Sunday, September 26, 2010

"I'm just going to write because I cannot help it" (Charlotte Brontë)

Like others have posted this week, I’m grappling with a number of issues right now. So as both Luker and Knight have suggested I’m going to write about them in hopes of making sense of them.


The biggest issue is finding a research question. While I do have a general area I’m interested in (like Alisha, I’m interested in women in the library field), I don’t know how to narrow that down, nor do I know how to “frame” it. My undergrad degree was in English and French, concentrating in literature, so social science research is new to me. I spent the last year of undergrad researching constructions of female authorship during the 19th century--essentially, what it meant to female writers to be professional authors in a time when women writers were seen as hacks. I’m still interested in this area and think there might be some sort of connection between the stereotypes of female librarians and female authors, I’m just still trying to fully make that connection and figure out if this works for a social science research project.


The other issue I’m dealing with is who will care about what I’m researching (which seems to be a common concern). I’ve run into this problem before when doing large research projects and it’s always gone away as I begin to do the actual research and see where what I’m saying fits in or complements the existing research. However since this is a different sort of research, I don’t know if it’ll work the same way this time around.

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