First Day

The first day is over and I'm a bit shattered. It's been intense, but incredibly stimulating.

Last night we started off by introducing ourselves to each other. We wore boards around our necks with post-it notes stuck to them, listing our personal and professional goals and our passions. It was something that, a few years ago, would probably have scared the living daylights out of me, but it was actually a lot of fun and it really helped break the ice.

This morning, we started with an overview of the research process, by Wieland Gevers. I've heard him talk before about this at UCT, but it was still helpful to be reminded that publication is the heart of scholarship and that there are unwritten rules of publication which all scholars have to follow.

After Prof. Gevers's talk, we were given an outline of the vision, plans and progress of the Carnegie Project by the three library directors. I still haven't quite got my mind around how exactly the Research Commons will operate, so it was good to put it into its context and begin to see how that might work. I also realised that staffing and operational policy will depend on the instititution - there are really no rules for how it should work, as long as it fulfills the goal of supporting research.

Luigi Nassimbeni was next, talking about the Emerging Researchers Programme at UCT. This was a brilliantly entertaining and enlightening talk about what new recruits are told about how to get published. I'd never heard of the h-index before, or that you could find out who has cited you simply by searching for your r name in Web of Science.

Our last talk of the day was by Don Foster on Research in Social Science. Don started by asking us what Knowledge is and more than that, How we know.

Um.

He interacted wonderfully with us and took us on a tour of the history of what qualifies as knowledge. Ah: I've finally found out what the term "epistemology" means!