Undergraduate Research

What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?

One important type of research is trying to make meaningful predictions about the future based on what’s happened in the past. Traditionally, human beings aren’t very good at the task.

“IT’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper—which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated. Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate’s office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device. He wishes you good luck at the coming meeting and signs off.”

Thanks to Sheryl for pointing to this article in her blog post on 21st Century Learning.

Digital History Hacks: All is Flux

One of the main purposes of this site is to serve as a place where faculty and students can focus on the process of research and scholarship. We all spend our lives surrounded by the products of research–books, journals and artistic works–but often the process of preparing the work is invisible.

In his keynote at the Teaching Learning with Technology at JMU, Gardner Campbell talked some about the limitations of traditional definitions of information literacy. As part of his presentation, Gardner talks about how a colleague–a Pulizer Prize winning poet–was amazed at the fact that most of the students in the class skipped right over the key to understanding the work “Don’t they know how long a writer takes to choose and epigraph?” Probably not, since most of them have very little experience with books as they are written.

Same thing happens with other types of research in the humanities. As Bill Turkel noted in post a while ago, even graduate students work with research model that is pretty linear:

1. Formulate question
2. Do research
   • Collect a bunch of sources
   • Decide which look most promising and skim through those
   • Read the most relevant ones carefully
   • Take good notes
3. Write
4. Publish

In the world of digital scholarship, some researchers follow a much different direction. The journals on this site are venues for you to write incrementally and informally.

• Until your interpretation stabilizes…
  • You keep refining your ensemble of questions
  • Your spiders and feeds provide a constant stream of potential sources
  • Unsupervised learning methods reveal clusters which help to direct your attention
  • Adaptive filters track your interests as they fluctuate
  • You create or contribute to open source software as needed
  • You write/publish incrementally in an open access venue
  • Your research process is subject to continual peer review
  • Your reputation develops

Feel free to join in and help us make this new 21st century model work for us.