making a public research catalog
The idea is to maintain a research catalog for the lab. Research ideas can come from a lot of different things: reading, writing, conversation, jokes, and trolling. Even if one can think of a cool idea, typically we (busy academics) can’t start the project immediately. Furthermore, we don’t have time to do it all. For that case, the best thing we can do is to leave a note somewhere, hoping that we will have some time in the future that we can do this.
I have been logging research ideas that come to my mind in http://keep.google.com for my own good, which now has a number of random but exciting research ideas that I want to pursue in the future. The thing is that I won’t be able to pursue many of them due to my limited time, some of the research ideas could have been done by someone else already, and some of the ideas are timely so that it makes less sense to do it after 10 years.
There I thought, maybe I should open up all the ideas in a “research catalog” and share with the outer world. Like any shopping catalog that you get in your mailbox that you used to watch again and again when you were a kid. Well, at least, I spend a good amount of time watching Black Friday catalogs until now. It can be better than me feeling bad on not pursuing all the interesting ideas that I have had in mind cuz I can maybe inspire someone to do it.
People would be concerned with their own ideas being stolen by someone else. However, isn’t this what we do anyway in academic research? We publish papers to set the boundaries of our knowledge, and the other people refer to the boundary to set their starting points or “stand on the shoulders of giants.” Why do we only converse with the things that are done-done in retrospect? Why don’t we expedite the cycle of academic conversation at the ideation stage? Much smaller than actually carrying out the research but isn’t this a valid contribution to the academia anyway? Most importantly, if you can’t do it all by yourself, why would you not contribute by donating the ideas to others who have more motivations to actually do it. In fact, the chance is that the likelihood that you will work on the idea greatly increases if you share the ideas more with the world: by expressing your thoughts more often to other people, getting feedback from them, being encouraged by your colleagues, finding right collaborators that may have right expertise, or inspiring other people to actually do it — which is fine, too. Maintaining my own research catalog on my personal website can be something that I can do immediately. However, I wonder if the right thing to do is to create a platform (something like researchgate or arxiv) that anybody can publically maintain a research catalog.
I have suggested my lab to maintain a “physical” research catalog in a bulletin board as a way to incubate research ideas in the lab. It has the same motivation but this can happen within a lab as a way to start a new project. Lab members can see research ideas in a public place and see what other people have in their mind in an asynchronous fashion in a more scalable way, as opposed to — “ I have this cool idea and hear me out” conversation with a smaller set of colleagues, which often ends up with discouragements. This can be particularly useful for organizing the lab when you want to recruit people for a particular project or if a new member joins the lab and wants to join a new project.
There are multiple reasons why I want this to be “physical”. First of all, I don’t like the linear representation of idea notes in digital media (e.g. Evernote, blogs) that is typically chronologically ordered (which is why I like keep.google.com). Having no (or little) notion of “outdatedness” in its layout makes it more encouraging to maintain a research catalog — a piece of paper on a board is still the same after months and years and your ideas never get old until it is realized. Second, ironically, a physical catalog can have a better access to people than a digital research catalog. Even for joining a lab, we have probably too many digital information that is hard to follow and find all: onboarding documents, master projects list, demo-deck, and the templates. Rather, finding information on a wall right next to our lab can be much easier “cuz it’s there”. In addition, it can effective in encouraging cross-lab collaboration — maybe random patrons in the hallway from another lab can join the project. Third, it can utilize the mental resource that we have for a physical activity. There is a well-known psychology theory that says we have limited resources per modality: multiple resources model. For example, we have limited cognitive resource for reading but even if we are exhausted with reading, we can still speak and listen because the modality is different (textual vs. verbal), which is why I think audiobook works or why a professor can work more hours than a Ph.D. student (more meetings)! One hypothesis that I have been thinking is that we have similar limitations in the media that we use (digital vs. physical). The amount of work we can do in front of laptop is limited. Even if we used up all the mental resources, we may have our energy left to use outside the digital world. Moving away from the laptop, taking a short walk in the hallway, maybe wandering in front of the bulletin board and reading something written on a piece of paper can be a nice break from your work on your laptop, still utilizing your time in an efficient way.
What can be on the board should be truly open-ended— a short write up printed on a piece of paper (less than one page), a short title that stimulate one’s curiosity on a sticky note, which invites in-person conversation, replies to the existing notes, a sign-up sheet that expresses the interest of participation. The only rule that I would have is 1) to maintain the “state” of the project (such as ongoing, recruiting, in publication), 2) to take out all the notes of the project from the wall if it is published, regardless of who did it and 3) to make sure that “publishing” in the research catalog is the only way to start a new project in the lab — you got to present your idea to people and collect feedback!
Come to think of it, this is counter-intuitive because we have been doing the exact opposite. On a typically wall in a university, you can see posters that someone already presented at conferences. Typically, everything on the wall is in retrospect, which is basically saying everything that you see here is done so you can’t be part of it (and this is just bragging). If we can change that, if everything that you see on a wall can encourage conversation, participation, collaboration, and inspiration, which is better?
