I went to a very valuable Academic Support session in the library with librarians Alice and Leo.

We spoke about structures of knowledge. How the Library is one ‘citational infrastructure’, and another library, Libsearch, JSTOR or Google Scholar, etc. are different citational infrastructures. Each curated by different organisations, each organisation potentially having a focus, or reliance on different organisations, each potentially capable of bias.

In a similar way to our discussions with David about idiosyncrasy (all research is worthy of engagement, to a certain extent…) we spoke about rhizomatic learning and how our minds slowly frame and gain knowledge from interpretation of data. If this data is fixed and for example, every academic is using the most cited sources for each topic on google scholar. Ideas will only be generated by the most popular sources from this particular infrastructure. Which means that there is in some form, a bias.

We spoke about learning as receiving data, scanning data for information, consolidating information into knowledge, knowledge becoming wisdom (or your own hypothesis). The information, knowledge or wisdom cannot be changed later if the data has not been meticulously and carefully sourced. These things can’t be added on, they have to be imbedded into the research from the beginning.

I reflected on the fact that, due to impending deadlines in previous years, I wasn’t happy with how diverse my academic writing was, I ended up quoting predominantly men from the west. I had hoped to have a more diverse bibliography, but the time constraint got the better of me, and because I hadn’t started with the research and finding the sources I would need later, not only was my essay short on enough relevant research, it also felt a little too reliant on Cage.

Book Recommendations: Algorithms of Oppression – Safiya Umoja Noble

Practical advice:

• Don’t just use citation counts or top results as a measure of quality
• Think about personal bias and source evaluation
• Try less traditional sources
• Could you cite sources in other languages?
• What or whose ideas are represented?
• Build evaluation skills

Think of citations as bricks, when citations become habits, bricks form walls”

Sara Ahmed

We were asked to write three artists on a post it at the beginning of our class. I wrote three case studies I am intending to use for my research. We discussed the sensitivity of referring to an artist’s work, when there is an element of them being chosen based on their identity. The answer came back to research, in that it is very important that I research the particular artist and find out how they tend to navigate their identity in relation to the world.

One of the Phd students in the room talked about how she will be using different citational practices in her bibliography because she felt certain elements of Chicago Citation was problematic. To be honest, I am not entirely sure how I felt about this, but it was interesting. It was interesting that the forms of academic essay at Phd level are up for discussion. It was inspiring to hear about the ways in which this format is constantly challenged and changing.