At the beginning of your program, typically the first year of your master's or the first 1-2 years of your PhD while you finish your course work, you will work with me and other team members to develop your thesis topic. This will involve conducting a literature review and, possibly, prototyping/quick pilot tests, ultimately leading to a project pitch as an abstract.
Find a research gap with an annotated bibliography
We start with an initial set of topics based off of our mutual research interests and available funding. Typically we'll already have an idea of the broad opportunities or research questions we want to tackle. Your goal then is to become aware of the related work, develop an annotated bibliography, and build up your own research collection.
Finding papers
After discussing with your supervisor(s), or after joining an existing project, you'll have a list of starting points to find papers. You then need to expand this list. Here's how you do it:
- Search, both generally and on Google Scholar
- When you read papers, follow-up with the papers that are cited
- After reading a relevant paper, find papers that cite that paper using Google Scholar or similar services
- Survey papers in your field are extremely valuable when you're starting your search
You may not be able to read every paper. It's important to reduce the number that you read in depth:
- Skim papers (abstracts, outlines) first to triage whether papers are relevant or not
- Prioritize the papers that are the closest to your current ideas, or the ones that inspire you the most
- Prioritize seminal or classic papers that kick off research agendas (by chasing citations or finding heavily cited papers)
- Prioritize recent papers that are very up-to-date on the literature and modern techniques
Create an annotated bibliography
An annotated bibliography is a set of papers/citations, each with a short description that you can use to remember the key parts of the work, and to use when you write up related work sections in your papers/thesis. Make sure to include the following:
- The citation itself (in .bib format ideally for use in Overleaf/LaTeX later)
-
The
novelty/contribution:
what
is
the
new
knowledge
that
the
paper
provided?
- this is great practice at writing contribution statements, which you'll want to do for every research project you do.
- Example: "The authors are the first to apply Multi-Dimensional Visualization Theory (Note: NOT A REAL THEORY) for avatar design in VR, which is important because it suggests differences in Presence for 2D and 3D avatars."
- 1-2 sentences of what the authors did. For example, "The authors conducted a quantitative study of avatar visualization on Presence in VR. Twelve participants conducted a handoff task with virtual objects using 3 avatar visualization techniques (within-participants): 2D cartoon, 3D cartoon, and 3D realistic."
- 1-2 sentences of the outcome. For example, "The results show that 3D visualizations increased presence over 2D, but there was no difference between 3D cartoon and 3D realistic."
You can find examples of annotated bibliographies online (e.g., here). Feel free to write paragraphs or bullet points; sketches or images from the paper are also great.
You can use any tool you want to store the bibliograph. Some suggestions: Note-taking applications (e.g., OneNote), reference managers (e.g., Mendeley), documents (Google Doc, PowerPoint). Make sure it's easy to search as you will eventually need to navigate it.
Digest research topics into trends
As your list of papers grows, it will be difficult to keep track of them. You will need to give the related work structure. Some ways to do this are clustering and tagging.
- Clustering: Many papers tackle similar topics, giving you a picture of a field as a whole rather than specific projects. Grouping similar projects in sections or folders will help you understand what projects are related. This will eventually become sections in your Related Work in papers or in your thesis. For example, you may have "visual avatars in VR" as one cluster, and "Multi-Dimensional Visualization Theory (again, NOT A REAL THEORY)" as another. As you proceed, these may split and merge.
- Tagging: If you are very organized, you can use tagging features in tools like Mendeley or OneNote to allow for ad-hoc clusters as needed ("Visual avatars", "VR", ...). If you figure out a sustainable way to do this, tell me how you do it.
Reference management tools
Regardless of what tool you use for your annotated bibliography, you will need a reference management tool to generate your bibliographies when writing. This is especially important if you continue on to a PhD or beyond in academia. Examples include Mendeley and Zotero. Ask around to find what is right for you.
Project Pitches
As you become familiar with the literature and start thinking of new research projects, the next step is to come up with a project pitch. This is an abstract that captures the three essential parts of every research project: novelty, impact, and feasibility.
-
Novelty:
To
contribute
to
knowledge,
you
need
to
do
something
new.
(Unless
you
do
a
replication
study,
but
these
are
rare
in
HCI
and
haptics.)
Your
project
pitch
should
say
what
is
new,
and
how
new
it
is.
Is
it
incremental,
or
a
radically
new
idea?
Both
can
be
valuable
in
different
ways.
- You need to review the related work for this step - make sure you find the closest existing project to any idea you pitch.
-
Impact:
It
may
be
fun
to
come
up
with
a
completely
original
moment
in
human
history,
but
we
only
have
so
much
time
and
energy.
Something
uninteresting
or
not
valuable
may
not
be
the
best
use
of
our
time.
Evaluating
the
potential
impact
(whether
practical
or
conceptual/intellectual)
helps
you
prioritize
various
novel
ideas.
- Impact happens in lots of ways, review contribution types below and think about who it will impact.
-
Feasibility:
Cold
fusion
or
P
≠
NP
would
be
novel
and
valuable,
but
there's
a
reason
it
hasn't
been
done.
And
if
it
is
done,
you
need
certain
expertise
to
pull
it
off.
Evaluating
feasibility
helps
us
know
whether
we
are
the
right
people
at
the
right
time
may
not
be
the
right
people
for
that
job,
and
whether
we
can
finish
it
in
time
for
you
to
graduate
and
get
a
job.
However,
we
can
always
scope
down
a
project
-
focus
first
on
novelty
and
impact,
then
reel
in
the
projects
using
feasibility.
- Quick prototypes can help you test an idea within a couple hours or days. Use these to check big unknown questions for feasibility.
For every project you pitch (and you should pitch a lot of them), rate the novelty, impact, and feasibility. Include an abstract and a sketch, and you're good to share it with your supervisor and colleagues. Together, you can pick the most impactful project to focus your efforts on.
(Credit to Patrick Baudisch for this framework, which I've adapted here.)
Types of contributions
HCI (and haptics) contributions can take many forms. Review Wobbrock's excellent summary of types of contributions to help figure out what you are actually contributing. This will help you refine a contribution statement.
Conduct the research
Once you have your top pitches, go off and conduct your research! This is where we transition from an idea to actually learning something worth sharing. See the follow-up posts for how this is conducted based on the type of research project you are pursuing.