CHI reactions or how I used Dewey to review papers
It's an odd kind of meeting when person you meet for the first time (or so you think) suddenly tells you - hi, i know you, you wrote my rejection letter... Quite honestly, I did not know where to hide just at that moment. This also made me rethink the process by which my workshop co-organizers and I reviewed papers for our Engaging the City workship at CHI 2005.
Writing is probably one of the hardest things I do for this whole academic shtick. Of course, I've gotten my share of rejection letters (not so pleasant, but it's a learning experience). Yet when I was faced with the prospect of reviewing papers for a workshop that I was helping organize, the reality of evaluating the writing of others became a thorny personal issue. Just how DO you evaluate someone else's writing? What do you apply as markers of quality? How do you know?
Thinking about it, I realized that reviewing is inseparable form my own practice or writing. Actually, probably one of the most helpful things I've ever read for my own writing was John Dewey's "Logic: The Theory of Inquiry". Turns out, not only was this piece extremely helpful in informing my own writing, but it was also a roadmap I'd tried to follow when reviewing. There are four important rules that I got from that piece, rules that I tried to apply to every paper I wrote and reviewed since (it really hasn't been that long since I'd discovered this, but the changes in my approach were immediately evident). Here is the main gist of it:
Inquiry (any research project must be a form of inquiry for it to be a worthwhile and interesting undertaking) is a mode of conduct and has a beginning, middle and end. It involves a very specific pattern. Dewey himself defines inquiry as follows: "Inquiry is the controlled or directed transormation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its consitutent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole."
So... the process of research or design must have four parts to it:
1. the indeterminate situation (a situation that is not fully understood, unknown or uncertain - for example "making friends is a difficult proccess and we actually don't quite know how people do it")
2. the formation of a problem for inquiry - that is, figuring out exactly what is the major question your research or design must answer. For example - considering the above "indeterminate situation" of making friends, the question could be - what are the major determinants of whether someone is considered a friend or not?
3. the distinctions and relations that may be discovered in a directed transofmration of the situation - this means, you must understand what is already known about the topic of your interest and the question you are asking and then perform investigations to add to that knowledge in a systematic fashion so that you may answer the original question you posed
4. the unified outcome that is produced - that is, once the answer to the quesiton you posed is found, you must incorporate that with existing information and add it to the larger framework of the situation itself (in this case "how do people make friends") in an effort to move towards a complete understanding of the situation (making the situation determinant).
So, any research paper must start out with the description of an indeterminate situation (along with an argument of exactly why it is indeterminate). It then must ask the "question", that is "formulate a problem of inquiry", setting a clear thesis for the work. Then it must balance both the existing theoretical framework it uses to investigate/find answers and the advances that are made to add to the existing knowledge in an effort to answer the question. It must finish with showing how the new knowledge is incorporated into the coherent whole of the original situation and contributes towards making the situation determinant.
During writing - this is a strict road map and the hardest portion, I find, is clearly formulating the question.
During reviewing - if a paper is missing any of these pieces, especially if after reading it I continually ask myself "so what IS the QUESTION?", then it is clear that the paper will not be accepted. Every author must have a clear purpose for both doing research and writing reports on it. Fumbling in the dark and striking out at random, without a clear goal and/or an understanding of existing knowledge surrounding each question is not exactly a good way of getting at answers.
In this piece, Dewey also distinguishes between common sense and science. I tried to describe this particular relationship in my earlier review of the piece itself. After attending CHI, I simply could not get rid of a nagging feelig: a very large proportion of "research" reported at CHI did not feel to me like scientific inquiry. On the contrary, it seemed to fit better with what Dewey called "common sense" inquiry. Although this is not necessarily a bad thing, in some way, this helps me understand the "what" and "why" of CHI...
Writing is probably one of the hardest things I do for this whole academic shtick. Of course, I've gotten my share of rejection letters (not so pleasant, but it's a learning experience). Yet when I was faced with the prospect of reviewing papers for a workshop that I was helping organize, the reality of evaluating the writing of others became a thorny personal issue. Just how DO you evaluate someone else's writing? What do you apply as markers of quality? How do you know?
Thinking about it, I realized that reviewing is inseparable form my own practice or writing. Actually, probably one of the most helpful things I've ever read for my own writing was John Dewey's "Logic: The Theory of Inquiry". Turns out, not only was this piece extremely helpful in informing my own writing, but it was also a roadmap I'd tried to follow when reviewing. There are four important rules that I got from that piece, rules that I tried to apply to every paper I wrote and reviewed since (it really hasn't been that long since I'd discovered this, but the changes in my approach were immediately evident). Here is the main gist of it:
Inquiry (any research project must be a form of inquiry for it to be a worthwhile and interesting undertaking) is a mode of conduct and has a beginning, middle and end. It involves a very specific pattern. Dewey himself defines inquiry as follows: "Inquiry is the controlled or directed transormation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its consitutent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole."
So... the process of research or design must have four parts to it:
1. the indeterminate situation (a situation that is not fully understood, unknown or uncertain - for example "making friends is a difficult proccess and we actually don't quite know how people do it")
2. the formation of a problem for inquiry - that is, figuring out exactly what is the major question your research or design must answer. For example - considering the above "indeterminate situation" of making friends, the question could be - what are the major determinants of whether someone is considered a friend or not?
3. the distinctions and relations that may be discovered in a directed transofmration of the situation - this means, you must understand what is already known about the topic of your interest and the question you are asking and then perform investigations to add to that knowledge in a systematic fashion so that you may answer the original question you posed
4. the unified outcome that is produced - that is, once the answer to the quesiton you posed is found, you must incorporate that with existing information and add it to the larger framework of the situation itself (in this case "how do people make friends") in an effort to move towards a complete understanding of the situation (making the situation determinant).
So, any research paper must start out with the description of an indeterminate situation (along with an argument of exactly why it is indeterminate). It then must ask the "question", that is "formulate a problem of inquiry", setting a clear thesis for the work. Then it must balance both the existing theoretical framework it uses to investigate/find answers and the advances that are made to add to the existing knowledge in an effort to answer the question. It must finish with showing how the new knowledge is incorporated into the coherent whole of the original situation and contributes towards making the situation determinant.
During writing - this is a strict road map and the hardest portion, I find, is clearly formulating the question.
During reviewing - if a paper is missing any of these pieces, especially if after reading it I continually ask myself "so what IS the QUESTION?", then it is clear that the paper will not be accepted. Every author must have a clear purpose for both doing research and writing reports on it. Fumbling in the dark and striking out at random, without a clear goal and/or an understanding of existing knowledge surrounding each question is not exactly a good way of getting at answers.
In this piece, Dewey also distinguishes between common sense and science. I tried to describe this particular relationship in my earlier review of the piece itself. After attending CHI, I simply could not get rid of a nagging feelig: a very large proportion of "research" reported at CHI did not feel to me like scientific inquiry. On the contrary, it seemed to fit better with what Dewey called "common sense" inquiry. Although this is not necessarily a bad thing, in some way, this helps me understand the "what" and "why" of CHI...
posted by Q at 20:43
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