5.3 The Research Diary

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Blogging the research process is as useful for professionals as it is for students. Obviously, faculty should approach blogs with a greater concern for privacy— sensitive and proprietary data should not be published publicly before being vetted— but as a document of your process, a blog can prove invaluable.

For inspiration, check out PhD Weblogs, an interesting repository of diaries written by researchers in various stages of doctoral work. A few examples:

Dave's PhD Blog — Sample: "I've submitted a paper to SenMetrics 2005, a workshop associated with MobiQuitous 2005. It's happening on 21 July in San Diego, California (USA); I'd like to visit there, so I'll be waiting for 1 June (which is the notification of acceptance date). The paper is based on my honours work from 2003, but since it is getting awfully close to where my current research is heading, I think it is worth exploring."

Infosophy — Sample: "Many of the entries in this blog are reflections to class discussions and related readings. Some of the longer entries are based on class papers. The rest are representations of thoughts about relevant current events, and related readings and blogs."

Corner Store — Sample: "so randy pausch gave an engaging opening plenary on getting diverse teams (artists & engineers) to work together -- there is of course forever the issue that engineers think artists just make stuff pretty, and artists just think engineers really don't get the everyday social world that the rest of us live in. but of course, to really make a spectacular creation requires respect amongst both "sides" so that both are compelled to get beyond the trite evaluations."

Working Notes — Sample: "In today's SLIS brown bag seminar E. Jacob talked about context and boundedness in the apprehension of place. The topic is quite philosophical as it departs from the distinction between space and place and conceptualizes the information system environment as a complex juxtaposition of objective, subjective and intersubjective factors that need to be accounted for."

Interpretive Alchemy — Sample: "I'm looking for any maps that appeared in Israeli and Arab newspaper articles written during and about the Six-Day War, or the 1967 War. I found quite a few yesterday, in a newspaper pronounced "La-Merhav" (an Israeli daily out of Tel-Aviv that stopped publication in 1971). It took an entire afternoon just to look at issues from January- June 1967, so I've set my sights lower, in terms of what I'll get done today. I also would've liked to find archives for papers that are still in press today, such as Ha'aretz, or Ma'ariv--both of which are archived at the Middle Eastern Popular Press Collection. I estimate that I'll have time to get through two sets of newspaper archives for June 1967 today, maybe less."

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