Sunday, June 10, 2018

Bricolage, Assemblage, and Chaos Theory: Thoughts on the Research Process


I have always been fascinated with words, especially those that I hear in presentations or speeches where I think “that’s a new one” or “what does that mean?”.  Having studied Greek, Latin, French, German, and a bit of Spanish, I am always curious to know their etymology. I am also curious as how these new words might be useful in my work or personal life. Maybe I was an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary in a previous life.

Several years ago at an Educause keynote, Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, introduced me to the concept of “bricolage”.  Derived from the French verb bricoler ("to tinker") it roughly comes to equate to the English “Do it yourself”.  Turkle speaks of bricolage as a form of tinkering, a soft-style approach to computer programming that is more intuitive and experimental than the strict analytical coding approach (https://dixieching.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/the-triumph-of-tinkering-turkle/). This tinkering approach certainly speaks to the modern maker movement of learning by doing.  Bricoleurs, people who use this approach, look at the world and their work in a more right-brained way.

Within the arts, bricolage has a slightly broader scope to include the work itself that is made from objects that are readily available (Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage). Similar to “assemblage”, a form of art first introduced to me by an artist friend, Rudy Rodeheaver,  “assemblage” is art that is made by assembling disparate elements – often everyday objects – scavenged by the artist or bought specially (http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/assemblage). 

I was first introduced to chaos theory in a doctoral leadership class when we watched a film with Margaret Wheatley on Leadership and the New Science.  Chaos theory, grounded in mathematics and quantum physics is quite complex. There are two important aspects to chaos theory; things that appear chaotic are subject to an underlying order, and complex systems are highly sensitive to change where tiny changes lead to dramatic consequences (e.g. butterfly effect). Chaos theory has real-world applications and is used in predicting weather, and in cryptography and robotics, to name a few.  While Wheatley applies the ideas from chaos theory to leadership and organizations, I believe it has some insights to offer regarding the research process

Over the years since I first encountered these terms, I thought that they provided some insight into how research is conducted and how students sometimes see library information literacy instruction as too linear and prescriptive.

Research is certainly a “do-it-yourself” activity.  Thinking of the researcher as a bricoleur emphasizes the creative aspect of the research process; one that is nonprescriptive; one that does not have a predetermined path. Like an artist, the researcher uses the ideas she/he finds or brings to the process and creates something new; new knowledge, new insights.

I am attracted to the idea of chaos theory as a way to think about how research actually happens. Looking at the definition of “chaos theory” in Wikipedia I see, at least for me, the pattern of how I do research.  “Chaos' is an interdisciplinary theory stating that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, self-organization, and reliance on programming at the initial point known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions.“ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory)

I often start research with an idea that is quite undefined in my own head – one that has a variety of disparate ideas. When I am researching a topic that has a clearly defined outline, my outline very often quickly devolves into chaos, one that is torn apart and re-assembled in new ways.  As I start searching databases, discovery systems, journals, books, blogs, news stories, I am not always able to discern a pattern as one citation/idea leads to others that may or may not be related in an easily discernable way.  As I start to read what I have gathered, I begin to see some underlying patterns that help to organize my understanding of the topic and also shows omissions and sends me back to “re-do” the search.  One of the things that I look for are for some feedback loops that help my growing understanding of the topic.  These feedback loops should reinforce some ideas and weaken or help me discard others; they may show repetition of ideas or authors important to the research.

Even looking for articles or books, the process is not particularly linear, unless I am looking for a known book or article.  What I get for results, even at the macro level, depends somewhat on the starting point – e.g. Google, EBSCOhost, ScienceDirect, or a discovery layer like Primo or EDS.  I pick and choose from the results, usually from those on the first page or two of results. The introduction of filters or additional keywords will either narrow or expand the search and confirm a direction or present an interesting new tangent to explore. While we are taught to look for good keywords, or find a good article and look at the references, even these present options for creating a new research path that may yield results.  We have all experienced those “aha” moments when a seemingly minor new idea takes our research in an entirely different direction or provides a new insight that brings clarity.

If I  think about the research process in terms of bricolage and assemblage, I typically begin with bits and pieces of what I know, and from gathered articles, blogs posts, books, without any sense of how they go together, or even if they can be put together into a coherent whole. While I think of research as a somewhat coherent process, it really is rather chaotic, with feedback loops, and tangents that drag my attention to new or related ideas that may become fruitful aspects of my work. I assemble, disassemble, and reassemble with new pieces and ideas, in seemingly random but structured ways until something coherent appears.  Thinking back to the beginning of the process, I can often see where some new insight, seemingly minor at the time, changed the focus and the outcome of the research.

Taking these ideas and turning towards thinking about teaching students how to do research (aka information literacy), I believe students often view what is presented in class is a linear or formulaic process of doing research.  The new ACRL Information Literacy Framework (http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework) is certainly more process oriented, but because there are six frames, it is easy to think of them as distinct and mutually exclusive rather than chaotic, with underlying feedback loops and self-organizing patterns that overlap across and throughout the six frames.  While it is critically important for students to know how to find books and articles, and how to evaluate what they find, and how to cite those sources, these skills and the underlying frames are in no way a description of the research process. Students need to know how to take these skills, find the necessary information/ideas, and then, more importantly, think like a bricoleur/artist and take this information and create something new; their own understanding of the topic.

In the end, what does this mean for us in the library profession? I see these ideas as a call for developing our “tinkering”, “creative”, and “design thinking” skills in the work that we do and in the way we help students gain the skills and expertise for life-long learning.  I hope, encouraging students to think of research as a chaotic process that is full of creativity, feedback loops, interesting tangents, as well as having some underlying process, will help them approach the process with more optimism and less dread.  My hope, for myself, and my librarian colleagues is that we will allow this type of thinking to move us beyond or typical analytical solutions to more creative ways of approaching the problems we all face.




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