Look once, look twice, look again: searching deeper to make research connections

My focus in the last week has been pulling together a proposal to take a research trip to England. At times writing it felt a bit like having my teeth extracted one by one without any anaesthetic but I think I've got it sorted out now. The interesting thing about writing the proposal, though, was following the trail of connections that led to to where I wanted to go.

It started about 8 weeks ago, when I saw a call for papers for a conference on research into speculative fiction being held at the University of Liverpool. It sounded like exactly my sort of thing, so I wrote an abstract and sent it off. The problem was, the conference was only for 1 day. And it takes 24 hours (minimum) to fly from Australia to England. So if I was going to go to the conference, I had to work out what else I would do while I was in the UK because there was no way I was going for less than 2 weeks.

One of the reasons the University of Liverpool is a great place for a conference on speculative fiction is that their library has a Science Fiction Special Collection. I was sure there had to be something in there for me but searching on the terms 'posthuman' and 'posthumanity' got me nowhere in their library catalogue. I kept searching around the Science Fiction Special Collection website looking for clues but I wasn't getting anywhere with skim searching. It was time to look deeper, and pay close attention to each page on the site.

Digging deeper

On the 'Scholarship' web page (which I'd previously ignored because I thought it related to getting a scholarship), was a list of links under various headings including 'Courses', 'Conferences and events', 'Themes & subjects' and 'Theses & dissertations'. Under the heading 'Themes and subjects' was a link 'posthumanity'. I clicked on it - it took me out of the library site to an unassuming (a bit dodgy looking, actually) page. On this page, under the heading 'Books' it listed fiction by just three authors, none of whom I was overly familiar with but one name jumped out at me: Olaf Stapledon. I knew I'd seen his name in my wanderings around the Science Fiction Special Collection site. I went back and double checked and bingo - the special collection has an extensive Stapledon archive.

So far in my research into posthumanity I've focused on recent theory and criticism, and each of the novels I've chosen for my case studies are from the late 20th/early 21st century. I hadn't really looked for where the beginnings of fictional posthumanity might be. Turns out, Olaf Stapledon is pretty much it - he is the forefather of posthuman science fiction. And now here was a whole archive of his writing, notes, correspondence, lectures and more staring me right in the face. This is what I'd (unknowingly) been searching for.

Lessons learned

There are a couple of lessons to learn from this exercise. The first is, if your instinct is telling you something you're searching for is somewhere on a site, keep searching. Look deeper and if you don't find it the first, second or third time go back and look differently. Secondly, don't assume the page title or even the visible headings are telling you everything you need to know. I'd dismissed the 'Scholarship' page several times because of its title and because the first two headings (courses and conferences) on the page confirmed what I thought the page was about. I'm not sure how many times I'd looked at that page before I finally scrolled down to see the 'posthumanity' link, but it was at least 2 or 3.

The Olaf Stapledon archive could turn out to hold the core ideas and concepts that will pull my PhD thesis into a cohesive whole. And although it was staring me in the face, I very nearly missed it. This is very unscientific of me but I believe it was my instincts telling me to keep going back and look again.

By the way, my abstract for the conference paper wasn't accepted. But to be honest, it doesn't really matter. I'll still go to the conference as a delegate, and it'll be a great networking experience, but in the end the conference was just a pathway to me finding what I really needed.

Osmosis and the hokey pokey: that's what creative-practice led research is all about

The past week I've focused on reading N. Katherine Hayles' How we became posthuman. It's a fascinating book that has sparked off lots of questions for me around what my creative piece is really about. It's also got me thinking about the relationship between my creative writing practice and my research; that is, how I use my research to inform my thinking about my creative practice.

Creative-practice led research is a tricky beast. It is often difficult to define the exact nature of the research/creative practice relationship, well for me anyway, but I'm going to put some thoughts down about how I see it working.

Almost three years ago, back when Dirt Circus League was a bunch of random ideas in a long-winded narrative that had no beginning, middle or end,  I stuck a sign on my mirror that encapsulated what I might want a reviewer to say about my book, once it was published. The sign says:

A Vonnegut for contemporary young adult readers... Wacky, fast-paced, original, off-beat, funny and wildly imaginative, always with an eye on the obscure and the absurd. A mash-up of neuroscience, action, dark humour and adventure with absolutely no lesson to teach.

