Lucy
Campbell and Barbara Opar, column editors
Column
by Stephanie Beene, Fine Arts Librarian for Art, Architecture and Planning,
University of New Mexico
I arrived at the University of New
Mexico in January 2016 as the Fine Arts Librarian for Art, Architecture &
Planning. Within a few months, I was asked to teach a collaborative Research
Methods Workshop for Architecture graduate students with Associate Dean and
Professor of Architecture, Mark Childs. Throughout 2016-17, Professor Childs
and I collaborated on the workshop and spent time assessing and developing it.
Some of the experiments from those developments are presented here.
In
the workshop, graduate students conduct field and/or archival research;
literature reviews; create and compare maps and GIS data; conduct database and
journal reviews; and use all four libraries on campus, including the Fine Arts
and Design Library. Students create their own path to authority by
interrogating the authority of other works and spaces. They assert their
expertise as one among experts, by examining artifacts, data, and models, and
placing them in conversation with one another.
Professor Childs and I challenge students to create visualizations, or
concept maps, of the research resources they encounter, leading to a variety of
curatorial, creative, and professional outputs.
We spend significant time framing the research process
through Scholarship as Conversation.
1 One of the
ways we do this is by placing authorities and works in conversation with each
other in a nonlinear, creative way. Students create a concept map
2 or visualization of their
research process, from literature encountered to end design products. By
visualizing their research process as an investigation of scholarship, topics
become conversations occurring across time, space, and media. I have found that
concept mapping lowers the frustration threshold when emphasizing the iterative
nature of research. It allows students to understand how and why something
enters “seminal” status. Conversely, students are able see when a scholar or
architect is unique or isolated in scholarly or professional circles. Taking
public housing as an example topic, students quickly see the need to narrow the
subject down by geography, city, material, and/or era. Students with this topic
can easily discern clusters of discussion points in a concept map, where
certain cities or subtopics have been more heavily discussed than others.
Scholars, arguments, funding models, designs, models and site analyses begin to
emerge as ideas to pursue for their own projects. Meanwhile, keywords,
subjects, authorities, and experts begin to recur throughout the visualization,
becoming the connective tissue between disparate resources. Some students’
visualizations include imagery, data, or schematics, leading us on a visual
quest for additional images based on those already found, using tools like
Artstor, or browsing through monograph and periodical collections. Through the
iterative nature of research, additional lines of inquiry expand as the
visualizations grow organically, allowing for inspiration and comprehension of
a topic. By visualizing arguments in terms of conversations that build or
collapse, like monuments, students are able to see how scholars mirror the act
of construction.
- The Association of College & Research
Libraries “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education” lays
out 6 Frames, or “Threshold Concepts.” One of these is Scholarship as
Conversation. It states “Searching
for information is often nonlinear and iterative, requiring the evaluation of a
range of information sources and the mental flexibility to pursue alternate
avenues as new understanding develops.” “Framework for Information Literacy for
Higher Education,” Association of College
& Research Libraries, last modified January 11, 2016,
http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework.
-
Academic OneFile, a Gale Resource, http://blog.gale.com/topic-finder/, allows students to
begin their research by visualizing their keywords and phrases through concept mapping,
either via wheel or tile format. The
tool will narrow their topic by thesaurus and synonym, while also linking to a
range of articles and resources. While students are encouraged to use Artstor
and Avery Index for more subject-specific and in-depth research, this is a good
starting point for them -- not only for broader topics like “public housing”
but also to start them thinking about concept mapping and visualization and the
ways in which scholars, articles, and ideas intersect with one another.