References___Terminology
There are basically three ways to insert references into a scholarly text: These are footnotes, endnotes, and the enumerative bibliography; this last one being the list of full references with requisite fields (such as dates, names, publisher info, page numbers etc) that go at the end of the text.
Although there are many different ways of using notes, my advice is to use them either for explanations or descriptions that digress from the body of your text; or for material that is actually a reference but that you cannot cite in the proper manner since some of the information that you need for a full bibliographical reference is missing. This is particularly valid in our field where many artworks will inevitably be exemplified, but where publication data that is needed for a full reference is not available unless there is an exhibition catalog that you can quote from. (Such as for example, page numbers).
How to find / How to read academic texts
The fifth week was spent by taking the subject material that one of you is working on and using this as an example for finding related material that can be used for a literature review.
The one we picked was Ceren's investigation into Eisenman's holocaust memorial in Berlin. In her diagram Ceren has declared one of her nodes to be "storytelling," and so this was the keyword with which we hit google scholar. And sure enough, even the very first document that came our way proved to be a good one, held inquiries that were relevant to what Ceren actually wants to discuss.
A good question to ask___Why are you a creative practitioner?
At this juncture, while you are deliberating upon what your work is all about; a very good (if not indeed downright crucial) question is why you are doing what you are doing. Differently put - what is the burning query that you are seeking an answer to? Such a quest does not only cover one project, it is not even about any of your output in general - instead it is about "you," the person who makes the stuff.
So, ask yourself. And then write down the answer. Again - not in long winded, over-intellectualized terms - not as an abstraction; but as a very real, tangible state of mind or as a quest that can be phrased in simple, clear language. I have a sense that pinpointing this will help you enormously in situating your practice - without which I do not think that you can really write about what you do with sufficient authority.
The question (and the answer) may or may not appear in your paper. In fact, most probably it won't do so. So, this exercise is for yourself, to help you come to grips with why you do what you do - out of which will then come the content of your text, since this will be about one of the things that you have actually created as a result of this global mindset or quest, which is simmering in the background, throughout your psyche.
Taxonomies instead of (bisociative) diagrams
We spent the 4th class examining the diagrams that I had asked you to construct in a bisociative manner - in such a way that you brought the unrelated strands of your practice together. What has emerged instead is that most of you have constructed elaborate and massive taxonomies (classifications that are used for scientific purposes) in which you are bringing together material that in most cases is not at all bisociative, but quite the opposite: Since there is so much stuff on these lists, most of it inevitably ends up being highly inter-related - to the point where in many cases these are even alternative descriptions of the exact same thing. So, even if creating classifications is your aim, as taxonomies these lists are not working either, I'm afraid; given that many of your items are repetitions. (And a good definition of what a taxonomy is can be found here by the way.)
Even those of you who did attempt to do a bisociative diagram got lost in generalizations, over-complicated language and abstractions whose meanings can be stretched in an untold number of ways. What is needed however is this folks:
Onions >>> Guacamole <<< Avocado. Onions and avocado did not belong together until someone got creative and put them both in the same bowl and came up with guacamole!
That simple! So, I would now like you to go back and look at the tangible components - such as the elements, materials, inspirations/influences and ideas - that constitute your creative practice. Do not go for abstractions, or generalizations, or long winded, over intellectualized explanations! Single words, if possible! And absolutely no need for hundreds of nodes and lengthy lists. Put your practice in the center, in place of where guacamole is in the above line. And then 2 strands that go into it is probably enough! 3 just maybe, 4 is already stretching it. But most certainly not lists of hundreds since these are bound to start making "bridges" - and at this stage this is something that I am trying to get you to avoid, so that we have clear trajectories for the upcoming literature review - out of which you will then in fact be creating your own original bridges...
Literature Review___Locating your sources: Portals, books etc... (and also a few things about citation styles)
While Google Scholar is the main source for articles and proceedings papers, another academic search engine you may want to check out is Scirus. PubMed is also a very well known search portal that (as the name already tells us) specializes in biomedical texts and life sciences. As such, probably not very useful to most of you right now; but who knows, there may well be students that will be taking an interest in work that has relations to these fields at some future point, so I have added it here also, just in case. Mendeley, a site that I already recommended whilst talking about reference management systems, can also be used to search for papers. And another good resource is Academia, a portal to which researchers upload their papers. A popular site where you can find many texts is Scribd, which is not only for academic work - so you can find anything from cooking recipes to magazines to government reports in there; but many scholars upload their writings onto Sribd as well, therefore definitely worth bookmarking.
