2024 Research-Resources-Reflections

Look back and think ahead!

Dec 05, 2024

2024 was an amazing year of change and transformative experiences!

December is a time for reflection and anticipation. I started the year in the position I’d held since 2017 as the Research Community Manager for Sage Methodspace (now Sage Research Methods Community). The contributions of amazing researchers made this role a lot of fun. In this newsletter I include links to a selection of Methodspace posts, video interviews and webinars, and open-access resources. After resigning from Sage Publishing to focus attention on my own work as an independent scholar, I launched the When the Field is Online Substack newsletter.

From April through June I was in residence at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum, Germany. My ongoing CAIS project is built on a process I call curating your own work. I’ve been writing about online qualitative methods for a long time – my first book about Online Interviews in Real Time was published in 2008 and my most recent book Doing Qualitative Research Online was published in 2022. The ongoing CAIS project is an intensive review of all the models and manuscripts to explored what needs to be changed, redesigned, or added.

What do I mean by “curating” my work?

Curators who put together art exhibits do more than simply hang paintings. They first have to decide what story they want to tell, and then select the pieces of art that fit their objectives. They might add new paintings that used the same techniques or built on themes represented in the earlier paintings, or related artifacts. They create written explanations, audio guides, and events that make the collection relevant today.

Similarly, as writers we can benefit from taking a fresh, comprehensive look at our body of work. What did we learn along the way? How do pieces from the past support or fit what we are doing now? What needs to be updated, renewed, redesigned, reformatted? Whose feedback will help us see this work from new perspectives? I call this process of organizing, reviewing, updating a collection of writing and related figures curating my work. I want to weave old and new ideas together so that others can use and build upon them.

These are the questions I’ve been asking and working to answer about my body of work. I’ve been studying, teaching, presenting, discussing, and writing about qualitative research in an online world since early days of the worldwide web. Some of this work has been published in a series of books, and other parts are in files buried in the maze of my hard drive. I am pulling the pieces together, soliciting input, updating the writing and an extensive set of visual models and figures. I intend to make it all available to researchers in an open access form.

Curating your work offers different opportunities depending on life and career stage. Experienced writers might have published books, chapters, and articles, as well as conference presentations, white papers, research notes and journals that represent the evolution of ideas over time. Students and early career writers can start organizing academic papers, research notes, and other materials so they can be used as the foundation for future work. In November I offered a four-part series about critical and creative thinking as part of the scholarly writing process; curating your work allows you to use those skills when to look deeply at your own body of work.

Curating your work can result in an index of your work, a new edition, a retrospective collection for your own website or a library archive, or another kind of outcome. The result of the project I started at CAIS will be a new multimedia research design guide for qualitative researchers on Pressbooks in 2025.

Learn more about curating your own work!

I discussed the process of curating your own work in a Textbook and Academic Authors Association newsletter article and webinar.

By the way, if you are a writer of books, textbooks, and/or scholarly journals this multidisciplinary association is the place to find community and support! Join here. Get a sneak peek of what TAA has to offer: two on demand presentations, two templates, two eBooks, and an issue of The Academic Author newsletter.

Design strategy for online studies

I also gave a webinar that incorporated some of the updated design ideas for online research, specifically in studies with human participants. This webinar was hosted by itracks, a company that makes secure research platforms for synchronous and asynchronous qualitative research.