Week 4: Bedraggled Daisy

This is my daisy! I did not find this way of mapping to be very helpful. It is my belief that knowledge organization is a very personal thing, and I rarely adopt a certain method of organization. Instead, I prefer to take bits and pieces of things and use it in my own way. Let me put it this way: if I were a famous writer, and I died without publishing the last instalment of my novel and it lay complete yet unbound somewhere in my house, no one would be able to find it. Ever.

I rely on notes by my bedside table (I often wake up in the middle of the night, struck with inspiration), on my iPhone, my computer (I use GoogleDocs, the sticky notes, and the notepad, EverNote, and Word). Nothing is in order to anyone but me. I don't want to spit on the bedraggled daisy because it obviously works well enough for Luker to suggest it to us. More power to whomever it helps!

Week Four - Bedraggled daisy (Althea)

I found the exercise useful because it forced me to identify the areas of research that has been done and areas that I could find more information for when I plan out my own research. However, like many of you, I found turning what I know into a daisy tedious. I definitely feel more comfortable with making annotated lists, which was what I did before I placed and organized that information into a daisy.

Also, depending on how much area the research intends to cover, there may be a lot of petals! Based on my own experience trying to fit these nine areas into the picture, the process may take a lot of time and the end-product can come out messy. In my opinion, people can try different methods to organize their work, but they should do what they feel most comfortable with.

Week 4

I appreciate (and almost always use) visual representations when mapping out an essay, a topic, or an argument. As I understand it, creating this bedraggled daisy should help folks organize and explore their research. However, for these purposes, I feel as though it's an ineffective activity.   My personal preference for visual representation of ideas is a mind map, where I can organize ideas in relation to each other. A mind map allows you to connect ideas to one another so that you can see common and overlapping connections. In contrast, the daisy forces you to try and fit all of your ideas into a daisy - it would be really difficult to add petals after the fact! For this reason, I found this daisy activity more limiting than anything.

In any case, here's my bedraggled daisy: 

Bedraggled Daisy Exercise

I found the daisy activity to be an unproductive way of writing out my ideas. I would much prefer to put them in a list, actually having to draw a flower seems a bit silly to me. My “petals” would be more easily groups into categories, for example people (teenagers, high school students), places/institutions (public library, high school library), and methods (mapping, tracking, usage). The idea of looking up research papers by combining petals is a good idea, but I would prefer to use my categories because it allows me to see what groups I am looking at more easily.

Week 4 - Lesley Rosebrugh draws a bedraggled daisy.

Believe it or not, this is the best of my numerous attempts at drawing a bedraggled daisy.
I thought to myself,  "I'm a reasonably capable adult and can probably knock this daisy out in no time!  How hard could it be to draw 8 interconnecting ovals?"
8 grotesque daisies later...

I see the value in Luker's (2008) exercise and I understand people find visualizing concepts to be helpful.
Personally, it didn't do much for me (other than remind me of how I almost failed art that one year...)

When researching a subject, I will make lists of key words and variances of those words (for search engines that shun truncation *shakes fist*) and use a variety of combinations until I find what I'm looking for.  If I were to actually input all of these terms into the daisy format, it would be an indiscernible tangle of madness.  Luckily, I had already gone through the process of searching for literature related to my research question and had a paired down list of key word combos that got me to my sources (Toronto didn't really help me to be honest).

There's got to be a better way than the bedraggled daisy for us to visually organize the intersecting subjects of our research questions.  Maybe some kind of colour coded web of lines?  That might only take me 3 or 4 tries :)

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?).

Week Three - Epistemology Quiz (Althea)

According to the epistemology quiz, I am Jürgen Habermas. I cannot say I'm surprised at all, since I do have an background in anthropology, and the core lessons in socio-cultural anthropology are almost always about how us to how our biases will always be contained within the decisions we make and the analyses we choose to use. However, I am also unsurprised because the answers were ones I have actively chosen.

As mentioned before, I made the choice to be schooled in contrasting disciplines. I may have chosen to major in anthropology which teaches its students that there is no such thing as objective knowledge, but I was also born and raised in a society that placed more focus in scientific education and have spent more time analyzing things with a scientific lens. So while I chose to pick answers that were more reflective of social science background, I could also see myself picking answers that would be more reflective of an empiric epistemology.

I would say that my issue with quizzes like the one we did is that they are always designed to place the individual in a single category even if the said individual has multiple leanings. I don’t intend to do the same quiz more than once, since getting multiple results don’t necessarily mean anything. What will learning that you may have the epistemology tendencies of more than one philosopher do?

For my research, I intend to find out if, and how, new technological resources and the abundance of travel information have affected the traveler’s experience. Since this is a topic that investigates how people share and use travel information and knowledge, my research design will revolve around the discovery of the traveler’s experience during their planning and travelling stages.  I would like for my research to inform knowledge creators on how to create and share better information, and to make information users more aware of how they choose to interact with information.