Mendeley will usually show you the correct citation data, however with Academia this may be missing (and with Scribd this is almost certainly going to be the case), in which case you need to copy paste the name of the paper into Google Scholar and get the reference from there; from the link at the bottom of the entry that says "Cite," as I am showing you in the image below:
Literature Review___Locating your sources: Google Scholar
For articles and proceedings papers Google Scholar is indeed your one stop shop for a good literature review; you really need to look no further! Sometimes GS even gives you direct download links to pdfs that the author has uploaded or that the publisher has provided, so you really can end up being very quickly done with your search. However alas, providing links on GS is not standard practice, most publishers prohibit this since the idea is to get paid subscriptions in order to view the texts. Notable exceptions are so-called Open Access publications that enable unrestricted online perusal of peer-reviewed academic journal articles. Nevertheless, most journals still adhere to the closed system and consequently most texts that you find on Google Scholar will not have the download links next to them.
The good news is that our university has a truly remarkable database through which we are subscribed to most academic publications. Thus, when you are logged in from the campus, almost all texts on Google Scholar will have download links that say "available from sabanciuniv.edu." Click on those and you will automatically be taken to the pdf itself, and if not, then to the correct page on the uni database, from where the text is only one click away. You can also do this from home by installing a macro on your computer that allows you to do so. I have never been smart enough to do this, but try it by all means.
Literature Review___Finding stuff
This is of course rather self-evident to begin with - you find things mostly online (and only very rarely through the physical library on campus), and you do so by using search terms that you type into a search engine such as Google Scholar.
That said, using search terms efficiently is a bit of an acquired skill that I will try to demonstrate to you through an example:
Literature Review___A hierarchy of sources
We now come to a very important part of your work - the literature review. Before we go into where you can locate the sources that you need for this, we need to talk about what types of publications can be considered for this task and what their order of importance is. First off, you need to be aware that your survey has to come from peer reviewed sources, seminal texts, acclaimed books and book chapters and respected academic websites. So, the order of desirability of where you get your citations from, goes like this:
Situating your creative practice___Looking "sideways": Arthur Koestler and Bisociation
Before we go into the all-important subject of the literature review, I am now going to ask you to go out on a limb, and take yet another look at your creative work - but not as a logical construct in which your thought patterns rest upon a predictable sequence, where all your ideas and input dove-tail and stand in easily recognizable neat relationships to one another - but rather by trying to identify the different strands of thought, of perception, of reasoning, of ideologies, of mental states, of processes and materials that you bring together to achieve an original result.
Many a cynical person will tell you that nothing is new, that everything has been done/thought of before, that true originality is dead even - and nowhere more so than in academia. But is this really so?
Many a cynical person will tell you that nothing is new, that everything has been done/thought of before, that true originality is dead even - and nowhere more so than in academia. But is this really so?
Theories in Arts and Social Sciences___Broad definitions
The book Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative Research by Mats Alvesson and Kaj Skoldberg has given me the idea that it may be a very good thing to give brief definitions of some of the prevalent theoretical frameworks in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Alvesson and Skoldberg conduct their analysis of these distinct theoretical approaches through separate chapters in their book, which can be read online here. Their objective in conducting such a study is to set the context for a further/novel framework for qualitative research, namely a "reflexive methodology."
Although some may claim that the concerns of creative practices stand outside these theoretical canons, I would strongly argue against such a notion since we (and by extension our work) are always influenced by the particular Zeitgeist that we live under; and these ideologies will have permeated our ways of thinking almost through osmosis, regardless of whether we are aware of this or not. So, a closer look at some of the major contemporary trends of Arts and Social Sciences theories should not be all too amiss:
Your discourse___Tips on language
Typically an academic text in arts and humanities is from 2500 to 7000 words, depending on whether it is written as a conference paper or as a journal article. The higher number is what would be expected for a journal article where you would develop your ideas on a deeper level. The lower number is what would be expected for a conference paper, which is much more of a survey, broad outline type of text.
For exhibition or funding applications there may also be cases where you will be required to make short submissions that are limited to 2 pages and sometimes even only to 1 page, including images. These are far more difficult to manage than the longer ones since the essence of a full paper will then need to be squished into a summary of 1000 words or less.
For all these types of texts, here are some tips on language:
Your discourse___First person or passive voice?
This is a tricky subject and I will try to look at it from different angles: Should your text be of a personal nature, flowing more or less like a narrative or should it be impersonal and objective, adopting a critical stance to your own output? Or should it be a hybrid of the two, where you switch from one mode to the other in different parts of your paper?
Many authors who write on the theory of creative practices suggest that these texts can also be seen as narratives that are strongly referenced, tracing this notion back to John Dewey and his famed book "Art as Experience." Elizabeth Grierson and Laura Brierly advocate a narrative stance to the extent that the title of their book on practice based research even incorporates the word "narrative." Graeme Sullivan is yet another author who places emphasis on narrative as a tool for practice based academic discourse.