It will be up to readers to tell me how much of that 'review' is true for the final product when Dirt Circus League is eventually published. But in terms of my PhD, and how my creative writing practice informs and is informed by my research, there are some interesting things to note about the 'review'.

From the start, it was always going to be speculative fiction. It was not going to be didactic. Like my writing hero Kurt Vonnegut, I wanted to make my readers both laugh and think and get some insight into the beauty, cruelty and absurdity of our planet earth. I referred back to the sign often but didn't try to specifically add in to the story elements from the sign, which would come across as false and implanted rather than naturally occurring. In other worlds, I wanted those elements to seep in by osmosis. And I want my research reading to do the same thing.

Research informing writing informing research

The timeline of story writing/ reading research breaks down roughly like this: 

• July 2010- March 2011: initial reading/first draft of manuscript simultaneously
• March 2011 - November 2011: lots of research into neuroscience and related fields (including reading my favourite Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology)
• November 2011-May 2012: further drafts and changes to manuscript along with reading into neuroscience and related fields such as critical neuroscience and reading another important text for me, Brain Culture)
• June 2012-October 2012: research reading, focusing on Bahktin's Rabelais and His World (my first real departure from neuroscience related reading)
• October 2012-December 2012: another significant rewrite of the manuscript
• December 2012 - now: reading literary criticism, some related to eco-criticism but mostly around speculative and science fiction; reading focused on posthumanism

The pattern shows intense periods focused on either researching or writing, with fewer periods where the two overlap. However, the basic plot and narrative of the story essentially hasn't changed. What the research does change in the manuscript is the deeper layers, the foundations of the manuscript and the ideas that form it. It's not so much that new ideas come into the manuscript, but that my research illuminates on what those ideas are really about. In turn, I make changes (sometimes quite subtle) that add layers of meaning to the surface story.

Coming back to Hayles' book, for example, I read a paragraph where she writes about Norbert Weiner's book The Human Use of Human Beings. Hayles posits:

'If memory in humans is the transfer of informational patterns from the environment to the brain, machines can be built to effect the same kind of transfer. Even emotions may be achievable for machines if feelings are considered not as "merely a useless epiphenomenon of nervous actions" (HU, p. 72) but as control mechanisms governing learning.'

When I read that I think about my protagonist Quarter, and how he is deliberately doing something to his body and brain that interferes both with memory and with how/what type of informational patterns will transfer from his environment to his brain because some of these patterns will now be bird patterns. I may use that thought to go back to my manuscript at some point and add in a detail, or perhaps even alter the ending slightly, to reflect that notion of the human and animal patterns within him. I'm not going to alter his character to add machine parts, or to incorporate a cyborg into the plot. Nevertheless the point Hayles raises inspires a series of questions for me about who or what Quarter really is, and what he may become.

In this way, my research dips and wiggles its fingers and toes in and out of my creative practice. It's kind of like the hokey-pokey but probably more like osmosis. Just as that sign on my mirror has influenced the type of book that Dirt Circus League is now and will become, so the research seeps its way into my creative writing, sometimes in ways I don't consciously recognise until my supervisor asks me a question about my work, and I realise that I can answer it.

Top five reasons why I am doing my PhD

There are five main reasons for why I decided to do a PhD.  I’ll rank them here from bottom to top.

Number 5
So that, in my old age, when my best friend (who’s also doing her PhD) and I are living together and raising hell in some retirement village somewhere, when the phone rings I can answer: “Dr Ryan’s and Dr Kimberley’s residence. To which doctor do you wish to speak?”
Of course, her PhD is in psychology so if people need a ‘real’ doctor, she may be able to help them. I, on the other hand, will only be able to provide advice on cutting out dead words and sentences. Although, of course, I may manage to pick up a bit of neuroscience during my research and so may also be able to assist with a dodgy diagnosis of a neuropsychological problem (callers are warned to hang up straight away if I mention scalpels or lobotomies).

Number 4
So that my older brothers and sisters (I’m the youngest of five) will have to show me some respect and call me Doctor Kimberley. This is to compensate for years of having to relive the trauma of having the childhood nickname of ‘reek-a-russy-bubby-girl’.
Clearly, I want people to call me ‘Doctor Kimberley’. Of course, I could just pretend I was a doctor of some kind and lie to strangers, but I’m a very bad liar. Some of my siblings claim that they will refuse to call me Dr Kimberley whether I complete my PhD or not. I will have my ways of making them conform. They will pay for that ridiculous nickname and the fact that none of them ever even had a nickname at all. Ever.

