This is the story: technology student builds concrete canoe, goes out to test in dangerous river, drowns. Just wanted to see if it would float properly, you see.

Ken Kitamura, 19, was not alone in this project. This is how the Japanese Mainichi Daily News reports it

Kitamura, a student at the Osaka Institute of Technology, built the canoe along with other members of the university’s civil engineering culture research club.

And this, the best part:

Kitamura was not wearing a life jacket. Police are continuing to investigate.

Honestly.

I HAVE let another project run wild. Will I ever learn?

A regular work day, and my very literary colleague Bronwen sends across this link. About amateur novels read on mobile phone, apparently a big thing with Japanese teenagers. Nice, I say.

So she sends me two more. The first on New York Times reporter Matt Richtel’s experiment at tweeting a thriller, the second on a determined bunch bending Twitter their way with short fiction.

Most of that — from what I could see at InstantFiction, twae, Maureen, etc — was micro enough to make flash fiction – even drabble — read like a novel. Richtel’s ‘Twiller’ was an exception, but still short enough to be labelled short story.

Question then was, would a full-length work of fiction fly on Twitter? Was there scope for an episodically lengthy narrative on the medium?

This was the time I was devouring my ex-colleague Prem Panicker’s Bhimsen (so far as I know the first attempt at blogging a full-length, *quality* work of fiction post by post), a reimagining of the Mahabharata, along similar lines as M T Vasudevan Nair’s award-winning Randamoozham, published in the south Indian language of Malayalam many years ago (the English version is titled Second Turn). It occurred to me the tale was just perfect for the experiment.

For one, the Mahabharata is the ultimate war story, providing enough ‘conflict’, enough opportunities for dramatic tension at every turn — surely that would help hold the reader? Plus, I have been fascinated with the narrative since I read M T’s wonderfully nuanced interpretation in Randamoozham as a kid. Plus, plus, war narratives — fictional, semi-fictional, factual — are of academic interest to me.

There was also the irony of attempting to fit one of the world’s longest and philosophical epics into a microblogging site meant to keep your friends updated about your non-activities  (‘am in shower. shoot, phone got wet’). (Not to mention the chance to make manly-man Bhima actually ‘tweet’, which appealed greatly to my wicked side.)

And so started this project (this is where you toddle off to twitter.com/epicretold and start following me).

So far everything was sane, under control. But the trouble with putting something out there is that it takes a life of its own. Before I knew it I found myself talking to the Indian media (Mahabharata + New Media = News Value squared), promising things I had never intended to promise.

How many tweets on an average day, ask the Journalist.

Three to four, I commit without hesitation (woh! where did that come from?)

Do you plan to have other sites to help latecomers catch up?

Oh yes, just starting an ‘about to’ page and thinking of having a separate ‘the story so far’ site as well, I say (seriously dude, shut your trap!)

Well, the short version is that I shot my mouth off and received fairly serious media attention (among others, see stories in Time, Reuters, WSJ-Mint, DNA, NPR, Asian Age, India Today, and Express; Reuters interview here). The pressure is on now (the discerning reader might notice that in twitter.com/aboutepicretold, the ‘about to’ page I did start, I have, demonstrating extreme verbal dexterity, managed to stay clear of concrete commitments – but that’s only for your eyes) and I must confess I have no clue where this thing will take me.

What sort of narrative will actually work here? Three ‘episodes’ a day, is that too far and few? Would the reader have forgotten where we stopped by the time s/he receives the next tweet? More worryingly, what worked for Japanese teenagers might not work elsewhere, in a different genre, across a different culture/cultures.

Good news is, this need not ‘work’ to make this work; I need not have a 1,000 followers hanging on to my every tweet (though that would be nice). As someone said to me the other day, the pleasure is in the process — so, I guess, is the learning.

A confession and a caveat, in that order, as I conclude. Many have asked me how much I have written, have I planned it all out? Not. I have not pre-written this, nor have I mind-mapped it much. After some thought, I have decided to see it as it is — fiction to go, written live. I will take my chances with that. I intend to follow Prem’s narrative structure as much as possible (he’s done the hard work, it is only fair I reap the benefits), in places closely (some of his imagery is too good a fit), in places, not.

