Caveat Lector

Last week’s brief annoyed expostulation gave me to think about the kinds of things it is possible to say in academic research vis-a-vis the kinds of things I need to say when I write for the profession.

Take Roach Motel. It’s not research. I would be laughed out of the room, and rightly so, if I tried to present it as such. It’s not based on experimental methodology, qualitative or quantitative; it doesn’t ask a question and try to answer it. Roach Motel is a polemic, supported by an odd assortment of anecdote, observation, ad-hoc systems analysis, and other people’s research. Why? Because that’s what I needed to write, and what I thought other people needed to read. I’ll take my lumps when I’ve been sloppy—in fact, I already have. But I’m not sorry for what Roach Motel is; even before publication, it has been reshaping the conversation around institutional repositories in ways that I think are healthy and necessary. It’s not research, but it’s useful writing nonetheless.

In other words, not all human progress cometh from the research enterprise. Problem is, “research” is the only thing the academy respects. I’m a pretty good polemicist, if I do say so myself. I could train myself to be an adequate researcher, but in the process I’d lose what little claim I have to being an effective writer, an effective actor in the professional world.

Frankly, the research straitjacket constrains too many researchers into asking completely uninteresting and unimportant questions, because those are the only questions that proper “research” can answer. There are a lot of examples of this in repository-related research. If we sat around waiting for the researchers to tell us how to run repositories, we’d be waiting for one hell of a long time… and the answers we’d get would be tangential at best and useless at worst. To answer this question, we need a community of practice communicating honestly within itself, and the occasional polemicist to cut through accreted layers of conventional wisdom and kick-start discussions.

So, you know, I am what I am. I answer the questions I can answer. I write what seems useful to me to write. I don’t do research; that’s just not my idiom (in the Pythonesque sense). This means that I really just don’t belong in the academy.