This week was focused on creating an outline that will be used for both the 5-page paper at the end of the semester and my final paper/thesis outcome. The following outcome was created with pretty strict adherence to the guideline for situated research as posted on the ENVS page.
Outlining was helpful for identifying the areas I feel good about and the areas that still need work before the end of the semester. For example, I felt pretty good about most of my “top of the hourglass” section. It was easy to split up the important topics for my background and situated contexts. This also highlighted the talking points that I have sufficient research for and those that clearly need more research to back them up. In particular, I still feel fairly weak on India as one of my situated contexts and need to read more about current adoption of the technology in the country. While not super urgent, filling out my research to fit all of my talking points is something that I will definitely need to get done before writing my paper at the end of the semester.
The “middle of the hourglass” further identified a number of weaknesses in my capstone so far. The most urgent is that I still need to settle on methodology that is interesting, doable, and supports my focus question. I feel pretty good about conducting discourse analysis on farmer testimonials for California and have already found several I can use, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to find testimonials for India. For California, I want to do data analysis of how collecting different data can affect different sustainable development indicators differently, but I am not sure at all that I will be able to get data or get interesting results. Same with analyzing ethnographic research of farmers in India. This part of my capstone will certainly need more thought and work.
The “bottom of the hourglass” is still completely just the skeleton. It will start to be filled up once I conduct research and can be completed the next semester, so I am not too worried about this section. However, for my paper this semester I will need to fill in this section somewhat, even if it is just as a placeholder. At this point, I can begin to contextualize my hypothetical results for what I think they will mean in the greater conversation of big data, sustainable development, and modern agriculture. Yet, this section will remain mostly empty until next semester.