Thread by @raulpacheco

Someone recommended Andrew Abbott’s Digital Paper for courses on research design and the “how to do research” 📝 components of a graduate degree. I like it, with a couple of provisos. First, it’s long-ish. Second, the ethnography chapter lost me completely. BUT... it’s a great 📚

Definitely recommend if your students don’t have any experience doing research because he walks them through the iterative and non-linear elements of research (we search for data, read, draft, write, edit, read some more, write some more, revise, submit). It’s not so linear.

Abbott divides the research components in:
- puzzles
- conceptualizations
- research questions
- programme of action (action items list).

This process makes sense to me and it’s what I suggest to y graduate students - I’ve written about this on my blog.

Finally ...

I liked that Abbott is very specific about his data sources and research method (library materials and secondary sources) and his most used two strategies: selective scanning (choose a few sources) and “brute force” (Read All The Things). The book has a chapter on reading!

Great book 📖 worth reading and teaching </end thread>