I created a Twitter account in 2007, but have always been a half-hearted user. The reason has been quite simply the restriction on message length. However, in the age of TLDR, being able to summarise research findings in one or two tweets seems to be an increasingly useful skill. So, here we go, my attempts.
# […] The thesis was that the Internet is as much a ‘metaphor’ as a technology, and successful e-campaigns have been those tapping into the former discursively (rather than the latter logistically). (9 March 2019)
# […] News articles that attracted a large amount of reactions from readers and articles that drew *divisive* reactions were two distinct groups [in our new Quality & Quantity piece]. (23 April 2019)
One of the questions I get most frequently from students upon their return from the field is “What now?”. They come back gloriously with tens of hours of interview recordings, pages after pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, and gigabytes of photos and news clippings, and they all say — understandably — that they feel overwhelmed by the challenge ahead of staying afloat and making headway in that sea of unstructured data.
RT @JessicaCalarco Doing qualitative research often feels like playing Jeopardy – you can see the answers (i.e., the patterns you find in your data), but you don’t always know the question (i.e., the problem those patterns solve). (21 December 2018)
I share with them well-established tips such as ease into it, embrace the messiness, keep an audit trail, put oneself in the reader’s [examiner’s] shoes, read what you want to write et cetera. These tips have all been highly appreciated, but then there are every now and then situations where students are still looking for something more concrete and readily usable in their research while I consciously try to be less prescriptive and more ‘Socratic’ (so to say). Those situations always feel to me like we are communicating back-scratching coordinates.
While I maintain that I shouldn’t be, and cannot be, too prescriptive, I thought I’d put together a nice ‘mixtape’ of resources for them. More will be added on.
Qualitative data analysis for applied policy research (Jane Ritchie & Liz Spencer, 1994, in A. Bryman & R. G. Burgess, Analyzing Qualitative Data, pp.173-194)
Just came back from a conference on “migration, mobility, and borders”, organised by and for our doctoral researchers. Interestingly, I was invited to give a ‘career talk’. My immediate suggestion was to bring in a career consultant instead, but for a combination of a couple of reasons, I ended up doing the talk. Come to think of it, I have been living and working among doctoral and early career researchers for almost 15 years, while being required to monitor the latest developments in the sector, so I told myself that I might indeed have one or two things to say about for their benefit.
Considering the theme, I prepared my talk along the lines of the increased expectation of (early career) researchers to be available/willing to be globally mobile. That is just one of the many, previously non-existent expectations imposed on the current generation of PhD candidates. I included this image (as a GIF) in my slides because every time I see it, I think of them. I honestly do.
Here are a couple more items that highlight how far things have changed in the PhD game.
# Thesis declaration, now and then (source: Got this off Twitter two months ago, but despite my best efforts, I can’t trace back to the original link. Let me know!)
There is so much to process here, but in the meantime, I have listened to the full 26 minutes of recording – despite the inevitable cringe that comes from listening to one’s own voice!!! – and realised two errors I made that I would like to iron out.
I should have said passers-by, not passer-bys. (15:52)
It was the Prime Minister’s Office that tweeted out those ridiculous anti-molka cartoons, not the Ministry of the Interior and Safety [let alone Internal Affairs]. (19:40)
Earlier this week I organised a lecture by a Professor of Anthropology on ethnographic methods for doctoral researchers across other disciplines. I stayed for the full session myself too. As I have said on this blog repeatedly already, my attitude towards anthropology is like that of a fangirl. I admit that must have a lot to do with my romanticised idea of the discipline. Nevertheless, my suspicions were confirmed when the professor said that anthropologists have a special relationship with ethnographic methods, feeling that they *own* the methods, even though the methods are now popularly used in many other disciplines too. (In fact on several occasions he used “anthropological methods” and “ethnographic methods” interchangeably.) And it broke my heart a little when he described anthropology as distinct from studies of texts, archives, and … the internet. It didn’t seem that anyone was bothered by that split-second remark, but to me it felt like someone closed the door on me – a door to a cool club that I was snooping around, hoping to be invited in.
Anyway, it was a fantastic talk and I was able to take away many gems of reading suggestions.
Saw a YouTube video of this song on a random blog many years ago. I liked it, but after that blog disappeared I couldn’t recall for the life of me the singer’s name. So, the video became one of those things that I don’t think about at all most of the time but when it springs to my mind out of the blue I will do some obsessive searching for in vain and leave until the next time it happens. Or to be more factual, one of my many digital objects of procrastination.
Then last week it just came back – equally out of the blue. Not the very same rendition but I take it.
👆 You are witnessing how an ‘urban legend‘ is born. An ‘Othered’ one at that. Whelks are not considered as aphrodisiac in Korea. It is a horrendous slang word to refer to women who have passed out on date rape drugs.
Couldn’t get this out of my head either. Also remembered this clip where a 72-year-old vlogger, Korea Grandma, was grappling with a self-service kiosk at a McDonald’s.
RT @AskAKorean This image haunted me for this seollal. On the crowded LNY trains, all the old people are in the standing seats because they can’t figure out how to book tickets online […] (5 February 2019)
LNY is a big holiday, so lots of Koreans travel home. Train tix for LNY sells out within minutes of being available for sale. And most of them are snapped up online. If you don’t know how to book tickets online, like many old people are, you are often out of luck.
The article describes old folks who show up to the train station hours early just so they can have a shot at buying train tickets. When they’re lucky enough to do so, they are often relegated to standing tickets. Hence, the messed up trains where only the old people stand.
S Korea is the most wired society in the world, and it often decides to simply let people who can’t keep up stay behind and suffer. I hate seeing this type of scene happening again and again.
Had a shaky start to 2019. Was down with the flu early January and I was out of commission for a week. It was a record in a sense. In the past, even when I was unwell, I didn’t usually take more than one day off, and I would still check my work inbox occasionally throughout that day. This time I was barely able to sit up, let alone move around, for one whole week. So I ended up doing nothing but drinking lots of tea and water while watching, in a half-asleep state, the full series of Parks and Recreation for the first time. The lesson of all this might have been that I am no longer that youthful version of me.
Anyhoo, because of this ordeal, I didn’t get to make any New Year’s resolutions. However, a good thing about being from a lunar calendar culture is that there is a second chance!
Well, actually, my resolutions are always the same: less sugar, less screen time on commute, and sleep earlier. Always these same ones, always failing to keep them, and always rolling them over to the next year. As a desperate measure, I have turned to audiobooks — something I would never have imagined myself doing. I don’t even like ebooks that much, so this is a pretty big leap for me. I am pleasantly surprised so far with this new commuting experience — but don’t confuse my new found love for audiobooks with how I feel about commuting.
