Research and Supervision

2017 ◽  
pp. 23-80
Keyword(s):  
Research Process ◽  
Engaged Scholarship ◽  
Doctoral Studies ◽  
Doctoral Level ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Research Supervision ◽  
The Social

Doctoral studies are often viewed as a “journey”, with expectations that students will be transformed into independent scholars. Various strategies and approaches are taken to this end, as discussed in Chapter 1. The research performed in doctoral studies is considered by many as the hallmark of such a terminal degree, a type of “rite of passage” for the rest of a scholar's career. This chapter reviews types of research areas, provides a background to mentorship, and engaged scholarship first introduced in research in the social sciences, arts and humanities. The context of research supervision in CS and IT is addressed, and a generic research process is elaborated, with consideration to developing critical thinking in, and imparting knowledge to, a research candidate. Some measures for doctoral research supervision are presented, as well as doctoral level research norms. Frameworks for research supervision are examined, and what is regarded to be successful supervision. Lastly some trends that have emerged in research supervision are reviewed.

scholarly journals Student-supervisor-university expectation alignment in the undergraduate engineering thesis

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
Brad Stappenbelt ◽  
Abheek Basu
Keyword(s):  
Rating Scale ◽  
Research Output ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Pedagogical Practice ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
Undergraduate Engineering ◽  
Research Supervision ◽  
Undergraduate Thesis

Given the lack of student research experience, the undergraduate thesis is necessarily focussed primarily on development of research skills (i.e. it is process oriented). Since postgraduate supervision is research output focussed, the lessons learnt from this field are not always directly transferable. In contrast to the vast body of work in the field of doctoral research supervision, there exists a dearth of literature on undergraduate dissertation supervision. To address this shortcoming, the present study examined the alignment of university, supervisor and student expectations regarding responsibilities in the undergraduate engineering thesis. University expectations, having undergone rigorous review, outline the sound pedagogical practice that should be applied to undergraduate supervision. Expectations of academic staff supervisors and thesis students were obtained through the use of survey tools and post-survey discussions. The surveys used in the present study were adapted from the Role Perceptions Rating Scale (RPRS). Alignment between student and university expectations regarding undergraduate thesis responsibilities in the present study was generally poor. The discrepancy between supervisor and university expectations was even greater, with academic staff generally assuming the bulk of the responsibility for many core thesis tasks. Post-survey discussion indicated that the driver for this behaviour were supervisor expectations that that undergraduate thesis research would contribute to publications. Taking primary responsibility for core thesis tasks away from the student, although improving the likelihood of successful research output, diminishes the ability for an accurate assessment of adequate academic performance. The learning that is intended to result from the undergraduate thesis is devalued when research outcomes are prioritised over research process.

The Snow Angel and Other Imprints

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Mona Livholts
Keyword(s):  
Research Process ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Writing Research ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Symbolic Formation ◽  
Writing Practice

This article, written in the form of an untimely academic novella is a text, which explores academic authoring as thinking and writing practice in a place called Sweden. The aim is on inquiries of geographical space, place, and academia, and the interrelation between the social and symbolic formation of class, gender and whiteness. The novella uses different writing strategies and visual representations such as documentary writing and photographing from the research process, letters to a friend, and memories from childhood, based on three generations of women's lives. The methodology can be described as a critical reflexive writing strategy inspired by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory and literary fiction, and additionally by methodological approaches in the humanities and social sciences, such as theorizing of letters, memory work, and narrative, and autobiographical approaches. In particular, it draws on work by the theorist critic and writer of fiction, Hélène Cixous, and the feminist author and theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, drawing on interpretation of Cixous' essay “Enter the Theatre” and Gilman's story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Characteristics of the untimely academic novella elaborate with possible forms of the symbolic, visual, and performative photographic and sensory in writing research; furthermore, time, social change, and unfinal endings play a pervasive role. It may be read as a story that situates and theorizes embodyment, landscape, and power through the interweaving of forest rural farming spaces and academic office spaces by tracing autobiographical imprints of an untimely feminist author. “The Snow Angel and Other Imprints” is the second article in a trilogy of untimely academic novellas. The first, with the title “The Professor's Chair,” was published in Swedish in 2007 (in the anthology “Genus och det akademiska skrivandets former,” (Eds.) Bränström Öhman & Livholts), and forthcoming in English in the journal Life Writing 2010.

Marcel Mauss and the Turn to the Gift

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Market Society ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
New Material ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Leonard Woolf

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.

The Rhetoric of the Page

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Maguire
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Blank Space ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The Social ◽  
Google Books ◽  
The Rich

This book explores blank space in early modern printed books; it addresses physical blank space (from missing words to vacant pages) as well as the concept of the blank. It is a book about typographical marks, readerly response, and editorial treatment. It is a story of the journey from incunabula to Google books, told through the signifiers of blank space: empty brackets, dashes, the et cetera, the asterisk. It is about the semiotics of print and about the social anthropology of reading. The book explores blank space as an extension of Elizabethan rhetoric with readers learning to interpret the mise-en-page as part of a text’s persuasive tactics. It looks at blanks as creators of both anxiety and of opportunity, showing how readers respond to what is not there and how writers come to anticipate that response. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter 1), the &c (Chapter 2) and the asterisk (Chapter 3). The Epilogue uncovers the rich metaphoric life of these textual phenomena and the ways in which Elizabethan printers experimented with typographical features as they considered how to turn plays into print.

