy is to assist the researcher in determining “where those interesting intellectual conversations adjacent to, but not exactly the same as, your work are taking place” (Luker, 82-83). However, I felt constrained by the daisy and disliked having to create “petal” boxes for each research topic. I felt the lists I created earlier were much better for me as I was able to include more detailed information within each intellectual conversation as well as my own ideas. The generalized topics on the petals show me the various headings where my research fits, but not the in-depth discussions taking place that my research can add to. 

Works Cited:
Luker, K. (2008). Salsa dancing into the social sciences: research in an age of info-glut. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.