Week 4- Bredraggled Daisies

Completing this week’s exercise was a bit of a challenge for me as seen from the big and weirdly shaped flower to the left (the one that looks like a sunflower/daisy hybrid). Its petals, as I have attempted, contain specific search terms or categories that I could delve further into.

The second smaller flower contains petals with much more general headings, but as a clarification note (I forgot to add, before uploading the image) is that copyright would be the word accompanying the terms (e.g. copyright laws, copyright freedom etc.). I know this picture seems quite unorthodox, compared to my colleagues’ and of course far from looking like the exemplar figure in Luker (2010, p.83). However,  this exercise was quite effective at helping me illustrate my messy thoughts. To give a little bit more contextual information, the bigger daisy to the left was drawn first and the smaller one to the right was last. 

What this exercise has made me realize is that if I were to use these headings (the terms in the individual petals) as a guide for search terms, it will generate too many and/or not specific to my expected/initial inquiry. I could look at the headings paired with each other (e.g. search copyright laws and fair use in one go) and find something useful to my research. I might also to refer to ‘sister/brother’ terms at times to look up more research (at which point would lead me to my reference librarian/personal librarian who could better direct my search). While this sounds tedious, I am relatively optimistic since it can be very useful to browse though academic journals (among other resources) that deal with the same overarching topics and still manage to stumble upon a valuable resource. Much like the “Zen paradox: you can never know what you’re looking for unless you know what it was you were looking for in the first place” (Luker, 2010, p. 60).

Lilian Le-Dang

References

Luker, K. (2010). Salsa dancing into the social sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.