/MakingKnowledge

An Open Humanities Lab Book, collecting knowledge-in-the-making during my PhD project. See README for more info.

Open Humanities Lab Book

Welcome to my attempt of making my process of research transparent and open (and in the future, useful and participative)

Currently (2022) on hold

See the bio section on my site for a few lines on my PhD project itself. (I've only started in September 2021, so there's not much to say for the moment in terms of content...).

One of my aims during my PhD is to make my research process transparent and open. Open Science has made the rounds as the new research ethos of the natural sciences and has especially been taken up by those working in quantitative and experimental fields (with highly normative banners such as "Open Science is just science done right!"). Despite my reservations about Open Science being overly focused on methods, I want to contribute to making the humanities more open too –not in the same way, of course, but reappropriating tools and ideas from the natural sciences and fitting them to my needs.

Concretely, this repository acts as an 'open humanities lab book', with annotations of my readings and the interpretations of sources. It's still an evolving project, and I still haven't figured out what is the best way to present all of it. At the moment, it seems quite messy and not very useful for anybody who isn't me... If you have any ideas or experience with (humanities) open lab books, do get in touch!

I am using a (not very refined) Zettelkasten method to take notes, making my notes 'atomistic'. This means that individual notes contain only one idea, claim, or concept (for example, the one called 'making lists is a precondition and one of the initial steps of practices of conservation') and that they are connected with other notes (the note in the example above is connected with 'one of the main issues of conservation biology is dealing with funding, which is dealt with by setting 'conservation priorities''). The idea is to have a large network of highly connected simple notes, which helps to draw relations between ideas and helps in creating new ones. The network, as well as the individual notes, change over time, which I think it's very interesting and useful. Knowledge-making is a dynamic process, so it's worth exploring how representation of knowledge can be also dynamic and adaptable. If some links are dead, it's because I haven't yet share the files that point to them publicly, as they refer to current readings and work-in-progress notes.