Thursday 26 March 2009

Research Training

I was planning on writing my next blog post on how irritating and what a waste of time generic research training days are.  The problem with this is that I have just recently been through two days of research training, organised by our Graduate Research School and found them (in the most part) to be quite useful and thought provoking! 
I am sure that a large reason for this is that the chap running them is a Philosopher by training, so did not alienate the humanities students in the way that these things tend do, however, I did find that these sessions made my brain work rather than shut down.  The structure of my thesis, the way I have to think about what I am writing, researching, analysing and where this all leads to, the methods and methodology of my work, all began to become a little clearer, which can only be a good thing can't it? 
I had begun to think that I did not have a clear methodology for this work, when suddenly it dawned on me that actually, I was beginning to form one.  I mention all this in the previous blog post, and at the moment this is still in the embryonic stage in my head - once it is clearer I will try and write about it, however, the fact that it exists was a revelation to me. 
I am now trying to make sense of Archive Fever in a way that will allow me to explain clearly how I see the relationship media technology has with regional identity and society has developed and will continue to develop.  
So, this blog post is a little shorter than it was going to be.  All I can really say is whilst some of it was like teaching your grandma to suck eggs (or some such analagy) it was also a useful process to go through and made me think more about my own research than I had done in a few weeks. It helped me to think of myself as a researcher who has the beginnings of a theory and some evidence to help prove it.  I have also resolved to blog once a week, in an attempt to give my life some structure and to help my thought process.  I hope that by blogging, I will generate ideas and questions that will inform my thesis. 

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