Making "editable text"___OCR and pdf converters
There will be times when you wish to make a quote that will be longer than just a few words. (Although you should always keep in mind that long quotes are not too desirable, instead you should be integrating the author's words into your own text flow and only quoting a snippet from it). But again, even when you do this, you may find that re-writing what the author wrote is easier if you can base your writing on their original text rather than doing it from scratch. For this you will need editable text. If you are reading a book or any kind of hard copy publication you will need an OCR system that undertakes the electronic conversion of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.
Reference management systems
Very special thanks go to Burcu Avcı who alerted me to these - and they will in fact make your lives a lot easier when it comes to doing your literature reviews, which you will be starting on quite soon.
One of the biggest challenges when you are conducting a literature review is to keep the texts that you are going to be citing from in some kind of meaningful and easily accessible order. These pdf files will add up, regardless of whether you bookmark them on your browser or whether you download them to your hard drive. Another problem is that they will usually have numerical titles that make no sense whatsoever when you go back to look for the material that you stored. And a further problem is that oftentimes the metadata (the part that will actually make up your reference) will be hard to extract from the pdf file itself. A reference management system resolves all of these problems by running an OCR based check inside the document and then inserts all the information, such as the title, the author names, the publication data etc, so that you can easily see what is what when you look at the list that you have compiled inside the application.
Using mindmaps for structuring a paper
A very handy tool whilst setting up the structure of your paper are mindmaps. While you can also draw a mindmap on a piece of paper or on a white board, mindmaps as software that you fill and manipulate on your screen are especially recommended since you can modify them far more easily than those that are created through analog means.
Situating your creative practice
The third class session was largely spent in trying to identify where you think you are situated within the contemporary art/design spectrum. This is needed in order to be able to reference your work, to establish meaningful connections whilst you do a literature review in the upcoming weeks. No creative activity exists in a vacuum, there are always links that go back to other works, and to global ideologies, conceptual frameworks and philosophies in which your work is nested. To make this process easier for you I had suggested creating a diagram, and that you could use Sullivan's diagram as a point of departure. I had also alerted you to the fact that Sullivan's diagram has notable shortcomings and that you would probably only be able to use it as a generalized method - that is, using a visual schema for identifying your place in the art world.
Setting up a Structure
Do this before you start to write since it will keep you focused and stop you from rambling and getting carried off of the subject.
Art papers seem to be very closely related to papers written in engineering, at least as far as their structure is concerned. This makes perfect sense since the content of an art paper is a close examination of a special project, and that is what technology papers are usually all about as well – the one notable difference being that engineering papers will also almost always have benchmarking and usability studies whereas the subject matter of art papers does not call for such surveys and tests. This difference aside, in terms of structure it is probably a very good idea to borrow the structuring of an engineering paper for an art paper. And, as far as I can see, this is what that would be like, the following little hierarchical structure or something very similar is what you should put down before all else and then proceed to fill out:
Homework
Your homework for this week is creating your own diagram based upon (but not limited to in any way) Graeme Sullivan's diagram that you can see in this post.
Read the questions that I have placed underneath the diagram, and there are sure to also be ones that I have not thought of that you will add to these. Then
make a diagram that situates your own creative practice in the field of
contemporary art/design, as you perceive this field to be. Thus, not
only will you have identified your own practice through this exercise
but you will also have spent some time thinking about the art/design
world at large today.
Early Abstract Revisions
The second week was mostly spent in revising the short abstract that you wrote in order to focus/pinpoint what you will be writing about for the rest of the semester.
Most of you have done a good job with this, although some further tweaking of the initial output will be required. Overall, the thing that most of you have to watch out for is "wordiness," and also the usage of complicated, or esoteric academic jargon that can very easily be replaced with simpler, cleaner forms of expression. Although there will be times when academic terms will have to be used, in most of the cases that I pointed out to you today, this usage was unnecessary. What you have to say is much better expressed in words that are "your own." Another thing that it will be good to watch out for are overlong sentences, that can easily be broken into shorter ones.
Keywords
Publications will expect you to provide metadata that indexes your text. To put this in everyday words, metadata will help readers find your paper in a database or through an online search engine. Amongst this metadata are keywords that are placed at the start of your text, directly underneath the abstract.
