John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

the data: survey results, interview and symposium transcripts and notes derived
from the critical, contextual review. The categories that emerged from coding
this material have been related to the critical discourse around the types of
objects that are being produced at the current time. In this sense the research is
responding to the work that is already being produced and how it is being made.
Because of the large amount of data from multiple sources that this research has
generated the researcher has undertaken a systematic organisation of this
information in a series of databases 45 . This was important to prevent the
researcher from becoming overwhelmed by the data and to prevent losing sight
of the original research purpose and questions. These databases have been
developed and archived incrementally throughout the period of research. They
have been used to categorise, sort, store, and retrieve data for analysis.
3.1 An engaged practitioner
The nature of the PhD project is the research questions and propositions have
been identified through practice. The research aims to demonstrate a
significant shift in the thinking of practitioners that make use of computerbased
tools towards a hybrid model of art and design practice. The researcher is
able to conduct this research because of his position as a practitioner and
curator in this field. This research is reflexive - it speaks back to practice and to
the research participants. It is acknowledged the researcher is engaged,
committed and seeking to bring about change in this field of enquiry. The
researcher has sought to maintain objectivity by being openly self-questioning
and self-critical.
3.1.1 Live discourse
The researcher conducted much research online (particularly of practitioner’s
websites) and noticed that an increasing amount of weblogs were encountered
in Internet searches. Weblogs (or blogs) are web pages that consist of many
(usually) short entries organised in reverse chronology (i.e. a reader will see the
most recent post first). In ‘Democratizing Innovation’ Eric von Hippel (2005)
45 The researcher created a custom FileMaker Pro® databases in order to critically review the archived material from
the critical, contextual review. FileMaker Pro® was selected because unlike other commercial database software it
easily handles both visual and textual information.
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