Number 3
I’m a library nerd and I love books, and the best way to get the cheapest (as in free) and best access to books is to be a post-grad student. I just can’t get over the fact that I can ask for a book from any library in almost any place in the world and it will get sent to me. For nix. It’s like having a magical power.  Of course, it’s not a magical power like flying, but it’s close.

Number 2
Not only am I a library nerd, I am a nerd nerd. It’s taken some years for me to come to this realisation. I was never a nerd in school – I was the rebel. I demonstrated all the classic (and not so classic) rebellious behaviours, including (but not limited to)
-smoking in the toilets at school (and scoring a suspension)
-turning up to school stoned
-having a hallucinatory flashback at school and hiding behind a friend and pointing at the principal screaming “keep her away from me”
-starting my own communist party
-walking out of religious classes
-constantly challenging and arguing (always logically, of course) with teachers
-flashing my arse from the windows of the Year 12 corridor
-getting everyone in my extended friendship group to wear their pyjamas on free dress day (still not exactly sure why that one caused such outrage, but Catholic girls schools can be strange places)
But rebellion is for the young. So now it’s my time to be a nerd.

Number 1
All these are excellent and valid reasons. But the number one gong I’m doing a PhD is because it will make me a better writer. Doing a PhD involves research, lots and lots of research. And if I learnt anything from doing my Masters, it’s that research makes me a better writer. It gives me new ideas. It makes me think about those ideas in different ways. It opens up whole new worlds I never knew existed. It adds layers and depth to my writing. It makes me really think about the world I’m creating and the internal logic that holds it all together. The creative writing and the research weave in and out of each other, not seamlessly, exactly, but each feeding into and off the other. But research alone is not enough. The PhD also provides rigour and discipline. It doesn’t let me get away with anything. And that’s just what a rebel needs. No matter what you call her.

Thoughts from a conference

Went to the QUT post-grad student conference, Ignite, held at the Kelvin Grove campus in Brisbane last Friday. It was a two-day conference but working full-time at the moment I could only fit in the one day.

I had a 10-minute paper to deliver first up in the morning, along with 4 other first year PhD students, which was interesting. I've spoken at conferences before for work-related stuff, but this was my first academic style conference. The audience was small and consisted of everyone's supervisors, family and friends but at least that meant it was a supportive group. Pretty much everyone used bigger words than me, though maybe my few mentions of neuroconstructivism put me up there. And the short reading I did from my creative work resulted in stunned silence (still not sure if this meant they were spellbound or shocked).

Over the rest of the day I attended a couple of sessions of PhD and Masters students delivering 20 minute papers. A couple of things I learnt from attending those:

• you can talk the academic talk and be entertaining
• interesting discussions can come out of the question and answer sessions
• keep on track with your topic
• be prepared and be professional
• somewhere along the way doing your PhD, the chances are high you will lost the plot

One of the most interesting papers was by a candidate who had just submitted her thesis for examination. About two thirds of the way through her PhD, she realised that all the assumptions she'd made about her topic were wrong. All the data she had collected was telling her something that she didn't want to see. So she had to take a step back, pull all the data apart and look at it again from a fresh perspective. After having a minor (or possibly close to major) meltdown, she got through it all and came out the other side with a thesis that was much more original than her initial work. She had some great advice to give to new PhD students, including:

• don't make assumptions about what you think your data is telling you
• don't give up - take a step back and work through the issues
• don't be afraid of letting your research taking you in unexpected directions

One of the worst papers was from a candidate who was clearly unprepared. She may have been a last minute replacement, which would explain why she was all over the place, but she made some major mistakes that could have been overcome with even a few hours preparation:

• she sat on a table swinging her legs, instead of standing
• she didn't use any visuals to help maintain audience interest and focus
• she rambled, lost her place, and jumped from idea to idea with no coherent thread
• despite getting several time warnings from the facilitator, she kept rambling on

I thought the facilitator was going to have to stand up and put her hand over her mouth to shut her up!

The final session of the day was a 'debate' about the relationship between student and supervisor during the PhD process. It was more entertaining than informative and ended up, as many discussions in Australia seem to do, deciding that what was needed was more alcohol. Sigh.

But all in all it was a good day. Met some interesting people, learnt some useful stuff and had a few laughs. It was a nice, laid-back intro to the academic conference.