Which brings me to the caveat. epicretold needs to be seen as an experiment in social media, not in the Mahabharata. It does not capture the philosophical richness of the epic, nor does it purport to have literary merit. It is simply twiction, nothing more.

Excuse me now, I got to go tweet.

ALSO SEE:

The end of childhood: The first 100 tweets on ER

PS: Check out the Facebook group page for epicretold here

Image: Sunil Krishnan

I like the idea far better than the ‘new route’, ‘taught’ PhDs some UK universities now offer. And why not? If a PhD is an ‘original contribution to knowledge’ accessible to scholars around the world, surely publications are a better way of doing that than a conventional thesis, which, very often, dies its life out on dusty academic bookshelves?

Arthur Georges, a professor at the University of Canberra in Australia, makes a case for it:

Publication in peer reviewed journals is the currency of science. Under this model, the arduous task of reorganizing and rewriting the thesis for publication is avoided, and the work is much more likely to see the light of day. There are much tighter constraints on what can and cannot be included in published articles, leading to a more concise thesis, with savings in effort all round. The thesis will be short (less than 200 pages), a blessing to examiners. The standards and expectations for the quality of published work are well-established, universal and unambiguous, enforcing a defacto standard across the sector that is currently lacking. The research itself is likely to be more focused on those activities likely to lead to conclusive and publishable results. And importantly, the candidate will be competitive for postdoctoral fellowships and employment at the time of graduation.

Fair logic, but PhD by publication is not without problems. One issue, as Steve Draper of the Glasgow University points out in this paper, is ‘comparability’. A conventional thesis is fairly standardised. There is a consensus among most universities on how long it should be, what it should contain, how it should be structured, etc. Not so with the publication route. As Draper puts it, there is much “divurgence in regulations” among awarding bodies.

What most universities do agree on are a) submission should contain published work, b) submission should contain a context document to introduce/support/pull together the published work and c) and there be a viva voce to decide on the award.

What universities do not agree on span more areas, mostly the nitty-gritties  (check out the guidelines at Stirling, Edinburgh, and East Anglia). For instance:

How many published pieces would make for a PhD?

Should these be peer-reviewed papers (what would happen if, say, a practioner who has written a how-to book decides to take this route)?

Should the publications be undertaken within a specific timeframe (for instance, during the time the candidate is registered as a doctoral student)?

How long and substantial should the contextual document be?

Issues, yes, but certainly not of depth to undermine the original logic. So why am I still reluctant to climb on to Georges’s – and, as it happens, Draper’s – wagon?

I guess my reservations arise out of a more fundamental – and perhaps old-fashioned – concern. For me a PhD is an exciting journey, undertaken not just to get from point A to point B quickly, but to look around, explore, absorb the landscape, seeing your destination only on the distant horizon; it is a training in not just producing original knowledge, but a test of endurance and ability to persevere with and manage larger projects.

The publication route, I fear, cuts into this. Gone is the romance, the adventure – the destination is too near, the path too flat and straight and blinkered to produce anything but ‘normal science’. As for endurance, this is a collation of short-term efforts, a series of sprints, not a marathon. Which, though impressive and a valid demonstration of academic sportsmanship, is a different kind of training — less foundational, more ephimeral.

Am I being a pedantic, old git? Tell me below.

Illustration courtesy: fotosearch.com

Intrinsic motivation, said Trevor.

Naïve idealism tinged with narcissism, said Barry.

Curiosity, said Peter.

The pleasure of being paid for a job you love doing, said Jian, the pleasure of contributing to your institutional prestige.

Promotion, said Hammadi.

The last one is interesting. I wonder if the points the others made – the one-liners presented above are brutal summarisations of pithy but well-reasoned arguments, please note – are not prettier versions of the simpler truth Hammadi captured.

Honestly, do we undertake research for others? Or do we do it for ourselves?

I am pretty certain I began mine for my own wicked self. What got me studying war journalism was my sense of inadequacy as a correspondent – essentially, it was a move to stand out amongst a fiercely competitive crowd of peers as a better-educated, more productive proposition who just might know what he is writing about. I continue with it primarily because I am convinced that if I marry my professional and academic sides, I would get the best of both worlds, enabling me not only to stand out in the said crowd, but do so with a smug ha-I-got-something-you-don’t-have smile on my face.

