Day 43-46: Taking Off

Egret DSC_3720
Originally uploaded by Sridhar Parthasarathy.

Well, not exactly. Not after a few days of not being able to blog due to my illness.

It's more of a relief and the much-needed rejuvenated feeling. My mind feel clearer and sort of more liberated. Perhaps with more inspiration? That's why I feel like I'm taking off like this beautiful crane that looks so divine it's more like a painting than a snapshot of the real thing! It is simply breath-taking, don't you think? It is a photo like this that inspires poems, etc.

And perhaps it is inspiring my dissertation, too, heh-heh! :-P

Well, I went to see Than Wor Vajiramedhi, a highly respected monk, today to give some donation of several things and also to discuss Dhamma and catch up with him in general. I ended up getting more projects from him!

But this doesn't deter my spirit at all. Instead, I feel refreshed and excited, looking forward to the things I would be doing for Buddhism, and hoping that I could carry that momentum into my slow-moving dissertation! heh-heh

I'd better stop now. So many things to do. So little time! Oh, I did make some decent progress on that quali book I like so much. I have made up my mind already that I should finish most of the book before I rewrite Chapter 1 again.

Originally I plan to finish Chapter 1 within next week. But this book is so cool it helps me with the questions that has always bogged me down for 3 years. And that is how to ask a good research questions!

So, I believe that if I spend more time getting the preliminaries right, the rest would follow smoothly. I saw my past struggle as having to rewrite again and again because I couldn't get my thinking and reasoning straight. Something has always been missing. Now I hope this book would be a good step-by-step guide. I'm gonna trust my hunch this time!

Day 41-42: Lantern - - A Great Concept to Explain Quali Research

Orange Juice
Originally uploaded by Hadjek.

I've not been well for these past few days, so I'm combining the 2 days' worth of blogging together.

And because I'm not feeling well, I feel I need some huge injection of Vitamin C. And look what kind of photo I found! Don't you just love Flickr? This photo is so amazing! It literally made me thirsty! heh-heh

Now, back to business. I just wanna continue on Shank's book. I really like how he differentiate among the 3 types of "seeing." The "mirror" way to see things is more of a speculative style while the window type is more scientific. Neither of which is going to be my focus.

Lantern, however, is what qualitative research is all about. On page 11 of his book, I found what I need to use to defend my decision to go for qualitative in my ph.d. study despite the "norm" in my school to go quantitative. I would probably be the first, or second, to have this so-called "deviant behavior!" hee hee hee

Here is some excerpt from p.11:

• "...When we look at qualitative researchers over the decades as they have struggled to craft conceptual tools for their trade, we find an implicit reaching for illuminative concepts. We see them use such words as "illumination" and "insight" and "understanding."

• "...We see researchers going to faraway places and to ordinary settings, seeking to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. We find researchers struggling to see the world through the eyes of others, to understand acts in terms of strange motives, and to fathom cultures in terms of strange presuppositions..."
  

• "...We find other qualitative researchers using interpretative tools and techniques to decipher cultural codes and social mores ranging from marriage rituals to dealing with uncommunicative students..."

• "...Therefore, the goals of qualitative research are insight, enlightenment, and illumination. We are neither contemplative mirror researchers nor unbiased window researchers. We are searchers and discoverers and reconcilers of meaning where no meaning has been clearly understood before, and we do not feel that our understanding of meaning is complete until we discover and understand its role in practice and experience...."
  

Wow, I'm literally moved by his words. Thank you, Professor Shank! You have made me feel good about my determination to do what I'm doing! Gee, it is really uplifting reading your book! It's not just a "how to do a qualitative research" book, if you ask me. It helps give the readers more the "sense of purpose." And that's why I like it so much!

(p.s. I already gave it a 5-star and positive comment on Amazon.com!)

Day 40: Mirror, Window & Lantern

Japanese Garden
Originally uploaded by NatashaP.

Almost finished reading that chapter on Interpretation.