Writing an Abstract
An abstract is not the same as the introduction of your text. Instead, an abstract is a summation of your entire text. Usually publications will impose a limit on your abstract - the most common one is 300 words, although sometimes this can go up as far as 500, and sometimes it can be as low as 100 words. The idea is to get the main points of your text into this narrow word count in such a way that someone who reads your abstract knows immediately whether your text is of interest to them, whether it holds material that they can cite from in their own work - in short whether they should continue to read the actual paper itself. Below are two examples that show you how an abstract can be put together:
Specifiying a Subject
Keep things focused. Never write a paper about all of your work! Leave that to the art historians who will compile your oeuvre when you are old and rich and famous, if not indeed already dead… ;-)
Situating your creative practice
The following diagram and classifications have been taken from the 5th Chapter of Graeme Sullivan’s 2004 book Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts. While there can be many other ways of situating or defining your practice; and while many creative practices are far too complex to allow for an easy classification, Sullivan's approach may nevertheless be useful as you are starting out in identifying where you may belong in the wide spectrum of contemporary art and design - however do not approach it as a given, but rather look at it critically, to see how, and indeed if you fit in here:
Research Methods___Some broad definitions: Quantitative, Qualitative, Digital Humanities
Theory of Creative Practice is an emergent field that is generally considered to be situated in the Humanities; however this may be an incomplete definition since the field is hybrid in nature and may borrow from many different research methodologies, some of which may not relate to the Humanities but to different types of inquiry. This may especially be the case for design projects that can often be evaluated under quantitative approaches to benchmark or assess their functionality. Below are the global definitions for two pervasive research methods (Quantitative and Qualitative), followed by a definition of a novel field called Digital Humanities that may also carry some relevance when it comes to theorizing upon ToA/CP projects that can be linked to computational visualization or archiving systems.
Course Structure/Why such a course?
The course's structure will follow a practice based approach whereby you will be taken through all the steps that go into writing a theoretical text in the field of artistic/creative practice. You will progress week by week, starting by defining and narrowing the subject that you wish to write upon, learning how to structure a paper, getting a grasp on how to conduct research and literature reviews; ending with a full, referenced academic text of 5000+ words that follows the requisite standards, and that is also accompanied by a visual presentation that demonstrates the contents of your text. What is important to know is that this text will not be your thesis. Instead it will become an independent paper that you should feel confident enough about to submit to an academic, peer reviewed journal as an article.
Suggested Reading/Viewing List
Barone, T. E., Eisner, E. W., (2011) Arts Based Research, Sage Publications, USA.
Biggs, M., Buchler, D., (2008). Eight criteria for practice-based research in the creative and cultural industries, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 7(1), pp: 5 – 18.
Busch, K., Artistic Research and the Poetics of Knowledge, Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, Volume 2. No. 2. Spring 2009 ISSN 1752-6388, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/busch.html
Busch, K., Artistic Research and the Poetics of Knowledge, Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, Volume 2. No. 2. Spring 2009 ISSN 1752-6388, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/busch.html
Candlin, F., (2000), Practice-based doctorates and questions of academic legitimacy. International Journal of Art and Design Education, 19 (1). pp: 96 - 101 http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/737/1/Candlin2.pdf
Gray, C., Malins, J., (2004), Visualizing Research: A Guide To The Research Process In Art And Design, Ashgate Publishers, UK.
Leavy, P., (2008) Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice, The Guilford Press, USA.
McNiff, S., (1998) Art-Based Research, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, UK.
Siegesmund, R., (2010) Tensions of Art-Based Practice in Educational Settings http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duemifawyes
Smith, H., (ed), Dean, R. T., (ed), (2009). Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts (Research Methods for the Arts and Humanities), Edinburgh University Press, Scotland
Sullivan, G., (2004), Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, Sage Publications, CA, USA. Google book: http://tinyurl.com/9prewbv
Sullivan, G., (2004), Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, Sage Publications, CA, USA. Google book: http://tinyurl.com/9prewbv
Working papers in Art & Design Journal http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades/index.html
Course Definition
This course aims to enable artists and designers to theorize and to write effectively on their own creative output and projects, as well as to give them the ability to conduct research and develop theory in wider related fields such as art theory, art criticism, art education, new media, curatorial studies and the like. The research methodology of this field can be seen to be a merger of qualitative inquiry, aesthetics and narratology; although quantitative approaches may also come into play, particularly where the evaluation of design projects is concerned. Given the oftentimes subjective nature of writing about one’s own projects and creative output also calls for additional approaches and tools, which include the ability to put together a solid documentation of personal creative output as well as integrating such a documentation into both the text and the presentation/summation thereof.
The course work will take the student from a start-out point involving the definition and setting up the parameters/boundaries of their topic, to a final point of writing a well structured theoretical text as well as learning to prepare a cogent presentation through which the creative work under scrutiny can be summarized efficiently and be disseminated at academic gatherings. Interim stages will cover areas such as approaches for conducting both online and off-line research, with an emphasis on the ability to efficiently use search engines and key words for content development, processes for undertaking effective literature reviews and their manner of integration into personal research, including an understanding of academic referencing styles.
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