Made out of people

So how do you write about this science thing?

"The conventions for writing in the field have digressed from the research process." That was my polite answer to a friend who is working through his survey paper.

He was confused. He already knew his topic, and had a pretty good idea of where it was going. And he hadn't created his work in a particular niche; he'd started on a question that his advisor and he had negotiated out. Which literature was it meant to fit into?

When we write a graduate survey paper, at least in my department, we usually wait until we know what we're working on. We then write a "general survey of the area." It picks an area, discusses it with reasonable thoroughness, and point sto a big, gaping hole in the research. (The next section of our writing, the topic proposal, should then proudly announce that we've filled in the hole.)

The prototypical version of this was managed by a fellow member of my research group a few years ago. His survey paper presents a taxonomy of collaborative filtering systems, and a grid into which these entries might be fit, filled with system names and research projects. One hole in the grid was empty. That hole, of course, was his dissertation topic. Very neat.

And completely unrepresentative of the reseach process he'd done. The survey was a creation; he had carefully picked a taxonomy that would highlight his distinctions.

The current understanding of the scientific process requires a framework to be placed over the work--and I freely admit that the framework doesn't completely match the way we do things. A substantial part of the writing process has been, for me, constructing the framework that will lead to the meaningful conclusions, phrasing the general research concept into particular hypotheses, and choosing a subset of both my methods and my data to describe.

While it's not wrong, it's not quite what we tell kids either.

Recently, I was reading some old journals from Oxford's Internet Library of Early Journals. In particular, I was interested in the 18th century articles from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It's fascinating stuff, partially because the conventions for writing science haven't been decided yet. Is it in Latin or English? The articles haven't decided. Some dive into results up front, then go back to methods later. Some introduce with a literature search, others with a personal motivation. Some dive straight into methods (and at least one starts with the words "Figure one").

Obivously we've developed conventions partially to tame this mess. Reading a paper, I know it will have methods--they'll be in the third section. It'll link itself to other papers in either the second section, or the seventh. There's a little variation, but not a lot. The survey paper may force the issue into an odd shape--but it guarantees that you cover all the right stuff.

Of course, as the comment above illustrate, the research process has changed. Lots of CSCW isnt a science, not in the hypothesis-materials-and-methods sense of the word¹.

Should we work out new conventions? Perhaps borrow them from CSCW's many parent fields, and write to each other in anthro. language, or sociological language, or design language as needed? Or do we stick with the language of science, and accept that we will spend a chunk of time bending our work to fit the format?

¹ Lots of science isn't a science, either... read Feyerabend, Latour, Kuhn, and pretty much anyone in the "Social Studies of Science" area after 1950 or so.