I guess this is primary narcissism, part of a quest for self-preservation, which Barry acknowledged in his presentation. I have a feeling, however, that there is more than a “grain” of self-love involved in the exercise. Most of us do what we do with far less altruistic motives than we care to acknowledge. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves a different set of questions:

How many of us would continue with research if there was no research remission?

How many, if it wasn’t linked to career preservation?

I am sure there are worthy souls out there, and more worthy reasons for why we do research, but I get the feeling that for many of us it is narcissism tinged with idealism rather than idealism tinged with narcissism as Barry suggested.

Aw, ignore me. It just might be that I suffer from NPD and think too much of my own argument.

Also read: Re-search? Pardon my French

Image: courtesy http://copyservices.tamu.edu/clipart/clip21/fsl1026.gif

That is only slightly better than asking, “Haven’t you finished yet?”

My initial view was that it was because the process somewhere involved searching anew. Some clever person had, before us, come up with something clever – and we, in our quest for cleverness, were investigating it afresh in the hope of:

• proving the said clever person wrong
• scrounging for something the said clever person had overlooked so we could present it as our own
• adapting the said clever person’s work to suit new demands

That all sounded very nice and strong and I was quite pleased with the reasoning for some time. Especially since dictionaries broke the word down as re + search, the former a prefix found in loanwords from Latin meaning ‘again’ and the latter meaning, well, ’search’.

Trouble was, did this not imply research was re search? Did it not suggest everything we do today is treading the trodden path, ergo, unoriginal?

Surely, there’s enough original work?

Surely, there are searches going on?

While Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and the ever-dependable Wikipedia defined research as what we commonly take it to mean (“a course of critical or scientific inquiry”, “careful or diligent search”, “active, diligent, and systematic process of inquiry aimed at discovering, interpreting, and revising facts”, in that order), they were content to leave where the re bit fit in unexplained. So I turned to the net, and here are three academic definitions, shamelessly lifted from Introduction to Social Work Research, a presentation by Dr Osei Dwarka of the University of Illinois:

• …careful and systematic study in some field of knowledge, undertaken to establish facts or principles (Grinnell, 1997)
• …a systematic way of asking questions (Drew, 1980)
• …the scientific examination (reexamination) of emphirical data collected by someone first hand, concerning the social and psychological forces operating in a situation (Monette et al, 1994).

Um, interesting. But not particularly illiminating in this instance – for, none of the definitions takes us any closer to the elusive re. This is when I came across Klaus Krippendorff’s definition, in Content analysis: an introduction to its methodology (2004, p81): …a repeated search within data for apparent patterns.

Certainly more insightful, it offers an explanation for the prefix. But it also makes me ask why. Why is it a repeated search? Why is it not just a search?

A quick look at etymology (courtesy Oxford Online, Merriam-Webster), and I get the impression – and mind, this is only the impression of someone unschooled in matters such – that it was first used by the French to probably mean what it actually means: search afresh. The Middle French word recherché, which, Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia assure me fathered our modern-day research is a compound of our old pal re and cherché (French for ‘search’, I am told). And the French, in light of the existence of an already cute word for search would not have started calling it recherché just for the heck of it. So in all likelihood, it had popped out, complete with the prefix, to mean what it means literally.

Once in vogue – I am hypothesizing here, of course – it crossed the English channel without much ado. Perhaps it was initially used in English too to mean what it means (spelt differently though, by the look of it: as first researche and later reserch). Perhaps not. What is certain is that through the 15, 16 and 1700s, the word began to acquire the meaning ’search’ and ’search thoroughly’.

Thus, we had – oh, what would I have done without Oxford Online? – quotes such as I carefully avoided the habitation … lest it should … furnish a clue to the researches of my pursuers and Our most profound researches are frequently nothing better than guessing at the causes of the phenomena. And by the time Jane Eyre came along with Currer Bell and Charlotte Bronte on her arm in 1847, the re had become just an appendage: She had left Thornfield Hall in the night; every research after her course had been vain.

We seem to have forgotten about that poor prefix today; most often, the word is used to mean a search for something specific.

Question now is, are people like moi – pardon my French – re-searchers?

Or are we plain searchers?