I am feeling better about Luker, not that I have any better insights, but more to the point that I am taking some of her statements to heart. She says that research is more Thinking than Doing and that the research needs produce something that is significant, worthwhile and contributes to the understanding of the phenomenon. So, as I am reading for other classes, I tend to pay attention to statements saying to the effect that "more needs to be done"....or "the debate is still raging"....or "we don't really know."
This probably explains the reason that so much research is generated in medicine and biology--there is a natural push to expand the knowledge base. Our task is less direct but I will try to hold on to the questions, "So what? What does it mean?" "Who cares?
Knight introduces three research forms and then offers some characteristics of each. Is it your understanding that we are allowed to engage in any of these three-action? case? evaluation?
Maybe soon, we can start sharing some of our ideas about possible studies....
Mary
So true! I always wonder what to think when I bump into those more-work-needs-to-be-done-type statements...could they be little rhetorical trick? Do you think scholars partly justify their own work with those very statements?
ReplyDeleteHi Mary,
ReplyDeleteYou brought up some very interesting points about Luker's advice.
It flared something up in me that I would like to get off my chest...sometimes DOING is not an option due to external factors.
Last term I took the Art Librarianship course and wrote a paper on the lack of Open Access (OA) art-based peer-reviewed journals.
In short, there is not a lack of art scholarship in print but there is a lack of it in OA form due to costly copyright fees.
One might assume that online publishing is cheaper, whereas, it can cost $1000s of dollars to publish ONE image in an article. Risk of copyright infringement is heightened online because of its ease to copy and paste images for (potential) mis-use. Additionally, scholars are treated as corporate entities and are expected to pay big bucks for images. However most scholars publish articles to promote scholarship and further their careers through accolades - NOT to make money.
To illustrate – how could an author depict Michelangelo’s melancholic disposition if they could not explain by including a detail image from Raphael’s School of Athens ?? Impossible!
As a result, print copyrights are easier to manage but less accessible to online users. This is especially detrimental to studio artists who prefer to access information remotely.
So what? What does it mean? Who cares?...
Well, I do for one. And I am sure others do as well. While I respect the need to enforce copyright there should be exceptions made for academic articles/journals. By limiting art scholarship to costly online journals like JSTOR scholars have a much smaller audience than those interested in the hard and soft sciences (much cheaper to publish and disseminate online).
Furthermore, after reading an entire decade’s worth of ARLIS/NA's journal, ART DOCUMENTATION, I know that many art librarians have tried to "produce something that is significant, worthwhile and contributes to the understanding of the phenomenon". And yet many have ended articles with the statement "more works needs to be done" to provide better access. This is because copyright law overrides research methodologies and practices.
It has not been easy to convert academic art history scholarship to the digital landscape. What's worse, is that as art scholarship falls further behind while the sciences and math continue to flourish in Open Access form. By being less accessible to the online researchers it has become more difficult to expand a knowledge base due copyright limitations.