pu2-ke-qi-ri's blog

I love doing research, really, I do. The excitement of plowing through piles and piles of books, discovering something nobody's every known before... it's why I can't wait to get up in the morning and work some more! Oh goodie!

However, this is not an endeavour for the faint of heart. The fire-breathing dragons aren't the problem (after all, if you've read Calvert Watkins' book _How to Kill a Dragon_, you know that Indo-European root you want to use to kill the dragon is *gwhen-, Hittite kuen-, Vedic han-, Greek phon-, and so forth) but I detail a few of the potential pitfalls below. How much of this is autobiographical and how much is imagination or exaggeration, I leave up to you.

First, we have the issue of the Intractable Scholarly Problem. Much as the spinning wheels of a car stuck in the mud fling out a lot of blobs of mud and the occasional rock, so the too the Intractable Scholarly Problem generates a great big scholarly mess and the occasional projectile, while nobody is really effectively able to move forward. And, of course, the heavier the problem (or car) the deeper it sinks in, and the harder it is to move. What real-world analogies exist for rubber mats, I know not.

Of course, the best remedy for navagating any sort of confusing thicket of information (switching metaphors here!) is to find a guide. Happily, you have found such a guide, who happens to be the world expert in the subject. Unhappily, he just left for the semester and refuses to be contacted. Luckily, there is someone else you can ask for help-- in Belgium.

Maps can also be very useful for navagation, especially in very heavily wooded or mountanous areas (This is the improved version of the metaphor in the previous paragraph, eh?) Such is the nature of the Reading List for the Literature Review. Rather than just reading every paper written on the subject on the face of the earth since 1853, you can skip to the most important, well-argued, and relevant. The thought of this brings great hope, until one discovers that half of the references on the page are wrong, like wrong year, wrong journal, wrong volume, wrong author...

In that case, one is largely left up to one's own devices. There are several potential problems with going the literature review on one's own. First is the out-of-date bibliographical database. Well, you're studying prehistory, what do you expect. The next is the impossble-to-obtain book, which is essential that you read, but nobody has ever heard of, and certainly isn't listed in the library's card catalogue. In that case it is advantageous to befriend some of those professors who compulsively hoard books in their office (you know the sort) and see if they could be persuaded to loan you the book.

Alternately, one knows in advance if one's project is going to involve many of these books, when a professor of this sort gives you the keys to his office knowing that this eventuality may come up. It may also behoove one to befriend a structural engineer, to make sure that none of the piles of books or bookshelves are going to fail catastrophically, so to speak.

Or, say that the library has the book. It's checked out, so you recall it. However, it was one of your friends who had the book, and who has just left for a multi-month field study in central Asia, and is therefore in no position to return the book to the library, and so said friend racks up two months of recalled book fines, and then becomes your personal enemy. It can be especially bad if said person is your office-mate. 

Another problem is that of multiple editions of a book. If a book has gone through six editions, you can be sure that the information you need will be in the sixth edition. You can also be sure that the explanation you will need to understand that information will be in the second edition, thus necessitating that you actually read through all six editions. 

Research is also not for those fearful of foreign languages. It can be an asset to have the ability to learn a language quickly-- say in a matter of weeks-- for that paper that you just can't do without reading for a deadline coming up in a month. The alternative, cultivating relationships with friends who know a wide variety of foriegn languages, may be unreliable when they suddenly find themselves very busy just when you need a paper translated, or, alternately, unable to deal with the technical jargon that, no, that language just really couldn't calque from English.

The final problem I would like to discuss is that of the "coy title." Certain titles will hint at some of the content contained within, without really making it clear what is contained within. Hence, one does not realize until one is on page 6 of the article that it really is about something that pertains to the main focus of your research, which is not what the title led you to believe. Of course, if one overreacts, one ends up reading a bunch of papers that really are totally irrelivant! 

However, I would like to end this discussion on a positive note. Perhaps there is a way to avoid racking up lots of money at the photocopier. Why not simply take digital photos of all the pages, then print them out in the inexpensiveness of your own printer! I haven't actually tried this one, but we'll see how it goes.

 Yours, pu2-ke-qi-ri