The Science and Art of Interviewing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Gerson ◽  
Sarah Damaske
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interview Guide ◽  
Hidden Patterns ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Depth Interviews

Qualitative interviewing is one of the most widely used methods in social research, but it is arguably the least well understood. To address that gap, this book offers a theoretically rigorous, empirically rich, and user-friendly set of strategies for conceiving and conducting interview-based research. Much more than a how-to manual, the book shows why depth interviewing is an indispensable method for discovering and explaining the social world—shedding light on the hidden patterns and dynamics that take place within institutions, social contexts, relationships, and individual experiences. It offers a step-by-step guide through every stage in the research process, from initially formulating a question to developing arguments and presenting the results. To do this, the book shows how to develop a research question, decide on and find an appropriate sample, construct an interview guide, conduct probing and theoretically focused interviews, and systematically analyze the complex material that depth interviews provide—all in the service of finding and presenting important new empirical discoveries and theoretical insights. The book also lays out the ever-present but rarely discussed challenges that interviewers routinely encounter and then presents grounded, thoughtful ways to respond to them. By addressing the most heated debates about the scientific status of qualitative methods, the book demonstrates how depth interviewing makes unique and essential contributions to the research enterprise. With an emphasis on the integral relationship between carefully crafted research and theory building, the book offers a compelling vision for what the “interviewing imagination” can and should be.

A sketch of the education landscape in biomimetic and biohybrid systems

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Mura ◽  
Tony J. Prescott
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Course Development ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Research And Innovation ◽  
Innovation Activities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Societal Context ◽  
Discipline Programs

The Living Machines approach, which can be seen as an exemplar methodology for a wider initiative towards “convergent science,” implies and requires a transdisciplinary understanding that bridges from between science and engineering and to the social sciences, arts, and humanities. In addition, it emphasizes a mix of basic and applied approaches whilst also requiring an awareness of the societal context in which modern research and innovation activities are conducted. This chapter explores the education landscape for postgraduate programs related to the concept of Living Machines, highlighting some challenges that should be addressed and providing suggestions for future course development and policy making. The chapter also reviews some of the within-discipline and across-discipline programs that currently exist, particularly within Europe and the US, and outlines an exemplar degree program that could provide the multi-faceted training needed to pursue research and innovation in Living Machines.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

“Tradition,” Vernacularism, and Learning to Be a Folk Musician With Social Media

2020 ◽  
pp. 442-466
Author(s):  
Simon Keegan-Phipps ◽  
Lucy Wright
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Shaping

This chapter considers the role of social media (broadly conceived) in the learning experiences of folk musicians in the Anglophone West. The chapter draws on the findings of the Digital Folk project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and begins by summarizing and problematizing the nature of learning as a concept in the folk music context. It briefly explicates the instructive, appropriative, and locative impacts of digital media for folk music learning before exploring in detail two case studies of folk-oriented social media: (1) the phenomenon of abc notation as a transmissive media and (2) the Mudcat Café website as an example of the folk-oriented discussion forum. These case studies are shown to exemplify and illuminate the constructs of traditional transmission and vernacularism as significant influences on the social shaping and deployment of folk-related media technologies. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to understand the musical learning process as a culturally performative act and to recognize online learning mechanisms as sites for the (re)negotiation of musical, cultural, local, and personal identities.

scholarly journals Enhancing the roles of information and communication technologies in doctoral research processes

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Stein ◽  
Kwong Nui Sim
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Formal Learning ◽  
Doctoral Study ◽  
Ict Skills ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
The People ◽  
Information And Communication

Abstract While information and communication technologies (ICT) are prominent in educational practices at most levels of formal learning, there is relatively little known about the skills and understandings that underlie their effective and efficient use in research higher degree settings. This project aimed to identify doctoral supervisors’ and students’ perceptions of their roles in using ICT. Data were gathered through participative drawing and individual discussion sessions. Participants included 11 students and two supervisors from two New Zealand universities. Focus of the thematic analysis was on the views expressed by students about their ideas, practices and beliefs, in relation to their drawings. The major finding was that individuals hold assumptions and expectations about ICT and their use; they make judgements and take action based on those expectations and assumptions. Knowing about ICT and knowing about research processes separately form only part of the work of doctoral study. Just as supervision cannot be considered independently of the research project and the student involved, ICT skills and the use of ICT cannot be considered in the absence of the people and the project. What is more important in terms of facilitating the doctoral research process is students getting their “flow” right. This indicates a need to provide explicit support to enable students to embed ICT within their own research processes.

Which way records management research?

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha
Keyword(s):  
Information Management ◽  
Health Sector ◽  
Records Management ◽  
Medical Computing ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
The Social ◽  
Computer Based ◽  
Scopus Database ◽  
Broad Subject

This paper evaluates the keywords and subject areas in records management (RM) publications, as indexed in the Scopus database, with a view to mapping RM research from 1971 to 2018 so as to determine the direction of research in the field. A total of 4 762 documents were obtained from the Scopus database using the term records management and searching within the title, abstract and keywords fields. The data was analysed using VOSviewer software. The findings reveal that interest in RM research has grown as the volume of publications has continued to increase. Whereas there was no dominant area of research in the 1980s, as far as RM research is concerned, the main focus in the 2010s was the management of electronic health records, thereby signalling a shift in RM research from being just an information management exercise to being used for the management of records in the medical and health sector. Other popular research areas in the 2010s were health care, electronic medical record/s, information management, medical computing, information systems, and electronic document exchange. A classification of the RM publications according to Scopus’s broad subject fields revealed that RM research is mainly conducted in computer science, engineering, medicine, and the social sciences. The study predicts a slow growth in the number of RM publications in the next ten years (2019-2028), greater focus on RM in the health sector, and continued dominance of computer-based systems and electronic records as topics of RM research.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document