Heat and Editing
A blistering afternoon, where a wall of heat hit me as I walked out of the parking garage toward the library. Vast blue skies. Sticky behind my knees and down my back. Luckily it’s Friday, so I found a spot to work in the crowded Alcazar study room. A far cry from Grad Services at Berkeley, with it’s open tables, easy plugs for the computer, and my study buddies. But there’s some charm to being here too, surrounded by Spanish young people preparing for September exams, and it’s quiet, and away from the distractions of my in-laws, so it works.
Am working on editing a book that was a colleague’s dissertation, and it has me thinking a lot about how difficult it is to do good research. My adviser often talks about how challenging it is to connect theory with data, but until I started to try and do it myself, and critique how well others did it, I didn’t see the full picture of what she was saying. Because while any piece of research broadly relates to and touches on a lot of different areas, the possibilities of one study to really show evidence for something are actually quite narrow. So oftentimes books in particular claim to be addressing a broad swath of issues, many of which are unmeasurable by the methods in the study.
The challenge is to balance the philosophical and theoretical questions the study’s topic broadly raises with the conclusions drawn based upon the research itself. Complicated to do well. Even writing this here, I’m thinking to myself–How will I do this?
This is just one challenge of my dissertation, as I work to revise my proposal and begin my study. Critiquing how this professor has done it is relatively easy. Doing it well myself is much more difficult.
What’s your experience balancing these things?
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And as an aside, if you need a moment to be filled with love for your country (as in the Estados Unidos de America), look through this art project. Or if you’re interested in immigration. Or if you just want to be inspired to make creative and beautiful things.