I have been back from my travels for a month and a half, and I finally feel like I am caught up. The feeling of being in a frenzy of ‘stuff’is subsiding, and I am feeling grounded after being in exploration mode in the months of April and May. Everything I learned from those visits and conversations are informing the work I am doing now in surprising ways. Insights from conversation that I was busy taking down — either mentally or physically — are recalled with a renewed sense of significance. Getting away from the comfortable lull of a routine provided some space for ideas to be revisited with a freshness of mind that would not have been possible otherwise. It also made me realize how luck I am to be based in Toronto, where there is no lack of stimulating talks, conferences, and other events for one to engage and discover other like-minded collaborators. The trick is knowing how to find out about them to begin with.

For example, I attended the design critique hosted by Aaron Marcus, where I got to see a few presentation from KMDI students as well as presented my own concept for a music knowledge community (an idea that all my work is building towards). I have not been in a design crit setting for at least a decade, and it was an energizing and refreshing experience, from the preparation, to the feedback. It’s an idea that I want to pursue after I graduate, and it’s an objective that becomes more clear as time goes on. As they say, if you can conceive of it, you can make it happen.

I’ve also been working tirelessly on a knowledge classification paper for Prof. Mai dealing with the organization of music knowledge. It’s quite exciting actually, learning about genre theory, teasing out epistemological assumptions behind research approaches in information science, domain-specific approaches, learning the difference between taxonomies, ontologies, thesauri, controlled vocabulary, etc etc. It’s quite exciting, because this is an essential stage in the design of any information or knowledge sharing systems, and one that I really knew nothing about. I mean, this is what information science has to offer that is valuable, not just knowing how to apply existing classification or knowledge organization systems, but actually designing one from scratch and understanding its implications for information system design. Once the paper is finish (shortly I hope) I will post more about it.

The rest of the summer is going to be filled with some more follow up work on the ODBS, as well as putting my proposal together for my thesis. My interest is beginning to turn towards individuals (or users of music, as Antoine Hennion calls them) who have learned how to perform music using online resources as a point of departure. These individuals will be hard to source out, but its going to be a fun challenge to come up with a methodology that would work. More cerebral work, but its necessary work. There are a few small conferences that I am considering submitting papers to as well, while actively seeking out more consulting projects to work on.

The ability to balance multiple interrelated trajectories is essential for anyone with an interdisciplinary interest. What helps is being passionate about what you want to pursue, and of course a supportive network, be they mentors, friends, loved ones, and even strangers. Speaking of which, time to send out some good old fashioned thank you notes in the mail.