Part two of Grounding your Research –
How is this more than just my opinion?

Method is how you make experiments, how you encode language, how you think or misc. other.

For philosophers, for example, thinking is the method. Think about that for a moment. More about that in Part 3.

Regardless of discipline, the underlying question with the most at stake when beginning to write any thesis might be:

How is this more than just my opinion?

How do neuroscientists do this? How do economists do this? How do engineers do this? How do semioticians do this?

It would be good to have background awareness of how diverse the world of methods is among different communities of researchers.

For a long time, art historians were traipsed into the academy to teach artists how to write. If your current writing style looks like art history, you have already unconsciously chosen a method. But artistic research is not (necessarily) art history—otherwise why use two words?

Artistic research is arguably in a pre-disciplinary stage—it’s new and not established. It might never be.

So deciding methods is a bigger task for you than other researchers who can look at a concise book of methods—made for their discipline, approved of by their supervisor. In established disciplines, methods are mutually agreed upon and fairly uncontroversial, if they change it’s only incrementally or rarely. Researchers in such disciplines might have a menu of 10-15 accepted methods and make minor modifications as they proceed.

Artistic researchers? Yes books are starting to be written, conferences organised, journal articles written… but there are hundreds of methods here, cherry-picked from other disciplines. Many will turn out to be duds. That’s what it’s like at the start of a new research modality.

Multiply that by how weird art can be and you’re in the land of infinite methods. But you still have to justify how this is not just your opinion.

If you want to reduce that headachey fatigue you may be feeling about now, quickly try to locate which discipline(s) look the most like how you think/practice as an artistic researcher—does your practice look like Linguistics? Evolutionary Biology? Anthropology? Philosophy? Art history? Psychoanalysis? Neuroscience? Feminism? Then build your method on one (or two combined) of the more cogent methods within these disciplines and look for journals that might publish such an approach. See Write for Readers.

If you have no headache and are feeling brave, then assimilate multiple strategies on the journey to inventing completely new methods that arise from the unique ways that artists think.

Chemists might use a basic PQC writing style, punctuated by graphs and statistics—here argument and logic are advanced by deferring to experimental results, so the writing style is a minimal frame for the reasoned interpretation of statistical results. Linguistic theorists after Chomsky, on the other hand might use a hybrid writing style—”transformational analysis” to codify parts of language, and logical thinking advanced through writing—resulting in a thesis that looks like programming code in parts, and philosophy (theoretical thinking) in others—two methodologies combined.

So there are many writing structures, according to different disciplines, to satisfy the demand of research—that your ideas are not just your opinion.

Each community of researchers develops standards for a type of rigor that they consider to exceed opinion. These are agreed upon more or less internally by that community because the specialization of research at this level makes it challenging for a chemist to provide a serious critique of linguistic methods.

As interdisciplinary research increases, overlapping academic communities now have to mediate the accepted methods from more than one community—which poses challenges.

Wrap up

If artistic research becomes more widely accepted, it’s possible that certain artist-oriented/artist-only “methodologies” will become standards. Or it is possible that due to the nature of artistic research, combined with it’s late arrival, artistic researchers will continue to cherry pick from a cornucopia of disciplines and/or continually re-/invent our own methods.

Go to Part 3 – Philosophy methods (i) Be reasonable! Understanding Dialectics