Each text format requires

its own method for processing. This is not a one size fits all approach, it’s more of a many sizes fit all – being able to have some fields that comprehensively link throughout the text resources – such as keywords. I’m hoping this database will replace the Zotero library and the email library. Okay. I can get started on this. Really, I always seem to need to start any new effort with some form of developmental housekeeping. It makes the task more approachable.

I’m thinking of building a database…

to serve the management problem. Part of my purpose is to develop a paperless research methodology. I just don’t want to use up precious resources if I don’t have to. It is harder to read documents and process the texts within the computer. But, with the new pdf formats making it possible to select text out of the document, I think, if I used a system of text selection for quotes, and then a separate field for my response, annotation, or summary, that might create a powerful cognitive process for getting the most for my time spent on the work. The database is not the bibliographic reference software, that is a separate entity specifically used for citation management. No. This is a cognitive processing application, that will allow me to track the documents I have read, and from there, begin to formulate my own arguments and positions. One thing I want to track is what kind of paper/book I have read. I think the fields will emerge through the process. I can add as many as I like. Yup. I’m going to set up the database now.

Designing a research process

It has been a busy month, and I am ready to jump into the next phase of my development as a scholar. I have begun the process of looking at current research in my field, to understand the arguments, the kinds of papers, the journals, pertinent to my field of study. I do not have a bullet proof method for processing the texts, although I keep working on developing such a thing. I was using email as a searchable text system, posting my comments on readings with the pdf attached. The problem with this system is that I have no way of compiling searches by keyword, other than as a group of emails. I’m concerned that this is going to become unwieldy as the volume of data increases. Clearly my method from my MA thesis was inadequate. I now have these milk crates of pdf files that I don’t know what to do with. Apparently I have a cognitive quirk that makes it so I can find anything if it is in a pile, I have a very difficult time managing files in file drawers. There is this sensation of things disappearing, similar to the navigational dyslexia I experience finding my way through the world.

I have been writing about aesthetic experience

and the specific kinds of sensory data and memory system meaning making that gets triggered by an aesthetic object. I do believe there are specific kinds of meanings that are formed in relation to objects and environment. I experience different meaning making constructs in an art gallery, compared to a classroom, compared to a conference presentation, compared to washing the dishes. What I want to do is understand how these meaning constructs are occurring, and make distinctions amongst them, amongst choosing which of those environments or objects I will design as learning experiences in my teaching. There is a difference, in my subjective experience of a comic book, a novel and a video documentary. They are all aesthetic objects, and I can expect some similarities because they fall into that category, I can also expect differences, because they all employ different visual, narrative, and textual strategies for me to decode. The process of decoding carries it’s own layer of meaning making, sensory data and memory system connections. The form the object takes means that it carries it’s own requirements for ‘language and fluency’ to be able to decode the object and ascribe meaning to it.

The way I view my experience is changing

The recent paper I re-wrote on cognition, curriculum and aesthetics is changing the way I perceive my experience and the mechanisms that both extract meaning and trigger emotional reactions. If I can write out this theory in my own words, it will help me understand how my conception of the formation of my own identity is operating. My brain is engaged in a constant process of analyzing, coding, and archiving sensory data, discerning what of that data is most relevant to my well being, and making decisions about “what is the next right thing to do?”. Concurrent with the processing of sensory data is a retrieval system that sifts through my memory systems, which have been indexed by value-category, to determine what previous experience the current experience can be linked to. It is this linking between sensory data and memory that makes it possible for me to construct meaning from my experience. My sense of self is the combination of my entire value-category memory system, as it is ‘awakened’ in relation to current experience. My ‘self’ is that process, that mixing and matching of memory and experience, to determine what this current situation means, and what I am going to do about it. There are multiple environments that I have associated memory attachments with, and different environments will trigger characteristic clusters of memory. In addition, environments will also stimulate different neural clusters – for example, an echoing, busy bus terminal with departures being called out over a public address system is going to evoke a different sensory experience than sitting perched on a rock bluff over a spring swollen, rushing river.

If Spiegelman, and I…

are able to learn how to come to terms with difficult childhoods precipitated by parents unable to parent, through the work of representing our experiences in non-conventional expressions of our subjective experience, I do not know of more difficult subject matter to learn. Surely, if this attitude and approach works in these contexts, it is possible that it could work in other areas of learning.

From a sociological perspective…

we need to make a connection between our value-category memory system (our perceived life-world) and the phenomenal sensations we are experiencing when we are learning. Greene talked about the need for curriculum that facilitates the formation of conscious understanding in the learner by supporting connections between the learners past experiences and the demands of current learning situations. The learner needs to orient him/herself within moments of strangeness, moments when the inherited solutions to typical problems no longer seem to work. Greene, citing Phenix, talked about the learner achieving a state of self-transcendence, a state of duality within which the learner feels him/herself to be an agent and knower, at the same time identifying what he/she is coming to know. I argue that a curriculum that is designed to acknowledge moments of strangeness, moments where the learner is unable to solve problems based on inherited life-world knowledge, and also designed to allow for idiosyncratic meaning making beyond conventional representations of knowing through scholarly texts, is going to support academic success in a much wider variety of learners than is currently possible within the narrow confines of academically acceptable representations of knowledge.

The psychological element…

is discussed in Langer. There is a connection between Edelman’s theory and Langer’s theory. Langer suggests that there are times when we need representational resources that are non-verbal, alternate forms to articulate our subjective experience of phenomenal sensation. Langer proposed that the ability to express subjective experience in non-linguistic form can serve as a precursor to textual language. Langer argued that there are subjective experiences that are pre- or post- verbal, that need art forms to provide an initial attempt to formulate communication. I argue that there are concepts and experiences that are too difficult to be translated or interpreted immediately into textual language. When we are learning, we need to have alternate ways and means to interpret what we have learned, to bring the learning into focus, to distill and discern the phenomenal transform of our sensory perception, processed through our value-category memory system and then communicate our understanding to others.

The struggle continues…

Edelman (2004), Langer (1957) and Greene (1971). There is a connection here, between the physiological, the psychological and the sociological, that speaks to my argument that when we are learning, we need idiosyncratic and multiple modes and media to learn difficult things. It has to do with how language evolved to express consciousness entailed by the phenomenal transform of neural activity processed through value-category memory systems. The formation of symbolic and gestural systems of language constructed by multiple polymorphous sets. That there is no singular mapping for each representational state, rather a rich set of selectional non-representative repetoires give rise to conscious representation of subjective experience. This is the part that is coming from Edelman. I am suggesting that sometimes, especially when we are learning difficult concepts, we need to be able to express our subjective experience through multiple modes and media of language, prior to developing a linguistic articulation, similar to the ways we create conscious awareness of non-consciousness.

I think that gives me enough to go on…

for now. I’m going to add dictionary definitions of ambiguous, subjective, and experience. And I want to add Edelman’s theory of the relationship between C and C’ states, linked to Langer’s theory of mold, form, and abstract communication, and connect those to Edelman’s theory of representation. I do need to freewrite my way through these concepts.