Today I am supposed to write about my Digital Culture research and expose my interests and ideas that will eventually form the subject of my MA Thesis. There is a wide range of topics that have caught my attention and I often find myself trapped in a general, almost chaotic field of research. I am grateful to my professors and colleagues that helped me realize that it is essential to build a concrete research question that would be worthwhile and meaningful to explore. In order to face this weakness of mine I had to track and observe my thoughts on a daily basis; this has been my personalized mindmap and it will hopefully results in a fruitful MA work.
The tags above represent my interests. Writing down a list of keywords in a spreadsheet has been part of my daily routine. I precategorized my interests in the following areas:
- technology: my list of interests concerning applied forms of new technologies
- intention: needs and improvements related to the use of new technologies
- research topic: questions that I deal with in the context of digital culture
- product/service: usable applications of new technologies
- structure: frameworks deriving from technology usability and social interaction
Once I have a thought about my MA work, I check my list of interests and I try to find possible correlations between them. Therefore, I keep on creating nodes and edges saved as spreadsheets and today I imported them in GEPHI to visualize my reflections.
So far, it seems that I am mostly interested in exploring the intention behind the usability of technology and how it is related to my possible research questions.
Visualizing my ideas has been a vital touch of brainstorming for my MA work. Click here to view my graph.