Hello again! Long time no see…
I’ve been in the process of “consciously uncoupling”😉from my employment as a law professor while consciously coupling 🤔 with my Summer of Protocols research. (I don’t know what that means either.)
In practical terms, the uncoupling has meant deleting and saving emails, getting what I needed off my work laptop, sending goodbye emails, etc. I’ve turned in my laptop and parking pass, and now all that remains is clearing out my work office. The deeper ongoing conscious uncoupling is the identity shift that I’m still working through. (Does the non-professor / non-lawyer me now swear on social media? and other pressing questions…)
I wanted to share what’s been going on with my research, as I feel like I’m finding my “access point” into the mass of information I’ve been engulfed in over the last 6 weeks.
This post on Mapmaking and Access Points is the first of a series of three “craft” posts (in writerly lingo) dealing with my process for learning (research and thinking) and transforming that learning into a form of communication (an essay and an artifact) in my Summer of Protocols work. I expect to be working out substance with you soon.
So let’s get started.
Mapmaking
In my research and writing, I tend to need to see a whole before I can grapple deeply with a part of the whole. I have to see a larger system - a context - before I dare to offer a meaningful analysis or critique. I always want to take things up a level, up a level, up a level, until I feel I have a bird’s-eye view, a mapmaker’s view, if you will.
This means it can take a while before I feel like I have anything to say about a new area I’m learning about. During this time, I’m reading and taking in information broadly, and am usually in the middle of many books, articles, podcasts, and more. (E.g., in my Summer of Protocols research, I’ve been doing all of that and have participated in talks from 17 guest speakers and 8 core researcher discussion sessions already.) I am looking at the area from multiple disciplinary perspectives. I am exploring the terrain, not sure what is friendly or hostile, what path will lead me to a dead end, who is telling me the truth, whether I'm getting a picture of the complete elephant or just one of its parts.
To get more concrete about mapmaking in my current research project, I feel like I had a breakthrough towards my map of the territory on Unconscious Protocol Participation last week, when I attempted to visually order the multiple concepts I was researching into a coherent structure. I’m sure my thinking will continue to evolve, but (spoiler alert) here’s the Protocol Participation Cycle I sketched out. (It’s scary to put rough work out there, but here’s to working in public! Don’t worry, I’m not going to explain it to you…yet.)
If I’m talking about past research projects, my need for a personal map of the territory meant that I felt unable to write anything about Bitcoin or crypto systems until I created my map. (This was very worrying to my tenure committee, as it is important for tenure-track academics to publish early and often.)
At the beginning, this meant that I had to immerse myself in all things Bitcoin for about 2 years: combing message boards, reading papers about money, governance, computer science, cryptography, economics, and history; watching videos; scouring crypto news sites; and going to industry conferences and meetups. The information and experiences I was having had to percolate in my head for a good long while before my big picture understanding (i.e., my map of the territory) could emerge and I could say anything at all about it. I think that’s why I wrote my first published paper on how components of the Bitcoin system impacted the resilience of the system as a whole. It was, in essence, laying out my map of the territory.
Access Points
What do I mean by finding access points when talking about my research? I mean that I have a rough map of the research territory in my mind — how the system I’m inquiring into operates — and that I can talk about a smaller piece of this system in the context of the whole. The smaller piece I can talk about is my access point. The access point seems to come only after I have a rough map of the territory.
So, if I had managed to craft a map of my research territory like the one above, I might choose an access point of Sicilia or Libia to explore in my writing. (Of course, just creating the map of the territory could be an important contribution on its own.) Understanding where Sicilia is on the map - an island near Italia, with all of the implications that flow from its place within the system - would enable my discussion to be much richer and hopefully more useful, as it could account for interactions between my access point and other parts of the system, or even the system as a whole.
A house is another image of this research and thinking process that resonates for me. Instead of a map representing the larger system structure of my area of research, a house, with its foundations, floor plan, entrances, porches, etc, provides the visual organization for me, and my access point might be a window, a door, or a crack in the walls. A place where I could grab on and have something to say.
What’s my access point into the Protocol Participation Cycle pictured above? I think for my Summer of Protocols piece, I will be focusing on the mode of entry (from an agency/free will perspective) into protocols, and thinking about how the mode of entry impacts other parts of the cycle.
I am hoping to work in some stories about children who were raised by animals (sometimes called “feral” children), so there’s something everyone can look forward to. 🐺
All for now.
Thank you for reading! I would love to hear how you make sense of research and find your access point into writing. Does your process look anything like mine?
Stay tuned for the next two posts in this craft series!
Getting Pruney With It
Whetting Your Creativity
Also, thanks to Kei Kreutler for a fascinating discussion of “memory palaces” as part of her Summer of Protocols project on Mediums of Memory. As described in the Farnum Street Blog, “[t]he memory palace technique is about changing your memories into images placed in a familiar mental location. The idea is that you can mentally walk through your Palace looking at your memories to recall them.”
Memory palaces, which use visualized structures like a house (or a palace!) floorplan to help remember specific things, are related to the maps of the territory I use to understand my research.
Hooray for uncoupling! Your process reminds me of a concept/exercise that I try to emphasize for early researchers: the need for a theoretical and/or conceptual framework at the start of a project. Roughly the theoretical framework is their understanding of the particular way the world works with respect to their topic/question. Sometimes the conceptual framework is a next step, when you narrow down to the analytical framework of the topic that is more specific to the question. People have different forms of frameworks (narrative text, equations etc) though I tend to use lots of boxes and arrows. The idea is to attempt to capture aspects and identify relationships. However in all of these, one usually has an entry point in mind and the framework exercise encourages the person to think bigger and more systematically. Your map reminds me of another approach, concept mapping. (Can also be boxes and arrows!) which consists of bigger related ideas.