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After talking with a dozen or so colleagues, he concluded that "filling a gap in the literature" was not really how anyone went about choosing a research problem. There were four main "lessons" he gained from his collegial conversations: * Future research arises from current research. Things are never really finished, and many projects don't work out as we'd planned. All that cleanliness in the literature is misleading! * Future research can be autobiographical. On this one, I'd like to quote the author at length: Research is often "me-search," a friend of mine likes to say. Ideas for research topics can stem from brief personal experiences from childhood or threads that run throughout their professional lives. For example, gender equity in science education has riveted a colleague since she majored in chemistry in college. Another colleague's passion is the give-and-take of arguments, "so I think that's why I'm studying fifth graders' persuasive writing." What "voice" means for minority scholars fascinates an African-American academic who feels that the traditional norms of scholarly discourse stifle her own creativity. For those colleagues, their lives are inspiration, but not evidence -- in other words, they are not autoethnographers. Sometimes a good project arises from family life. A child psychologist extended her work on infant communication when her 14-month-old son was pointing incessantly to the refrigerator. "I'd take one thing out after another, and he finally seemed to find what he wanted," she said. "So I got excited and found three families, studying how kids make their ideas known and how they correct your misconceptions when you're wrong about what they want." * Future research often arises from conversations. You know this one. Have lunch with your colleagues, visit them in their offices, hobnob at conferences. I don't care if you're shy and you don't like talking to people. Get out there and circulate! * Fu

This post brings together several threads I've been pondering recently: the explosion of conversation over the new aesthetic (see Ian Bogost and Bruce Sterling), conversation about the future of digital humanities (see Steven Ramsay and Ted Underwood), and an insightful post from Cathy Davidson on attention and education. He just separates "creative writers" from creative people so that the students have creative ideas but communicate them in an "uncreative," dull, mechanical, machinelike way where the fact that computers and people have different ideas about creativity doesn't matter. I'm interested in how machines read, but I'm not interested in their ability to mimic the dullest responses that humans can generate. Instead, I'm interested in the ways that computers (and other objects) participate in the aesthetic experiences of composition in ways that are "creative" rather than explicitly ignoring creativity. Rather than think of writing as a process where students produce widgets that can pass factory inspection (by robots or humans), maybe we can take up Davidson's suggestion, which might be read here as an invitation to develop new aesthetic relationships.