Yes, it seems to drag on forever! I spent most of today recuperating from yesterday, and editing my grandma's funeral book.

I love this photo, though. First of all, it brings back those nostalgic moments I have with Japan. You could even call it "homesick" in a way. Japan is calling me again!

Secondly, it has something to do with what I read today! Towards the end of the chapter I'm struggling with (Intepretation in Quali Research), the author makes a reference back to the very first chapter when he talks about the three types of "seeing" things: Mirror, Window and Lantern.

Since I skipped every chapter to come directly to this very chapter I'm now reading, I had to skip back to first chapter again! Duh!

Anyway, it's almost 3 now. So I'd better go to bed. Tomorrow they're coming to deliver more bookshelves here! Kids, if you're going to do Ph.D., you need a lot of bookshelves at home! :-P

Oh, how I wish I could hop right into the park, right next to this pond, to meditate!

Day 39: More Progress on the Priliminaries

Early morning in Visegrad
Originally uploaded by -=Ninja=-.

Day 39 has been pretty slow. I had so many other deadlines!

Yes, when you see a photo of natural landscape, especially cool-atmosphere, majestic mountain to calm your soul down again, it is a sure sign I haven't made much literal progress on my dissertation! :-P

Anyway, I was glad I forced myself to do something on it to keep myself on a daily progress. And I did write more on the prelimiaries, which are the Hypothesis, the limitations, etc.

I hope to get it over with the intro chapter this week. And let's hope there will be no more mountain photos again for a while! :-P

Day 38: Saussure or Peirce?

• Not that I have to make a choice, but it seems these two "fathers" of semiotics do differ a lot in their approach to this exciting science of meaning-making.

• As I slowly made progress on my literature review today, I carefully took notes of how these two contempraries differ. One was a prominent linguist, the other was a philosopher whose interest was primarily logic.
  

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Ferdinand de Saussure

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

1857–1913), the "father" of modern linguistics, proposed a dualistic notion of signs, relating the signifier as the form of the word or phrase uttered, and to the signified as the mental concept. It is important to note that, according to Saussure, the sign is completely arbitrary, i.e. there was no necessary connection between the sign and its meaning. This sets him apart from previous philosophers such as Plato or the Scholastics, who thought that there must be some connection between a signifier and the object it signifies. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure himself credits the American linguist William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) with insisting on the arbitrary nature of the sign. Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign has also greatly influenced later philosophers, especially postmodern theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard. Ferdinand de Saussure coined the term semiologie while teaching his landmark "Course on General Linguistics" at the University of Geneva from 1906–11. Saussure posited that no word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a "signifier," i.e. the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the "signified," or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued "sign." Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts.

Charles Peirce

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce

Western Philosophy 19th/20th century philosophy

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), the founder of the philosophical doctrine known as pragmaticism (not pragmatism, which was founded by WIlliam James and others) preferred the terms "semiotic" and "semeiotic." He defined semiosis as "...action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs." ("Pragmatism", Essential Peirce 2: 411; written 1907). His notion of semiosis evolved throughout his career, beginning with the triadic relation just described, and ending with a system consisting of 59,049 (= 3¹⁰, or 3 to the 10th power) possible elements and relations. One reason for this high number is that he allowed each interpretant to act as a sign, thereby creating a new signifying relation. Peirce was also a notable logician, and he considered semiotics and logic as facets of a wider theory. For a summary of Peirce's contributions to semiotics, see Liszka (1996).

Day 37: More on Interpretation

"You'll blink before I do"
Originally uploaded by BrianScott.

For some reason, this cute little owl reminds myself of two things: Harry Potter's Owl and myself!

Well, the reason for the latter is because I've been to that Enneagram training and discovered that I'm Type 5 person, the Observer. And, boy, does this owl observe!

I wonder what's on the owl's mind at this particular moment? Well, may be it is trying to make sense at what it is seeing. If that is the case, then this photo fits well with what I'm trying to blog about today, which is my progress on my dissertation. I'm now reading about interpretation techniques for qualitative research.

