Ph.D. life, etc.: December 2003 Archives

Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students is an invaluable resource by Phil Agre for Ph.D. students and others who like to find their way around the modern day maze we call network (social and cyber).

Quote:
"The first thing to realize is that Internet-world is part of reality. The people you correspond with on the network are real people with lives and careers and habits and feelings of their own. Things you say on the net can make you friends or enemies, famous or notorious, included or ostracized. You need to take the electronic part of your life seriously. In particular, you need to think about and consciously choose how you wish to use the network. Regard electronic mail as part of a larger ecology of communication media and genres -- telephone conversations, archival journals and newsletters, professional meetings, paper mail, voice mail, chatting in the hallway, lectures and colloquia, job interviews, visits to other research sites, and so forth -- each with its own attributes and strengths. The relationships among media will probably change and new genres will probably emerge as the technologies evolve, but make sure that you don't harbor the all-too-common fantasy that someday we will live our lives entirely through electronic channels. It's not true."

The most relevant aspect of the engineering courses (my background) is the emphasis on the systems mode of thinking which has helped me tremendously in my present course of study here at SCILS, especially in Information Science.

So far, the challenge has been to build a frame of reference or a mindset through which one is able to see the problems related to information science and the resolutions proposed to resolve them. Personally, I believe that the systems way of thinking is a very insightful and powerful tool, especially because helps you study a problem by identifying the boundaries around it, its scope, what happens within the boundaries, and how the issues with the problem at hand interface with the environment (i.e. with outside of the relevantly defined boundary).

Another challenge for me was to adjust to the statistics methods used in social research. Despite the obvious difference between the statistical results of technical systems and those related to the relation between the independent and dependent variables in social phenomena, the statistics background from my engineering courses has helped me in the quest to identifying the conjecture between statistical analysis of engineering data and data gathered from information science experiments. Another benefit of engineering statistical courses is the ability they provide to better understand the fundamental background of the particular statistical tools, in light of the fact that courses that deal with statistics for social research emphasize mostly on usability and applicability of statistics, and do not necessarily stress enough on the actual derivation of the statistical tools and procedures.

The concepts of interconnectivity of various technical elements within the information and communication systems and the multitude of services they carry almost directly relate (albeit at a different level of application) to various practical communication tools and services that affect the social realm. An information and communication system is not a goal in its own; it is produced and used within the social web of interactions composed of human and non-human entities, or networked actors as suggested by the actor-network theory (ANT) and actor-network methodology. Considering that the actor-network theory considers human and non-human entities/elements in its analysis and methodology, it would be interesting to identify and describe a possible link between the variations and changes at the lowest levels of interactions (i.e. technological) and their potential effect on the interaction at the level between a system as a whole and the user(s).

Through these few reflections, I have attempted to link the experience and knowledge I have obtained from my engineering education and systems analyst/eng experience, with the role they have played so far in my PhD. level classes in Information Science. I hope to have more of these sorts of reflections in the future, as they pop-up in my head. :)