Week 4: The Bedraggled Daisy

I was kind of uncertain about the usefulness of Luker’s exercise in this chapter. From what I gather, the point was to create something of a “frame” for my research. 

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the benefits of visualization. Using the right creative tools can certainly jumpstart individuals when the process stalls, but this didn't really help me (that's not to say it can't help someone else!). All the daisy seems to do is paint a pretty picture, showcasing its disk floret as the intersection of all fields pertaining to my topic, which is something I could have done just as effectively by simply circling those elements in a top-down list.

So in that sense, there was probably a better way of framing my work. 

And as for the secondary purpose of say... identifying intersections of fields and entry points, it was still a bit ineffective. The ordering of petals is arbitrary using this model, and it might have been more useful to have a visual tool for reminding us about intersections between all possible combinations of “leaves”, rather than being restricted by a daisy framework (if you have more than three leaves it becomes harder to see overlap between each and every leaf).

It may not be the method for me, but I did draw a flower regardless! It’s comprised of all the elements I feel are big areas I’ll be touching upon in my research proposal. Please don’t mind my artistic ineptitude.

I do think Luker’s daisy framework would have been useful as a “brainstorming tool”, inserting leaves as more important areas you wanted to cover came up, and then eventually finding your prize of a research question hiding in the center. But as of right now, I already have a pretty clear idea of the research question I’d like to pursue.

And I hope that research question can be somewhat ascertained through my flower (I hope?).