In my favorite quali research book blogged earlier on Day 28, they neatly put three techniques together: Grounded theory, phenomenology and semiotics. Technique-wise, they put semiotics in the middle between the other two. (p. 82)

Today I've made it half way through semiotics. I am not too excited about grounded theory. I don't think it fits my need here that well. And although phenomenology sounds exactly like vipassana meditation, the best it could do in this case is to offer a complementary role when I cite my mindfulness experience in analyzing things.

The more I read it, the more I'm confident it must be semiotics. I'll be back with more on it later.

On another note, I just got my hands on the Japanese language version of the Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi a few days ago, and I am suitably excited. Well, to think that it has been more than 400 years since it was first written!

However, I'm more eagerly looking forward to read Budo Shoshinshu and Hagakure! Too bad my friend couldn't locate it in any book stores in Japan when she was there for a holiday. Hope to be able to order it through a Japanese book store on the web soon. Those two would be the center piece of my dissertation!

Well, that's about all. Now, this owl must go to bed! :-)

Day 35-36: Hermeneutics

I found a new approach I'd like to look at again in my Dictionary of Sociology. Hermeneutics sounds in many way like semiotics. It is about how to interpret a text by trying to understand what could have influenced the author's mind, social context included.

Source: Hermeneutics. (2007, April 29). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Retrieved 18:57, May 10, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hermeneutics&oldid=126832920

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics may be described as the development and study of theories of the interpretation and understanding of texts. In contemporary usage in religious studies, hermeneutics often refers to study of the interpretation of Biblical texts. It is more broadly used in contemporary philosophy to denote the study of theories and methods of the interpretation of all texts and systems of meaning. The concept of "text" is here extended beyond written documents to any number of objects subject to interpretation, such as experiences. A hermeneutic is defined as a specific system or method for interpretation, or a specific theory of interpretation. However, the contemporary philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has said that hermeneutics is an approach rather than a method and, further, that the Hermeneutic circle is the central problem of interpretation.

Essentially, hermeneutics involves cultivating the ability to understand things from somebody else's point of view, and to appreciate the cultural and social forces that may have influenced their outlook. Hermeneutics is the process of applying this understanding to interpreting the meaning of written texts and symbolic artifacts (such as art or sculpture or architecture), which may be either historic or contemporary.

In the last two centuries, the scope of hermeneutics has expanded to include the investigation and interpretation not only of textual and artistic works, but of human behaviour generally, including language and patterns of speech, social institutions, and ritual behaviours (such as religious ceremonies, political rallies, football matches, rock concerts, etc.). Hermeneutics interprets or inquires into the meaning and import of these phenomena, through understanding the point of view and 'inner life' (Dilthey) of an insider, or the first-person perspective of an engaged participant in these phenomena.

Day 34: Sociology of Knowledge

In my Dictionary of Sociology (Penguin, 2000), there was no mentioning about Sociology of Literature, per se. But I accidentally found it casually mentioned under Sociology of Knowledge. According to the Dictionary, Soc of Lit typically asks how social institutions influence particular literary forms or novelists.

However, when I tried to look up Soc of Knowledge in Wiki, hoping to find some reference to Soc of Lit, I couldn't find any. Wiki's entry for Soc of Knowledge is as follows.

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Sociology of knowledge. (2007, April 1). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:54, May 8, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sociology_of_knowledge&oldid=119560664

Sociology of knowledge

The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arise, and of the effects prevailing ideas have on societies. (Compare history of ideas.)

The term first came into widespread use in the 1920s, when a number of German-speaking sociologists wrote extensively on it, notably Max Scheler, and Karl Mannheim with Ideology and Utopia. With the dominance of functionalism through the middle years of the 20th century, the sociology of knowledge tended to remain on the periphery of mainstream sociological thought. It was largely reinvented and applied much more closely to everyday life in the 1960s, particularly by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and is still central for methods dealing with qualitative understanding of human society (compare socially constructed reality).

