Using Past Research
I have reflected a great deal on past research, the process of producing that research, and eventually the completed pieces. One of the things I have been faced with more than once is reusing completed pieces. I once got a call from an ex-employer for whom I used to write employability projects, and was asked to look at some old work, as there had been an audit question raised. This is standard practise, and can happen several years later, but is fairly unusual so late on. I remember meeting up with staff I used to work with, and looking through boxes in the store room to work through the question, which was finalised in a few short minutes. While there we found a box of old trial applications that I was pretty impressed with. These are really good work I said to my ex-colleague, who wrote them? It turned out this whole section of the store room was mine. After finding it hilarious that I hadn’t recognised my own, once neat handwriting, he had been unable to fathom my lack of affinity with my earlier work. I had written so much though, and this set had not been accepted for funding, so I can only guess they hadn’t stood out.
I know that straying across, or having to use, old work can be a disconcerting experience, and can be utterly different from writing it in the first place. My first experience of reusing an academic piece I have already mentioned in an earlier blog post, and was a completely unexpected request. It was suggested to me that I use my degree dissertation as my Key Skills Level 4 Communication submission, and at the time this use made a lot of sense. It was clearly an advanced written piece of English, which is what was looked for on the course. Then during the MA course, one of the assignments was to engage in academic social media, and for this part of my engagement was in Academia and Researchgate. On both, the main piece I had ready written for upload was my degree dissertation, which I had managed to transfer onto a memory stick. I uploaded it, and it still obtains regular reads and mentions. Oddly, the piece would now be lost if not for this, as shortly afterwards, my PC drive blew up, and my memory stick corrupted while being used in my PC drive. The degree dissertation was not backed up on a cloud storage device, and so is only now available online at all because of its association with the MA course. All of that research, lost, except for a dusty storage facility.
The most recent reuse that I have had is due to the PhD, and is my return to my MA dissertation. I am attempting to use the MA dissertation as a starting trampoline from which to develop one of the research questions further, to create a background to the arthouse videogame genre. There are several issues here. Firstly, rereading what I have already written is downright difficult, especially so soon after I first wrote it; I almost wish it was longer ago than just six months, though if it was, it would be out of date so less use. Secondly, do I still agree with it? I have no idea; I think I do, but does that mean I am being arrogant?! Good grief, the questions and self doubt never cease. And finally, this one being the big hitter, was I right? After I submitted my MA dissertation, I realised that I seemed to be the only researcher writing about a Ludic Aesthetic from the viewpoint of videogames. There were other people writing about a ludic aesthetic in terms of comic books, graphic novels, or anime, and I was advised of texts on cultural aesthetics by authors such as Sianne Ngai, but this was not well documented discussion. As far as I know, my Scalar book is the only one looking at a cultural videogame aesthetic. The problem with using a relatively unsubstantiated piece of research as a trampoline, is that you pretty much need to have some confidence in it. Is that the same thing as having confidence in yourself?
