The Case For Hard Core Research
I was pleasantly surprised with an unexpected guest on Friday: Nathan Powell.  Nathan recently graduated from BYU and was in one of my CS classes. He currently works with Dallan and Solveig Quass on the WeRelate.org genealogy wiki and search engine.
I spent some time talking with Nathan. As we spoke he raised a very interesting point. He said that while I’ll have the rest of my career to build large scale systems, this is the best chance I’ll have to do hard core research. He went on to say that there are many good programmers out there, but what really differentiates the best from the rest is the ability to read and understand the scientific literature.
I’m not really sure how to respond to that. It makes a lot of sense, and I do love reading the literature. In fact, that was my favorite part of the Interactive Software Systems class I took: during the course of a semester we read and analyzed over three dozen papers, most of them from the ACM library. At this juncture, however, it just doesn’t make sense to scrap what I’m working on for purer research. I really feel that I’m on the right track and that what I’m doing will have significant impact.
The question then is how best to utilize this good advice. As of this week I’ll begin a more thorough literature search, reading at least one paper a week. I’ll begin with any papers I haven’t read yet from previous Family History Technology Workshops, which should go quickly as they are all rather short. Then I’ll dive into the ACM library and see what I can discover. I’ll report on my findings here.
If anyone knows of any good papers or sources of papers related to this thesis, please let me know. Thanks!
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I believe that Nathan did really give some good advice (even if he doesn’t eat donuts- a truly tragic thing, I tell you)! I am looking forward to your reports of your literary findings!
You make it sound like I’ll be giving a book report on Harry Potter or something! ;)
I agree… somewhat…
While you are a student you should definitely take advantage of the time to study and research as much as you can. On the other hand, one of the problems I see in the genealogical computing field is that there is very little turn-over from research to useful technology.
If you can DO something good while you are LEARNING something good, then your research will be all the more meaningful.
Not to mention the fact that we live in a physical world where funding matters. Resources are always limited, and while pure research is great, to keep getting funded requires producing something that can do something. Sure it’s a personal bias, but isn’t that why techincal fields have way more money to toss around than the humanities? Now, I feel that the humanities do have use, but I’m saying that as a society we currently value physical results more than the development of the soul.
Of course, that’s probably why Nathan was telling you to take advantage of it in college.
Oh, and I think you should take advantage of your time in school to do Harry Potter book reports.
WHO’S GOING TO DIE IN BOOK 7???