Although very influential within modern sociology, the sociology of knowledge can claim its most significant impact on science more generally through its contribution to debate and understanding of the nature of science itself, most notably through the work of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (see also: paradigm).

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It seems, for many people, when they think about knowledge, they seem to think mostly of science. That's why there was no mention of other branches of Soc of Knowledge here, which is too bad.

Within this week, I plan to finish the first chapter of my proposal and make an appointment with my adviser to see him some time next week to discuss my progress.

From last meeting with him, I have shifted my attention to semiotics and was able to tighten up my objectives. Let's see what he thinks.

Day 30: Preparing for Weekend Workshop

golden pavillion IR
Originally uploaded by atrei.

Two days in a row with ice-blue, cool-tone photo posting from Flickr, this is a sure sign that I haven't made much progress dissertation-wise!

Yes, I tend to look for some photos for inspiration of something to write about, when in fact I do not have much to write about.

Today I was asked to write for my late grandmother's memorial book, and also for my alma mater's 80th anniversary book, and also had to follow up on a few errands, not to mention to prepare for this weekend's workshop.

I did, though, flip through my most favorite book, Semiotics: The Basics by Professor Daniel Chandler. I'm still on the first chapter, Models of the Sign.

A quote from the first chapter: "We seem as a species to be driven by a desire to make meanings: above all, we are surely homo significans -- meaning makers."

Wow, that's something! I'll leave you all to ponder this deep thought over the weekend. What is it in your life that you as a person are driven to make meaning of?

Day 29: Fine-Tuning Objectives

Cool Blue
Originally uploaded by champy1013.

I don't know why I am attracted to photos of majestic mountains, preferably with some snow, with a big lake or body of water in the foreground. The bluer, the better. I want to feel the cool, crisp air coming out from the photo. A few sprouts of Pine of Cedar tree are definitely a boost.

As I am browsing through Flickr again, trying to find some inpiration, I came across this one. Again, I ask myself: why?

Feng Shui-wise, big mountains are not a good sign in front of you, because it means obstacles. Huge ones! I guess it speaks the condition from my subconscious mind! This dissertation is the size of Mt. Everest, if you ask me! And then some!

But there must always be the presence of water. This is the special part. I find it very soothing in real life to always be near water. I mean, who wouldn't? And some evergreen trees.

I am still trying to think where I used to see my most favorite photo on the web of something that looks similar to this. I think it is a shot from a remote area along the silk route. It is beyond words. It's just like you're stepping into another world of its own altogether. May be that's how they got the word Shangri-la from.

Now, I'm really beating around the bushes. Well, not exactly. Day 29 has not been that productive, dissertation-wise. (Hence, the mountain photo.) First, I got a severe cramp attack that made me consider going to hospital because I thought it may have something to do with doc's reducing my prescription since last hospital visit. Then, I had to go teaching martial arts, then studying Japanese.

But since I made a resolution to make some progress on my dissertation everyday, I somehow made it. I opened a mindmap software and worked on the few maps I have there again. It was amazing to find out how much I could change the maps I drafted up as the outline for the first chapter, using the new information of what I have been reading during the past week alone.

If there is any students who want to do Ph.D. passing by this blog, may be there is one advice I could give you here, spend a lot of time on your dissertation objectives. I believe it holds the key. Well, once you have the passion of what you want to do, perhaps you want to do a lot of things on it.

But the truth is, you have to look at things in perspective. You have to be brave enough to say no even to your many burning desires. You will have many. You have to be wise enough to learn what you can move on with, and what you can not.

Simply put, it is when you are fine-tuning the objectives right at the beginning of your dissertation writing that you are actually making the Final-Cut.

Well, am I done with mine yet? Gee, I don't know. I think I am. And what they are? hee hee hee I won't tell you yet. Let me show them to my advisors first, and let's see what they think about it. And let's see if I have to post more photos of mountains on my blog again! :-p